Douglas Preston - The Ice Limit

"Fifteen inches to go," said Amira.

"Time to switch to archaeological mode," Glinn said. "We're sinking our hole in a slightly different place from where Masangkay dug, so we can sample undisturbed earth above."

The group followed him across the freshly exposed gravel. Amira took some more readings, tapped a few stakes into the ground, gridded it off, and snapped some chalk strings to make a square two meters on a side. The group of laborers came forward and began carefully troweling dirt from the square.

"How come the ground's not frozen?" asked McFarlane.

Glinn nodded upward at the four towers. "We've bathed the area in far infrared."

"You've thought of everything," said Lloyd, shaking his head.

"You're paying us to do just that."

The men proceeded to trowel out a neat cube, descending bit by bit, occasionally taking samples of minerals, gravel, and sand as they went. One of them stopped and held up a jagged object, sand adhering to its surface.

"That's interesting," said Glinn, stepping forward quickly. "What is it?"

"You got me," said Amira. "Strange. Looks almost like glass."

"Fulgurite," said McFarlane.

"What?"

"Fulgurite. It's what happens when a powerful bolt of lightning hits wet sand. It fuses a channel through the sand, turning it to glass."

"That's why I hired him," said Lloyd, looking around with a grin.

"Here's another," said a workman. They carefully dug around it, leaving it sticking up in the sand like a tree branch.

"Meteorites are ferromagnetic," McFarlane said, dropping down and carefully plucking it from the sand with his gloved hands. "This one must have attracted more than its share of lightning."

The men continued to work, uncovering several more fulgurites, which were wrapped in tissue and packed in wooden crates. Amira swept her instrument over the ground surface. "Six more inches," she said.

"Switch to brushes," said Glinn.

Two men now crouched around the hole, the rest of the workers taking up positions behind them. At this depth, McFarlane could see that the dirt was wet, almost saturated with water, and the workers were not so much sweeping away sand as they were brushing mud. A hush fell on the group as the hole deepened, centimeter by centimeter.

"Take another reading," murmured Glinn.

"One more inch," Amira said.

McFarlane leaned forward. The two laborers were using stiff plastic brushes to carefully whisk the mud into pans, which they passed to the men behind them.

And then a brush swept across a hard surface. The two workmen stepped out of the hole and gingerly troweled away the heavy mud, leaving a shallow layer covering the hard surface below.

"Rinse it off," said Glinn. McFarlane thought he heard a note of anticipation in the voice.

"Hurry, man!" Lloyd cried.

One of the workmen came running up, unrolling a thin hose. Glinn himself took the nozzle, aimed it toward the mud-covered meteorite, and squeezed. For several seconds, there was no sound except the gentle hiss of water as the last of the mud was rinsed from the surface.

Then Glinn jerked the nozzle shut. The water drained away from the naked surface of the meteorite. A sudden paralysis, an electric moment of suspension, gripped the company.

And then there was the sound of the champagne bottle, heedlessly dropped, landing on the damp earth with a heavy thud.

Isla Desolación,

9:55 A.M.

PALMER LLOYD stood at the edge of the precise cut in the earth, his eyes locked on the naked surface of the meteorite. For a moment, his mind went blank at the astonishing sight. And then, gradually, he became aware of himself again: felt the blood pounding in his temples, the air filling his chest, the cold air freezing his nose and cheeks. And yet the overpowering surprise remained. He was looking at it, he was seeing it, but he couldn't believe it.

"Margaux," he murmured, his voice small in the snowy vastness.

The silence around him was complete. Everyone had been shocked mute.

Lloyd had made pilgrimages to most of the great iron meteorites in the world — the Hoba, the Ahnighito, the Willamette, the Woman. Despite their widely varying shapes, they all had the same pitted, brownish-black surface. All iron meteorites looked alike.

But this meteorite was scarlet . But no, he thought, as his brain began to pick up speed again: the word "scarlet" did not do it justice. It was the deep, pure velvety color of polished carnelian, yet even richer. It was, in fact, precisely the color of a fine Bordeaux wine, like the parsimonious drams of Chateau Margaux with which he had been forced to content himself on the Rolvaag .

Now one voice cut through the shocked silence. It had a note of authority that Lloyd recognized as Glinn's. "I would like everyone to please step back from the hole."

Distantly, Lloyd was aware that nobody was moving.

"Step back," Glinn repeated, more sharply.

This time, the tight circle of onlookers reluctantly shuffled back a few steps. As the shadows fell away, sunlight lanced through the crowd, illuminating the pit. Once more, Lloyd felt the breath snatched from him. In the sunlight, the meteorite revealed a silky, metallic surface that resembled nothing so much as gold. Like gold, this scarlet metal seemed to collect and trap the ambient light, darkening the outside world while giving itself an ineffable, interior illumination. It was not only beautiful, but unutterably strange.

And it was his .

He felt flooded by a sudden, powerful joy: for this amazing thing that lay at his feet and for the astonishing trajectory of his life that had given him the opportunity to find it. Bringing the largest meteorite in human history back to his museum had always seemed goal enough. But now the stakes were higher. It was no accident that he — perhaps the only person on earth with the vision and the resources — would be here, at this time and in this place, staring at this ravishing object.

"Mr. Lloyd," he heard Glinn say. "I said step back."

Instead, Lloyd leaned forward.

Glinn raised his voice. "Palmer, do not do it!"

But Lloyd had already dropped into the hole, his feet landing squarely on the surface of the meteorite. He immediately fell to his knees, allowing the tips of his gloved fingers to caress the smoothly rippled metallic surface. On impulse, he leaned down and placed his cheek against it. Above, there was a brief silence.

"How does it feel?" he heard McFarlane ask.

"Cold," Lloyd replied, sitting up. He could hear the quaver in his voice as he spoke, feel the tears freezing on his numb cheek. "It feels very cold."

Isla Desolación,

1:55 P.M.

MCFARLANE STARED at the laptop on his knees. The cursor blinked back, reproachfully, from a nearly blank screen. He sighed and shifted in the metal folding chair, trying to get comfortable. The lone window of the commissary hut glittered with frost, and the sound of wind came through the walls. Outside, the clear weather had given way to snow. But within the hut, a coal stove threw out a wonderfully intense heat.

McFarlane moused a command, then closed the laptop with a curse. On a nearby table, a printer began to hum. He shifted again, restlessly. Once again, he replayed the events of the morning. The moment of awestruck silence, Lloyd jumping so impulsively into the hole, and Glinn calling out to him — by his Christian name, for the first time McFarlane remembered. The triumphant christening, the torrent of questions that followed. And — overlaying everything — an overpowering sense of incomprehension. He felt that the breath had been knocked out of him, that he was struggling for air.

He, too, had felt a sudden urge to jump in; to touch the thing, to reassure himself that it was real. But he was also slightly afraid of it. It had such a rich color, so out of place in the monochromatic landscape. It reminded him of an operating table, a vast expanse of snowy white sheets with a bloody incision at their center. It repelled and fascinated simultaneously. And it excited in him a hope that he thought had been dead.