The Ice Limit

cramped, and cold as hell, but it's the only way.'

'We've placed fifty percent more jacks than we need,' added Rochefort. His face had turned mottled in the cold, and his nose was blue. 'The tunnel was designed to be stronger than the matrix of the earth itself. It's completely safe.' He spoke very rapidly, his thin lips compressed in a disapproving frown, as if he felt any questioning of his work would be a waste of time as well as an affront.

Garza turned away from the meteorite and led the group down a tunnel that branched away at right angles. Several smaller tunnels curved away from its right-hand wall, heading to other exposed areas of the meteorite's underside and additional banks of jacks. After about a hundred feet, the tunnel opened into a huge subterranean storage room. It had a packed dirt floor and was roofed with caisson plates. Inside, I-beams, laminated timbers, and structural steel were stacked in orderly rows, along with a variety of construction equipment. Glinn stood at the far end of the space, talking quietly to a technician.

'Jesus,' breathed McFarlane. 'This place is huge. I can't believe you built it in a couple of days.'

'We don't want anyone nosing around our warehouse,' said Garza. 'If an engineer saw all this, he'd know immediately we weren't mining iron. Or gold. This will be used to build the cradle, bit by bit, as we jack up the meteorite and get a better understanding of its contours. Over there are precision arc welders, acetylene torches, hot riveting equipment, and some good old-fashioned woodworking tools.'

Glinn came over, nodding first at McFarlane, then at Amira. 'Rachel, please sit down. You look tired.' He indicated a pile of I-beams as a seat.

'Tired.' She gave a wan smile. 'And amazed.'

'I'm eager to hear your report.'

McFarlane squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. 'Nothing's written up yet. If you want a briefing, you'll have to settle for a verbal one.'

Glinn tented his gloved fingers together, nodding as McFarlane removed a dog-eared lab notebook from his jacket. Every breath was sending up a plume of frost. He opened it and flipped briefly through many pages of scribbled notes.

'I want to say up front that this is just the beginning. Twelve hours gave us barely enough time to scratch the surface.'

Glinn nodded again, silently.

'I'll describe the results of the tests, but I warn you: they don't make a whole lot of sense. We started by trying to determine the metal's basic properties — melting point, density, electrical resistance, atomic weight, valence — that sort of thing. First off, we heated a sample to find its melting point. We brought it up to over fifty thousand degrees K, vaporizing the gold substrate. It still remained solid.'

Glinn's eyes were half-lidded. He murmured, 'So that's how it survived the impact.'

'Exactly,' said Amira.

'Then we tried to use a mass spectrometer to find its atomic weight. Because of the high melting point, the experiment didn't fly. Even with the microprobe, we couldn't get it to remain a gas long enough to run the test.'

McFarlane flipped some pages. 'Likewise with specific gravity. The microprobe didn't give us a large enough sample to determine that. It appears to be chemically inactive — we hit it with every solvent, acid, and reactive substance we could find in the lab at room temperature and pressure, as well as at high temperatures and pressures. Totally inert. It's like a noble gas, except it's solid. No valence electrons.'

'Go on.'

'Then we wired it up to test its electromagnetic properties. And that's when we hit pay dirt. Basically, the meteorite seems to be a room-temperature superconductor: it conducts electricity without resistance. You put a current into it, and it will circulate forever unless something breaks it out.'

If he was surprised at this, Glinn did not show it.

'Then we hit it with a beam of neutrons. It's a standard test on an unknown material: the neutrons cause the material to emit X rays, which tell you what's inside it. But in this case, the neutrons just disappeared. Swallowed up. Gone. It did the same thing with a beam of protons.'

Now Glinn raised his eyebrows.

'That would be like shooting a forty-four magnum at a piece of paper, and having the bullet vanish into the paper,' said Amira.

Glinn looked at her. 'Any explanation?'

She shook her head. 'I tried to do a quantum mechanical analysis of what might be happening. No luck. It appears to be impossible.'

McFarlane continued to flip through his notes. 'The last test we did was X-ray diffraction.'

'Explain,' Glinn murmured.

'You shine X rays through the material, then you make a picture of the diffraction pattern that results. A computer reverse-engineers those patterns and tells you what kind of crystal lattice generated them. Well, we got a seriously weird diffraction pattern — virtually fractal. Rachel wrote a program that tried to calculate what kind of crystal structure would produce such a pattern.'

'It's still trying,' Amira said. 'It's probably gagged on it by now. It's one hell of a computation, if it can be done at all.'

'One other thing,' said McFarlane. 'We used fission-track analysis to date the coesite from the staging area. We've now got a date on when the meteorite struck: thirty-two million years ago.'

As he listened, Glinn's gaze had slowly dropped to the frozen dirt floor. 'Conclusions?' he said at last, very quietly.

'They're very preliminary' McFarlane said.

'Understood.'

McFarlane took a deep breath. 'Have you heard of the hypothetical `island of stability' on the periodic table?'

'No.'

'For years, scientists have been searching for heavier and heavier elements higher on the periodic table. Most of the ones they've found are very short-lived: they last only a few billionths of a second before they decay into some other element. But there's a theory that way, way up on the periodic table might be a group of elements that are stable — that don't decay. An island of stability. Nobody knows what kind of properties these elements would have, but they would be extremely strange, and very, very heavy. You couldn't synthesize them even with the largest of today's particle accelerators.'

'And you think this might be such an element?'

'I'm fairly sure of it, actually.'

'How would such an element be created?'

'Only in the most violent event in the known universe: a hypernova.'

'A hypernova?'

'Yes. It's much bigger than a supernova. It occurs when a giant star collapses into a black hole, or when two neutron stars collide to form a black hole. For about ten seconds, a hypernova produces as much energy as the rest of the known universe put together. Such a thing just might have enough energy to create these strange elements. It also might have had enough energy to accelerate this meteorite into space at a speed that would carry it across the vast distances between stars, to land on Earth.'

'An interstellar meteorite,' Glinn said in a flat tone.

McFarlane noticed, with surprise, a brief but significant exchange of glances between Glinn and Amira. He tensed immediately, but Glinn merely nodded.

'You've given me more questions than answers.'

'You gave us only twelve hours.'

There was a brief silence.

'Let's return to the most basic question,' Glinn said. 'Is it dangerous?'

'We don't have to worry about it poisoning anybody,' said Amira. 'It's not radioactive or reactive. It's totally inert. I believe it's safe. I wouldn't, however, mess around with it electrically. Being a room-temperature superconductor, it has powerful and strange electromagnetic properties.'

Glinn turned. 'Dr. McFarlane?'