The Ice Limit Page 5

McFarlane exhaled slowly. "Someone else collected the base data. I can't vouch for it. All I can say is, if that data's accurate, there's no other explanation: it's a meteorite."

  There was a silence. "Someone else's data," Amira said, cracking another shell and popping the nuts into her mouth. "Would that be a Dr. Masangkay, by chance?"

  "Yes."

  "You knew each other, I believe?"

  "We were partners."

  "Ah." Amira nodded, as if hearing this for the first time. "And so, if Dr. Masangkay collected this data, you have a high degree of confidence in it? You trust him?"

  "Absolutely."

  "I wonder if he'd say the same about you," Rochefort said in his quiet, high, clipped voice.

  McFarlane turned his head and looked steadily at the engineer.

  "Let's proceed," Glinn said.

  McFarlane looked away from Rochefort and tapped his portfolio with the back of one hand. "There's an enormous circular deposit of shocked and fused coesite on that island. Right in the center is a dense mass of ferromagnetic material."

  "A natural deposit of iron ore," said Rochefort.

  "The flyover indicates a reversal of the sedimentary strata around the site."

  Amira looked puzzled. "A what?"

  "Flipped sedimentary layers."

  Rochefort sighed heavily. "Signifying... ?"

  "When a large meteorite strikes sedimentary layers, the layers get reversed."

  Rochefort continued tapping his pencil. "How? By magic?"

  McFarlane looked at him again, longer this time. "Perhaps Mr. Rochefort would like a demonstration?"

  "I would," said Rochefort.

  McFarlane picked up his sandwich. He examined it, smelled it. "Peanut butter and jelly?" He made a face.

  "May we just have the demonstration, please?" Rochefort asked in a tight, exasperated voice.

  "Of course." McFarlane placed the sandwich on the table between himself and Rochefort. Then he tilted his coffee cup and carefully poured liquid over it.

  "What is he doing?" said Rochefort, turning to Glinn, his voice high. "I knew this was a mistake. We should have required one of the principals to come in."

  McFarlane held up his hand. "Bear with me. We're just preparing our sedimentary deposit here." He reached for another sandwich and placed it on top, then tipped on more coffee until it was saturated. "There. This sandwich is the sedimentary deposit: bread, peanut butter, jelly, more bread, in layers. And my fist"—he raised his hand above his head—"is the meteorite."

  He brought his fist down on the sandwich with a jarring crash.

  "For Christ's sake!" Rochefort cried, jumping back, his shirt splattered with peanut butter. He stood up, flicking bits of sodden bread from his arms.

  At the far end of the table, Garza sat with an astonished look on his face. Glinn was expressionless.

  "Now, let us examine the remains of the sandwich on the table," McFarlane continued as calmly as if he were giving a college lecture. "Please note that all the pieces have been flipped over. The bottom layer of bread is now on the top, the peanut butter and jelly have reversed places, and the top layer of bread is now on the bottom. It's what a meteorite does when it hits sedimentary rock: it pulverizes the layers, flips them over, and lays them back down in reversed sequence." He glanced at Rochefort. "Any further questions or comments?"

  "This is outrageous," said Rochefort, wiping his glasses with a handkerchief.

  "Sit down, please, Mr. Rochefort," said Glinn quietly. To McFarlane's surprise, Amira began to laugh: a deep, smooth laugh. "That was very good, Dr. McFarlane. Very entertaining. We need a little excitement in our meetings." She turned to Rochefort. "If you had ordered club sandwiches like I suggested, this wouldn't have happened."

  Rochefort scowled as he returned to his seat.

  "Anyway," said McFarlane, sitting back and wiping his hand with a napkin, "strata reversal means only one thing: a massive impact crater. Taken together, everything points to a meteorite strike. Now if you have a better explanation for what is down there, I'd like to hear it."

  He waited.

  "Perhaps it's an alien spaceship?" Garza asked hopefully.

  "We considered that, Manuel," Amira replied dryly.

  "And?"

  "Occam's razor. It seemed unlikely."

  Rochefort was still cleaning the peanut butter from his glasses. "Speculation is useless. Why not send a ground party to check it out, and get some better data?"

