Douglas Preston: The Ice Limit

"May I introduce Dr. Sam McFarlane," Lloyd said, turning away from the table and looking at Glinn. "The museum's retaining his services for the duration of this assignment."

McFarlane shook Glinn's hand.

"Until last week, Sam was wandering around the Kalahari Desert looking for the Okavango meteorite. A poor use of his talents. I think you'll agree we've found something much more interesting for him to do."

He gestured at Glinn. "Sam, this is Mr. Eli Glinn, president of Effective Engineering Solutions, Inc. Don't let the dull name fool you — it's a remarkable company. Mr. Glinn specializes in such things as raising Nazi subs full of gold, figuring out why space shuttles blow up — that sort of thing. Solving unique engineering problems and analyzing major failures."

"Interesting job," said McFarlane.

Lloyd nodded. "Usually, though, EES steps in after the fact. Once things have gotten fucked up." The vulgarity, enunciated slowly and distinctly, hung in the air. "But I'm bringing them in now to help make sure a certain task doesn't get fucked up. And that task, gentlemen, is why we're all here today."

He gestured toward the conference table. "Sam, I want you to tell Mr. Glinn what you've found, looking at this data over the last few days."

"Right now?" McFarlane asked. He seemed uncharacteristically nervous.

"When else?"

McFarlane glanced over the table, hesitated, and then spoke. "What we have here," he said, "is geophysical data about an unusual site in the Cape Horn islands of Chile."

Glinn nodded encouragingly.

"Mr. Lloyd asked me to analyze it. At first, the data seemed... impossible. Like this tomographic readout." He picked it up, glanced at it, let it drop. His eyes swept over the rest of the papers, and his voice faltered.

Lloyd cleared his throat. Sam was still a little shaken by it all; he was going to need some help. He turned to Glinn. "Perhaps I'd better bring you up to speed on the history. One of our scouts came across a dealer in electronic equipment in Punta Arenas, Chile. He was trying to sell a rusted-out electromagnetic tomographic sounder. It's a piece of mining survey equipment, made here in the States by DeWitter Industries. It had been found, along with a bag of rocks and some papers, near the remains of a prospector on a remote island down near Cape Horn. On a whim, my scout bought it all. When he took a closer look at the papers — those that he could decipher — the scout noticed they belonged to a man named Nestor Masangkay."

Lloyd's eyes drifted toward the conference table. "Before his death on the island, Masangkay had been a planetary geologist. More specifically, a meteorite hunter. And, up until about two years ago, he'd been the partner of Sam McFarlane here."

He saw McFarlane's shoulders stiffen.

"When our scout learned this, he sent everything back here for analysis. The tomographic sounder had a floppy disk rusted into its drive bay. One of our technicians managed to extract the data. Some of my people analyzed the data, but it was simply too far outside the bell curve for them to make much sense of it. That's why we hired Sam."

McFarlane had turned from the first page to the second, and then back again. "At first I thought that Nestor had forgotten to calibrate his machine. But then I looked at the rest of the data." He dropped the readout, then pushed the two weathered sheets aside with a slow, almost reverent notion. He began leafing through the scatter and removed another sheet.

"We didn't send a ground expedition," Lloyd continued, speaking again to Glinn, "because the last thing we want to do is attract attention. But we did order a flyover of the island. And that sheet Sam's holding now is a dump from the LOG II satellite — the Low Orbit Geosurvey."

McFarlane carefully put down the data dump. "I had a lot of trouble believing this," he finally said. "I must have gone over it a dozen times. But there's no getting away from it. It can mean only one thing."

"Yes?" Glinn's voice was low, encouraging, holding no trace of curiosity.

"I think I know what Nestor was after."

Lloyd waited. He knew what McFarlane was going to say. But he wanted to hear it again.

"What we've got here is the largest meteorite in the world."

Lloyd broke into a grin. "Tell Mr. Glinn just how large, Sam."

McFarlane cleared his throat. "The largest meteorite recovered in the world so far is the Ahnighito, in the New York Museum. It weighs sixty-one tons. This one weighs four thousand tons. At an absolute minimum."

"Thank you," Lloyd said, his frame swelling with joy, his face breaking into a radiant smile. Then he turned and looked again at Glinn. The man's face still betrayed nothing.

There was a long moment of silence. And then Lloyd spoke again, his voice low and hoarse with emotion.

"I want that meteorite. Your job, Mr. Glinn, is to make sure I get it."

New York City,

June 4, 11:45 A.M.

THE LAND Rover jounced its way down West Street, the sagging piers along the Hudson flashing by the passenger window, the sky over Jersey City a dull sepia in the noon light. McFarlane braked hard, then swerved to avoid a taxi angling across three lanes to catch a fare. It was a smooth, automatic motion. McFarlane's mind was far away.

He was remembering the afternoon when the Zaragosa meteorite fell. He'd finished high school, had no job or plans of one, and was hiking across the Mexican desert, Carlos Castaneda in his back pocket. The sun had been low, and he'd been thinking about finding a place to pitch his bedroll. Suddenly, the landscape grew bright around him, as if the sun had emerged from heavy clouds. But the sky was already perfectly clear. And then he'd stopped dead in his tracks. On the sandy ground ahead of him, a second shadow of himself had appeared; long and ragged at first, but quickly compacting. There was a sound of singing. And then, a massive explosion. He'd fallen to the ground, thinking earthquake, or nuclear blast, or Armageddon. There was a patter of rain. Except it was not rain: it was thousands of tiny rocks dropping around him. He picked one up; a little piece of gray stone, covered in black crust. It still held the deep cold of outer space inside, despite its fiery passage through the atmosphere, and it was covered with frost.

As he stared at the fragment from outer space, he suddenly knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. But that had been years ago. Now, he tried to think as little about those idealistic days as possible. His eyes strayed to a locked briefcase on the passenger seat, which contained Nestor Masangkay's battered journal. He tried to think as little as possible about that, too.

A light ahead turned green, and he made a turn into a narrow one-way street. This was the meat-packing district, perched at the uttermost edge of the West Village. Old loading docks yawned wide, filled with burly men manhandling carcasses in and out of trucks. Along the far side of the street, as if to take advantage of the proximity, was a crowd of restaurants with names like The Hog Pit and Uncle Billy's Backyard. It was the antithesis of the chrome-and-glass Park Avenue headquarters of Lloyd Holdings, from which he had just come. Nice place for a corporate presence, McFarlane thought, if you deal in pork-belly futures. He double-checked the scribbled address lying on his dashboard.

He slowed, then guided the Land Rover to a stop on the far side of an especially decrepit loading dock. Killing the engine, he stepped into the meat-fragrant humidity and looked around. Halfway down the block a garbage truck idled, grinding busily away at its load. Even from this distance, he caught a whiff of the green juice that dribbled off its rear bumper. It was a stench unique to New York City garbage trucks; once smelled, never forgotten.