Douglas Preston - The Ice Limit

After several fruitless minutes, McFarlane sighed. "Go to 120x."

Amira adjusted the machine. The landscape leapt forward, looking even more grotesque. Again McFarlane scanned it, sector by sector.

"I can't believe it," said Amira, staring at the screen. "It should have picked up something."

McFarlane sat back with a sigh. "If it did, it's beyond the power of this microscope to see it."

"That suggests the meteorite must be one tenacious crystal lattice."

"It sure as hell isn't a normal metal." McFarlane slapped the two eyepieces together and folded them back into the machine.

"What now?" said Glinn, his voice low.

McFarlane swiveled in his chair. He pulled down the mask and thought for a moment. "There's always the electron microprobe."

"And that is...?"

"The planetary geologist's favorite tool. We've got one here. You put a sample of material in a vacuum chamber, shoot a high-speed beam of electrons at it. Normally, you analyze the X rays it produces, but you can heat up the electron beam to the point where it'll vaporize a tiny amount of the material, which will condense as a thin film on a gold plate. Voilà, your sample. Small, but viable."

"How do you know the electron beam will be able to vaporize a bit of the rock?" Glinn asked.

"The electrons are ejected from a filament at extremely high speed. You can ramp it up almost to the speed of light and focus it down to a micrometer. Believe me, it'll knock off at least a few atoms."

Glinn was silent, clearly weighing in his mind the possible danger against the need for more information. "Very well," he said. "Proceed. But remember, no one is to touch the meteorite directly."

McFarlane frowned. "The tricky part is how to do it. Normally, you bring the sample to the microprobe. This time we'll have to bring the microprobe to the sample. But the thing isn't portable — it weighs about six hundred pounds. And we'll have to jury-rig some sort of vacuum chamber over its surface."

Glinn removed a radio from his belt. "Garza? I want eight men up on the maindeck immediately. We'll need to get a sling and vehicle big enough to move a six-hundred-pound instrument on the first morning transport."

"Tell him we need a major power source, too," McFarlane added.

"And have a cable with a ground-fault interrupt able to carry up to twenty thousand watts."

McFarlane gave a low whistle. "That'll do it."

"You have one hour to get your samples. We have no more time ." These words were spoken very slowly, and very clearly. "Garza will be here shortly. Be ready."

Glinn rose abruptly and left the lab, the door sucking in a gust of frigid air as it shut behind him.

McFarlane looked at Amira. "He's getting touchy."

"He hates not knowing," said Amira. "Uncertainty drives him around the bend."

"It must be hard to live life like that."

A distant look of pain crossed her face. "You haven't any idea."

McFarlane looked at her curiously, but Amira merely pulled down her mask and removed her gloves. "Let's break down the microprobe for transport," she said.

Isla Desolación,

1:45 P.M.

BY EARLY afternoon, the staging area had been prepped for the test. Inside the little shack, the light was brilliant, the air suffocatingly warm. McFarlane stood over the hole, looking down on the rich, deep red surface. Even in the harsh light it had a soft luster. The microprobe, a long cylinder of stainless steel, lay on a padded cradle. Amira was arranging the other equipment McFarlane had ordered: an inch-thick bell jar containing a filament and plug, a set of gold disks sealed in plastic, and an electromagnet for focusing the electron beam.

"I need one square foot of the meteorite cleaned to absolute perfection," McFarlane said to Glinn, who was standing nearby. "Otherwise we'll get contaminants."

"We'll make it happen," said Glinn. "Once we get the samples, what's your plan?"

"We'll run a series of tests on them. With any luck, we'll be able to determine its basic electrical, chemical, and physical properties."

"How long will that take?"

"Forty-eight hours. More, if we eat and sleep."

Glinn's lips compressed together. "We can't afford more than twelve hours. Confine yourself to the most essential tests." He checked his massive gold pocket watch. Another hour, and all was in readiness. The bell jar had been tightly sealed to the surface of the meteorite — an excruciatingly cautious operation. Inside the bell jar, ten tiny sample disks lay on pieces of glass, arrayed in a circle. A ring of electromagnets surrounded the jar. The electron microprobe lay nearby, partially open, its complex guts exposed. Multicolored wires and tubes streamed from it.

"Rachel, please turn on the vacuum pump," McFarlane said.

There was a whir as air was sucked from the bell jar. McFarlane monitored a screen on the microprobe. "What do you know. The seal's holding. Vacuum's down to five microbars."

Glinn moved closer, watching the small screen intently.

"Turn on the electromagnets," McFarlane said.

"You've got it," said Amira.

"Douse the lights."

The room went dark. The only light came from cracks in the walls of the ill-made shack and from the LEDs arranged along the microprobe's controls.

"I'm turning the beam on at low power," McFarlane whispered.

A faint bluish beam appeared in the bell jar. It flickered and rotated, casting a spectral light across the meteorite's surface, turning the crimson surface almost black. The walls of the shack danced and wavered.

McFarlane carefully turned two sets of dials, altering the magnetic fields around the jar. The beam stopped rotating and began to narrow, becoming brighter. Soon it looked like a blue pencil, its point resting on the meteorite's surface.

"We're there," he said. "Now I'm going to bring it to full power for five seconds."

He held his breath. If Glinn's concerns were justified—if the meteorite was somehow dangerous — this was when they might find out.

He pressed the timer. There was a sudden, much brighter, beam inside the jar. Where it touched the meteorite's surface, there was an intense violet pinpoint of light. Five seconds ticked off, and then everything went dark again. McFarlane felt himself relax involuntarily. "Lights."

As the lights came on, McFarlane knelt above the meteorite's surface, staring eagerly at the gold disks. He caught his breath. Each disk was now marked with the faintest blush of red. Not only that, but at the spot where the electron beam had touched the meteorite, he saw — or thought he saw — the tiniest pit, a gleaming speck on the smooth surface.

He straightened up.

"Well?" asked Glinn. "What happened?"

McFarlane grinned. "This baby isn't so tough, after all."

Isla Desolación,

July 18, 9:00 A.M.

MCFARLANE CRUNCHED across the staging area, Amira at his side. The site looked the same — the same rows of containers and Quonset huts; the same raw, frosted earth. Only he was different. He felt bone tired yet exhilarated. As they walked in silence, the crisp air seemed to magnify everything: the sound of his boots creaking in the fresh snow, the clatter of distant machinery, the rasp of his own breath. It helped clear his head of all the strange speculations that the night's experiments had aroused.

Reaching the bank of containers, he approached the main lab and held open the door for Amira. Inside, in the dim light, he could see Stonecipher, the project's second engineer, working on an open computer box, disks and circuit boards spread out fanwise. Stonecipher straightened up his short, narrow body at their arrival.

"Mr. Glinn wants to see you, on the double," he said.

"Where is he?" asked McFarlane.

"Underground. I'll take you."