  McFarlane glanced at Glinn, who was listening with halflidded eyes. "Mr. Lloyd and I trust the data we have in hand. And he doesn't want to draw any more attention to the site than he has already. With good reason."

  Garza suddenly spoke up. "Yeah, and that brings up the second problem we need to discuss: how we're going to get whatever it is out of Chile. I believe you're familiar with that sort of—shall we say—operation?"

  More polite than calling it smuggling, McFarlane thought. Aloud, he said, "More or less."

  "And your thoughts?"

  "It's metal. It's basically an ore body. It doesn't fall under the laws of cultural patrimony. At my recommendation, Lloyd created a company that is in the process of acquiring mineral leases to the island. I suggested that we go down there as a mining operation, dig it up, and ship it home. There's nothing illegal in it—according to the lawyers."

  Amira smiled again. "But if the government of Chile realized this was the world's largest meteorite and not just some ordinary iron deposit, it might take a dim view of your operation."

  "A 'dim view' is an understatement. We might all get shot."

  "A fate you barely escaped smuggling the Atacama tektites out of the country, right?" Garza asked.

  Throughout the meeting, Garza had remained friendly, showing none of Rochefort's hostility or Amira's sardonic attitude. Still, McFarlane found himself coloring. "We took a few chances. It's part of the job."

  "So it seems." Garza laughed, turning over the sheets in his folder. "I'm amazed you'd consider going back there. This project could create an international incident."

  "Once Lloyd unveils the meteorite in his new museum," McFarlane replied, "I can guarantee you there will be an international incident."

  "The point," Glinn interjected smoothly, "is that this must be carried out in secrecy. What happens after we conclude our part of the business is up to Mr. Lloyd."

  Nobody spoke for a moment.

  "There is one other question," Glinn continued at last. "About your ex-partner, Dr. Masangkay."

  Here it comes, McFarlane thought. He steeled himself.

  "Any idea what killed him?"

  McFarlane hesitated. This was not the question he'd expected. "No idea," he said after a moment. "The body hasn't been recovered. It could well have been exposure or starvation. That climate isn't exactly hospitable."

  "But there were no medical problems? No history that might have contributed?"

  "Malnutrition as a kid. Nothing else. Or if there was, I didn't know about it. There was no mention of illness or starvation in the diary."

  McFarlane watched Glinn page through his folder. The meeting seemed to be over. "Lloyd told me to bring back an answer," he said.

  Glinn put the folder aside. "It's going to cost a million dollars."

  McFarlane was momentarily taken aback. The amount was less than he had expected. But what surprised him most was how quickly Glinn had arrived at it. "Naturally, Mr. Lloyd will have to sign off, but that seems very reasonable—"

  Glinn raised his hand. "I'm afraid you've misunderstood. It's going to cost a million dollars to determine whether we can undertake this project."

  McFarlane stared at him. "You mean it's going to cost a million dollars just for the estimate?"

  "Actually, it's worse than that," Glinn said. "We might come back and tell you EES can't sign on at all."

  McFarlane shook his head. "Lloyd's going to love this."

  "There are many unknowns about this project, not the least of which is wh
at we're going to find when we get there. There are political problems, engineering problems, scientific problems. To analyze them, we'll need to build scale models. We'll need hours of time on a supercomputer. We'll need the confidential advice of physicists, structural engineers, international lawyers, even historians and political scientists. Mr. Lloyd's desire for speed will make things even more expensive."

  "Okay, okay. So when will we get our answer?"

  "Within seventy-two hours of our receipt of Mr. Lloyd's certified check."

  McFarlane licked his lips. It was beginning to occur to him that he himself was being underpaid. "And what if the answer's no?" he asked.

  "Then Lloyd will at least have the consolation of knowing the project is impossible. If there's a way to retrieve that meteorite, we'll find it."

  "Have you ever said no to anyone?"

  "Often."

  "Oh, really? Like when?"

  Glinn coughed slightly. "Just last month a certain eastern European country wanted us to entomb a defunct nuclear reactor in concrete and move it across an international border, undetected, for a neighboring country to deal with."

