Douglas Preston - The Ice Limit

The door to the hut opened, admitting a howl of snow. McFarlane glanced up as Amira stepped in.

"Finish the report?" she asked, removing her parka and shaking off the snow.

In response, McFarlane nodded toward the printer. Amira walked to it and grabbed the emerging sheet. Then she barked a laugh. "'The meteorite is red,'" she read aloud. She tossed the sheet into McFarlane's lap. "Now that's what I like in a man, succinctness."

"Why fill up paper with a lot of useless speculations? Until we get a piece of it for study, how can I possibly say what the hell it is?"

She pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. It seemed to McFarlane that, beneath a forced casualness, she was eyeing him very carefully. "You've been studying meteorites for years. I doubt your speculations would be useless."

"What do you think?"

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

McFarlane glanced down at the pattern of ripples on the plywood table, tracing his finger along them. It had the fractal perfection of a coastline, or a snowflake, or a Mandelbrot set. It reminded him how complicated everything was: the universe, an atom, a piece of wood. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Amira draw a metal cigar tube from her parka and upend it, letting a half-burnt stogie drop into her hand.

"Please don't," he said. "I'd rather not be driven out into the cold."

Amira replaced the cigar. "I know something is running through that head of yours."

McFarlane shrugged.

"Okay," she said. "You want to know what I think? You're in denial."

He turned to look at her again.

"That's right. You had a pet theory once — something you believed in, despite the razzing of your peers. Isn't that right? And when you thought you'd finally found evidence for that theory, it got you into trouble. In all the excitement you lost your usual good judgment and shafted a friend. And in the end, your evidence turned out to be worthless."

McFarlane looked at her. "I didn't know you had a degree in psychiatry, along with everything else."

She leaned closer, pressing. "Sure, I heard the story. The point is, now you've got what you've been looking for all these years. You've got more than evidence. You've got proof . But you don't want to admit it. You're afraid to go down that road again."

McFarlane held her gaze for a minute. He felt his anger drain away. He slumped in his chair, his mind in turmoil. Could she be right? he wondered.

She laughed. "Take the color, for example. You know why no metals are deep red?"

"No."

"Objects are a certain color because of the way they interact with photons of light." Amira shoved a hand in her pocket and took out a crumpled paper bag. "Jolly Rancher?"

"What the hell's a Jolly Rancher?"

She tossed him a candy and shook another one into her hand. She held the green lozenge up between thumb and forefinger. "Every object, except for a perfect blackbody, absorbs some wavelengths of light and scatters others. Take this green candy. It's green because its scatters the green wavelengths of light back at our eye, while absorbing the rest. I've run a few pretty little calculations, and I can't find a single theoretical combination of alloyed metals that will scatter red light. It seems to be impossible for any known alloy to be deep red. Yellow, white, orange, purple, gray — but not red." She popped the green candy in her mouth, bit down with a loud crunch, and began to chew.

McFarlane placed his candy on the table. "So what are you saying?"

"You know what I'm saying. I'm saying it's made of some weird element we've never seen before. So stop being coy. I know that's what you've been thinking: This is it: this is an interstellar meteorite."

McFarlane raised his hand. "All right, it's true, I have been thinking about it."

"And?"

"All the meteorites ever found have been made from known elements — nickel, iron, carbon, silicon. They all formed here, in our own solar system, out of the primordial cloud of dust that once surrounded our sun." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "Obviously, you know I used to speculate about the possibility of meteorites coming from outside the solar system. A chunk of something that just happened to wander past and get caught in the sun's gravitational field. An interstellar meteorite."

Amira smiled knowingly. "But the mathematicians said it was impossible: a quintillion to one."

McFarlane nodded.

"I ran some calculations back on the ship. The mathematicians were wrong: they were working from faulty assumptions. It's only about a billion to one."

McFarlane laughed. "Yeah. Billion, quintillion, what's the difference?"

"It's a billion to one for any given year."

McFarlane stopped laughing.

"That's right," said Amira. "Over billions of years, there's a better than even chance that one did land on Earth. It's not only possible, it's probable. I resurrected your little theory for you. You owe me, big time."

A silence fell in the commissary hut, broken only by the rattle of wind. Then McFarlane began to speak. "You mean you really believe this meteorite is made of some alloy or metal that doesn't exist anywhere in the solar system?"

"Yup. And you believe it, too. That's why you haven't written your report."

McFarlane went on slowly, almost to himself. "If this metal did exist somewhere, we'd have found at least some trace of it. After all, the sun and the planets formed from the same dust cloud. So it must have come from beyond." He looked at her. "It's inescapable."

She grinned. "My thoughts exactly."

He fell silent and the two sat, absorbed for the moment. "We need to get our hands on a piece of it," Amira said at last. "I've got the perfect tool for the job, too, a highspeed diamond corer. I'd say five kilos would be a nice chunk to start with, wouldn't you?"

McFarlane nodded. "But let's just keep our speculations to ourselves for now. Lloyd and the rest are due here any minute."

As if on cue, there was a stomping outside the hut, and the door opened to reveal Lloyd, even more bearlike than usual in a heavy parka, framed against the dim blue light. Glinn followed, then Rochefort and Garza. Lloyd's assistant, Penfold, came last, shivering, his thick lips blue and pursed.

"Cold as a witch's tit out there," Lloyd cried, stamping his feet and holding his hands near the stove. He was bubbling over with good humor. The men from EES, on the other hand, simply sat down at the table, looking subdued.

Penfold took up a position in the far corner of the room, radio in hand. "Mr. Lloyd sir, we have to get to the landing site," he said. "Unless the helicopter leaves within the hour, you'll never get back to New York in time for the shareholders' meeting."

"Yes, yes. In a minute. I want to hear what Sam here has to say."

Penfold sighed and murmured into the radio.

Glinn glanced at McFarlane with his gray, serious eyes. "Is the report ready?"

"Sure." McFarlane nodded at the piece of paper.

Glinn glanced at it. "I'm not much in the mood for drollery, Dr. McFarlane."

It was the first time McFarlane had seen Glinn show irritation, or any strong emotion, for that matter. It occurred to him that Glinn, too, must have been shocked by what they found in the hole. This is a man who hates surprises, he thought. "Mr. Glinn, I can't base a report on speculation," he said. "I need to study it."

"I'll tell you what we need," Lloyd said loudly. "We need to get it the hell out of the ground and into international waters, before the Chileans get wind of this. You can study it later." It seemed to McFarlane that this was the latest salvo in a continuing argument between Glinn and Lloyd.