'I said, layered. It has an outer shell, a thick inner layer, and a tiny round inclusion right in the center. This is not an accident. Think about it. What else is like this? It's very common. It must be a universal structure.'
'Sam, you're tired. Let me call a nurse for you. She'll —' But McFarlane interrupted. 'Amira figured it out. Right before she died. It was in her hand. Remember how she said we had to stop thinking from our perspective, start thinking from the meteorite's perspective? At the end, Amira knew. It reacted to salt water. It had been waiting for salt water. Waiting millions of years.'
Lloyd looked for the emergency button near his bed. McFarlane was in much worse condition than he had initially thought.
McFarlane paused, his eyes glittering unnaturally. 'You see, Lloyd, it wasn't a meteorite at all.'
Lloyd felt a queer suspension, a stillness in the room. There was the button; if only he could press it casually, without exciting the man. McFarlane's face was flushed, sweaty, his breathing rapid and shallow. The loss of the rock, the sinking of the Rolvaag, the deaths in the water, on the ice — it must have broken him. Lloyd felt a fresh stab of guilt: even the survivors were damaged.
'Did you hear me, Lloyd? I said it's not a meteorite.'
'What was it, then, Sam?' Lloyd managed to ask, keeping his voice calm, his hand casually moving toward the button.
'All those shallow earthquakes, right where the ship went down...'
'What about them?'
'Just this. Are you familiar with the Panspermia theory? That the earth was originally seeded with life from spores drifting through space?'
'Certainly, Sam, certainly,' Lloyd said in a soothing voice. He pressed the button: once, twice, three times. The nurse would be there momentarily. McFarlane would get help.
'Well, this is Panspermia with a vengeance.' The redrimmed eye bored into Lloyd's. 'That thing we just planted at the bottom of the sea? I don't know what it was, not exactly. But I do know one thing.'
'And what's that?' Lloyd tried to sound normal. Thank God, he could hear the hurried footsteps of the nurse in the corridor.
'It's sprouting.'
Authors' Note
THE ICE Limit is, in part, inspired by a real scientific expedition. In 1906, Admiral Robert E. Peary discovered the world's largest meteorite, which he named the Ahnighito, in northern Greenland. He located it because Eskimos in the area were using cold-hammered iron spearpoints, which Peary analyzed and found to be meteoritic in origin. He ultimately recovered the Ahnighito, wrestling it to his ship only with tremendous difficulty. The mass of iron, when it was finally aboard, destroyed all the ship's compasses. He managed to bring it back to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it is still on display in the Hall of Meteorites. He recounted the story in his book Northward over the Great Ice. 'Never,' Peary wrote, 'have I had the terrific majesty of the force of gravity so powerfully brought home to me as in handling this mountain of iron.' The Ahnighito is so heavy that it rests on six massive steel pillars that penetrate the floor of the museum's meteorite hall, pass through the basement, and are bolted into the very bedrock under the building.
Needless to say, while many of the locales mentioned in The Ice Limit actually exist, Lloyd Industries, Effective Engineering Solutions, and all of the characters and ships described in the novel, both American and Chilean, are entirely fictitious. In places, we have taken liberties with the design, construction, and characteristics of tankers to best suit the narrative. In addition, while an atlas will reveal a large island named Isla Desolacion some three hundred fifty miles northwest of where much of The Ice Limit is set, our Desolation Island — its makeup, size, and location — is entirely our own invention.
DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD are coauthors of the bestselling novels Riptide, Thunderhead, The Relic, Mount Dragon, and Reliquary. Douglas Preston is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and National Geographic, and has ridden on horseback for thousands of miles across the American Southwest, retracing the routes of early explorers and conquistadors. Lincoln Child is a former book editor who has published numerous short-story anthologies. The authors welcome reader e-mail at [email protected]. Their next novel will appear in hardcover from Warner Books in early 2002.
IT'S SPROUTING?!?
In the months since the original publication of The Ice Limit, a number of enigmatic and violent disturbances have been recorded in the Antarctic Sea in the area where the Rolvaag went down.
As a service to our readers, we have collected a selection of news reports about the unfolding events. All this information can be found only at Time Warner Trade Publishing's new iPublish website:
www.iPublish.com
For readers who cannot access the internet, we will send you printed copies of the latest news reports. Please send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the following address:
The Ice Limit News Reports
Warner Books, Rm. 9-53
1271 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
T H E I C E L I M I T
'W E B I L O G U E'
THE ICE LIMIT is copyright © 2000 by Lincoln Child and Splendide Mendax, Inc. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this text, or any portion thereof, in any form.
Warning! What follows is an epilogue to THE ICE LIMIT, which was originally available only on Warner's iPublish site. If you have not yet finished THE ICE LIMIT, reading this epilogue will spoil the book for you! You have been warned!
Dear Reader,
We have been asked to amplify certain details relating to the ending of The Ice Limit. In response, we have reproduced the following news stories, which we culled from issues of the New York Times, U. S. News and World Report, and the Washington Post during the period July 26 through September 1 of this year. We offer our thanks to the appropriate news organizations and wire services for giving permission to reproduce the stories here. Please note that these articles are copyrighted by their respective owners; reproduction, copying, storage, or retrieval of these articles in any form is strictly prohibited.
We present these items to you without editing and without further comment.
Sincerely,
Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
[New York Times - page A12, International: single-column story, below the fold]
Tanker Sinks in South Atlantic
By Christopher Ohrlanger</BL>
SOUTH GEORGIA, July 26—The British Maritime Agency representative at this small island in the South Atlantic reported today that a Liberian-registered tanker, Rolvaag, sank yesterday in a severe storm north of the Bransfield Strait, about 200 miles off the coast of Antarctica. Survivors were reportedly rescued and taken to the British Scientific Station at South Georgia, where they are currently receiving medical attention. The extent of the loss of life is not yet determined. The Rolvaag, according to the Registry, was a converted tanker owned by an American mining company, Neptune Subterranean, and had been involved in a mining operation on an island off the coast of Chile.