  "You're joking," said McFarlane.

  "Not at all," said Glinn. "We had to turn them down, of course."

  "Their budget was insufficient," said Garza.

  McFarlane shook his head and snapped his portfolio shut. "If you show me to a phone, I'll relay your offer to Lloyd."

  Glinn nodded to Garza, who stood up. "Come this way, please, Dr. McFarlane," said Garza, holding open the door.

  As the door hissed shut, Rochefort let out another sigh of irritation. "We don't really have to work with him, do we?" He flicked a clot of purple jelly from his lab coat. "He's not a scientist, he's a scavenger."

  "He has a doctorate in planetary geology," said Glinn.

  "That degree died long ago from neglect. But I'm not just talking about the man's ethics, what he did to his partner. Look at this." He gestured at his shirt. "The man's a loose cannon. He's unpredictable."

  "There is no such thing as an unpredictable person," Glinn replied. "Only a person we don't understand." He gazed at the mess on his fifty-thousand-dollar Accawood table. "Naturally, we'll make it our business to understand everything about Dr. McFarlane. Rachel?"

  She turned to him.

  "I'm going to give you a very special assignment." Amira flashed another sardonic smile at Rochefort. "Of course," she said.

  "You're going to be Dr. McFarlane's assistant."

  There was a sudden silence as the smile disappeared from Amira's face.

  Glinn went on smoothly, without giving her time to react. "You will keep an eye on him. You will prepare regular reports on him and give them to me."

  "I'm no damn shrink!" Amira exploded. "And I'm sure as hell no rat!"

  Now it was Rochefort whose face was mottled with an expression that might have passed for amusement, if it had not been so laced with ill will.

  "Your reports will be strictly observational," Glinn said. "They will be thoroughly evaluated by a psychiatrist. Rachel, you're a shrewd analyst, of human beings as well as mathematics. You will, of course, be an assistant in name only. As for your being a rat, that's entirely incorrect. You know Dr. McFarlane has a checkered past. He will be the only one on this expedition not of our choosing. We must keep a close watch on him."

  "Does that give me license to spy on him?"

  "Say I hadn't asked you to do this. If you were to catch him doing anything that might compromise the expedition, you'd have told me without a second thought. All I'm asking you to do is formalize the process a little."

  Amira flushed and was silent.

  Glinn gathered up his papers, and they swiftly disappeared into the folds of his suit. "All this may be moot if the project turns out to be impossible. There's one little thing I have to look into first."

  8: Lloyd Museum

  June 7, 3:15 P.M.

  MCFARLANE PACED his office in the museum's brand-new administration building, moving restlessly from wall to wall like a caged animal. The large space was half filled with unopened boxes, and the top of his desk was littered with blueprints, memos, charts, and printouts. He had only bothered to tear the plastic wrap off a single chair. The rest of the furniture remained shrink-wrapped, and the office smelled raw with new carpeting and fresh paint. Outside the windows, construction continued at a frantic pace. It was unsettling to see so much money being spent so quickly. But if anyone could afford it, he supposed Lloyd could. The diversified companies that made up Lloyd Holdings—aero-space engineering, defense contracting, supercomputer development, electronic data systems—brought in enough revenue to make the man one of the two or three richest in the world.

  Forcing himself to sit down, McFarlane shoved the papers aside to clear a space, opened the bottom desk drawer, and pulled out Masangkay's moldy diary. Just seeing the Tagalog words on paper had brought back a host of memories, almost all of them bittersweet, faded, like old sepia-toned photographs.

  He opened the cover, turned the pages, and gazed again at the strange, crabbed script of the final entry. Masangkay had been a poor diary keeper. Exactly how many hours or days passed between this entry and his death was impossible to know.

  Nakaupo ako at nagpapausok para umalis ang mga lintik na lamok. Akala ko masama na ang South Greenland, mas grabe pala dito sa Isla Desolación...

  McFarlane glanced down at the translation he had written out for Lloyd:

  I am sitting by my fire, in the smoke, trying to keep the damned mosquitoes at bay. And I thought South Greenland was bad. Isla Desolación: good name. I always wondered what the end of the world looked like. Now I know.

