Douglas Preston - The Ice Limit

"I can't answer your question," he said. "It's dangerous enough — we've learned that the hard way. But will it specifically endanger the ship? I don't know. But I think maybe it's too late for us to stop, even if we wanted to."

"But in the library, you spoke up. You had concerns. Just as I did."

"I'm very concerned. But it isn't that simple. That meteorite is as deep a mystery as any in the universe. What it represents is so important that I think we've got no choice but to continue. If Magellan had soberly taken into account all the risks, he never would have begun his voyage around the world. Columbus would never have discovered America."

Britton was silent, studying him intently. "You think this meteorite is a discovery on a par with Magellan or Columbus?"

"Yes," he said finally. "I do."

"In the library, Glinn asked you a question. You didn't answer it."

"I couldn't answer it."

"Why?"

He turned and looked into her steady green eyes. "Because I realized — despite Rochefort, despite everything — I want that meteorite. More than I've ever wanted anything."

After a pause, Britton drew herself up. "Thank you, Sam," she said. Then, turning smartly, she headed for the bridge.

Isla Desolación,

July 20, 2:05 P.M.

MCFARLANE AND Rachel stood at the edge of the staging area, in the cold afternoon sun. The eastern sky was clear and bright, the landscape below painfully sharp in the crisp air. But the sky to the west looked very different: a vast, dark cloak that stretched across the horizon, tumbling low, moving in their direction, blotting out the mountain peaks. A gust of wind swirled old snow around their feet. The storm was no longer just a blip on a screen: it was almost on top of them.

Garza came toward them. "Never thought I'd like the look of a storm as ugly as that one," he said, smiling and pointing westward.

"What's the plan now?" McFarlane asked.

"Cut and cover, from here to the shore," said Garza with a wink.

"Cut and cover?"

"Instant tunnel. It's the simplest engineered tunnel, a technique that's been used since Babylon. We dig a channel with a hydraulic excavator, roof it over with steel plates, and throw dirt and snow on top to hide it. As the meteorite is dragged toward the shore, we backfill the old tunnel and dig new tunnel ahead."

Rachel nodded toward the hydraulic excavator. "That baby makes Mike Mulligan's steam shovel look like a Tonka toy."

McFarlane thought back to all that had been accomplished in the two days since the meteorite crushed Rochefort and Evans. The tunnels had been cleared and reshored, and double the number of jacks positioned under the rock. The meteorite had been raised without a hitch, a cradle built underneath it, and the dirt cleared away. A gigantic steel flatbed cart had been brought up from the ship and positioned next to it. Now it was time to drag the meteorite and its cradle onto the cart. Garza had made it all look so easy.

The engineer grinned again. He was garrulous, in high spirits. "Ready to see the heaviest object ever moved by mankind get moved?"

"Sure," said McFarlane.

"The first step is positioning it on the cart. We'll have to uncover the meteorite for that. Briefly. That's why I like the look of that storm. Don't want those damn Chileans getting a gander at our rock."

Garza stepped back and spoke into his radio. Farther away, Stonecipher made a motion with his hands to the crane operator. As McFarlane watched, the crane operator began removing the steel roofing plates off the cut that held the meteorite and stacking them nearby. The wind was picking up, whistling about the huts and whipping snow along the ground. The final metal plate twisted wildly in the air as the crane operator fought to hold the boom steady against the gusts. "To the left, to the left!" Stonecipher called into his radio. "Now, boom down, boom down, boom down... Cut." After a tense moment, it, too, was set safely aside. McFarlane gazed into the open trench.

For the first time, McFarlane saw the meteorite exposed in its entirety. It lay in its cradle, a bloodred, lopsided egg atop a nest of timbers and metal I-beams. It was a breathtaking sight. Dimly, he was aware that Rachel was speaking.

"What did I tell you," she said to Garza. "He's got the look."

"The look" was a term she had coined for the way almost anybody — technicians, scientists, construction workers — tended to stop what they were doing and stare at the meteorite, as if mesmerized.

With an effort, McFarlane pulled his gaze from the meteorite to her. The infectious twinkle of merriment — so evidently missing for the last twenty-four hours — had returned to her eyes.

"It's beautiful," he said.

He glanced back down the length of the exposed tunnel to the cart that would carry the rock. It was a remarkablelooking thing, a honeycombed flatbed of steel and ceramiccarbon composite a hundred feet long. Although he could not see them from above, McFarlane knew that beneath the cart was an array of heavy-duty aircraft tires: thirty-six axles, with forty tires on each axle, to bear the staggering weight of the meteorite. At the far end, a massive steel capstan rose from a socket in the tunnel bed.

Glinn was calling out orders to dark figures in the tunnel, raising his voice above the increasing fury of the wind. The front now loomed above them, a cliff of dark weather that ate away daylight as it approached. He broke off and came over to McFarlane.

"Any new results from the second set of tests, Dr. McFarlane?" he asked as he watched the men work beneath them.

McFarlane nodded. "On several fronts." He fell silent. It was only a small satisfaction, he knew: making Glinn ask. It continued to rankle him, Glinn's monitoring his actions. But he had decided not to make an issue of it — at least not now.

Glinn inclined his head, as if perceiving the thought. "I see. May we hear them, please?"

"Sure thing. We have its melting point now. Or rather, I should say vapor point, since it goes directly from a solid to a gas."

Glinn raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

"One point two million degrees Kelvin."

Glinn breathed out. "Good Lord."

"We've also made some progress on its crystalline structure. It's an extremely complicated, asymmetrical fractal pattern built from nested isosceles triangles. The patterns repeat themselves at different scales from the macroscopic all the way down to individual atoms. A textbook fractal. Which explains its extreme hardness. It appears to be elemental, not an alloy."

"Any more information about its place on the periodic table?"

"Very high up, above one seventy-seven. A superactinide element, probably. The individual atoms appear to be gigantic, each with hundreds of protons and neutrons. It's most definitely an element in the `island of stability' we talked about earlier."

"Anything else?"

McFarlane took a breath of frosty air. "Yes. Something very interesting. Rachel and I dated the Jaws of Hanuxa. The volcanic eruptions and lava flows date almost precisely to the time of the meteorite's impact."

Glinn's eyes flickered toward him. "Your conclusion?"

"We always assumed that the meteorite landed near a volcano. But now it looks as if the meteorite made the volcano."

Glinn waited.

"The meteorite was so heavy and dense, and traveling so fast, that it punched deep into the earth's crust, like a bullet, triggering the volcanic eruption. That's why Isla Desolación, alone among the Cape Horn islands, is volcanic. In his journal, Nestor talked about the `weird coesite' of the region. And when I reexamined the coesite with the X-ray diffractor, I realized he was right. It is different. The meteorite's impact was so severe that the surrounding rock that wasn't vaporized underwent a phase change. The impact chemically changed the material into a form of coesite never seen before."