  It looks promising: the reversed strata, the bizarre vulcanism, the satellite anomalies. It all meshes with the Yaghan legends. But it doesn't make sense. It must have come in damn fast, maybe even too fast for an elliptical orbit. I keep thinking about McFarlane's crazy theory. Christ, I find myself almost wishing the old bastard were here to see this. But if he was here, no doubt he'd find some way to screw things up.

  Tomorrow, I'll start the quantitative survey of the valley. If it's there, even deep, I'll find it. It all depends on tomorrow.

  And that was it. He had died, all alone, in one of the remotest places on earth.

  McFarlane leaned back in his chair. McFarlane's crazy theory... The truth was, walang kabalbalan didn't precisely translate as "crazy"—it meant something a lot more unflattering—but Lloyd didn't need to know everything.

  But that was beside the point. The point was, his own theory had been crazy. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, he wondered why he had held on to it so tenaciously, for so long, and at such a terrible price.

  All known meteorites came from inside the solar system. His theory of interstellar meteorites—meteorites that originated outside, from other star systems—appeared ridiculous in hindsight. To think that a rock could wander across the vastness of the space between the stars and just happen to land on Earth. Mathematicians always said the probabilities were on the order of a quintillion to one. So why hadn't he left it at that? His idea that someday someone—preferably himself—would find an interstellar meteorite had been fanciful, ridiculous, even arrogant. And what was more to the point, it had twisted his judgment and, ultimately, messed up his life almost beyond redemption.

  How strange it was to see Masangkay bringing up the theory now in his journal. The reversed strata were to be expected. What was it that didn't make sense to him? What had been so puzzling?

  He closed the diary and stood up, returning to the window. He remembered Masangkay's round face, the thick, scruffy black hair, the sarcastic grin, the eyes dancing with humor, vivacity, and intelligence. He remembered that last day outside the New York Museum—bright sunlight gilding everything to a painful brilliance—where Masangkay had come rushing down the steps, glasses askew, shouting, "Sam! They've given us the green light! We're on our way to Greenland!" And—more painfully—he remembered that nig
ht after they actually found the Tornarssuk meteorite, Masangkay tilting the precious bottle of whiskey up, the firelight flickering in its amber depths as he took a long drink, his back against the dark metal. God, the hangover the next day... But they had found it—sitting right there, as if someone had carefully placed it on the gravel for all to see. Over the years, they had found many meteorites together, but nothing like this. It had come in at an acute angle and had actually bounced off the ice sheet, tumbling for miles. It was a beautiful siderite, shaped like a sea horse...

  And now it sat in some Tokyo businessman's backyard garden. It had cost him his relationship with Masangkay. And his reputation.

  He stared out the window, returning to the present. Above the leafy maples and white oaks a structure was rising, incomprehensibly out of place in the upper Hudson Valley: an ancient, sun-weathered Egyptian pyramid. As he watched, a crane swung another block of limestone above the treetops and began lowering it gently onto the half-built structure. A finger of sand trailed off the block and feathered away into the wind. In the clearing at the base of the pyramid he could see Lloyd himself, oversized safari hat dappled by the leafy shade. The man had a weakness for melodramatic headgear.

  There was a knock on the door and Glinn entered, a folder beneath one arm. He glided his way among the boxes to McFarlane's side and gazed at the scene below.

  "Did Lloyd acquire a mummy to accessorize it?" he asked.

  McFarlane grunted a laugh. "As a matter of fact, he did. Not the original—that was looted long ago—but another one. Some poor soul who had no idea he'd be spending eternity in the Hudson River Valley. Lloyd is having some of King Tut's golden treasures replicated for the burial chamber. Couldn't buy the originals, apparently."

  "Even thirty billion has its limits," said Glinn. He nodded out the window. "Shall we?"

  They left the building, descending a graveled path into the woods. Cicadas droned in the canopy over their heads. They soon struck the sandy clearing. Here the pyramid rose directly above them, stark yellow against the cerulean sky. The half-built structure gave off a smell of ancient dust and limitless desert wastes.