Terminal Freeze

28

“I got your message,” Marshall said as he stepped into Faraday’s lab and closed the door behind him. “You’ve found something?”

Faraday glanced up at Marshall, then at Chen, then back at Marshall. The biologist’s eyes looked wide and anxious behind the round tortoiseshell frames. But this in itself didn’t disturb Marshall -Faraday wore a nervous look on even the best of days.

“It’s more an interesting succession of facts than a hard theory,” Faraday said. He was standing behind-almost hiding behind, it seemed-a bewildering array of test tubes and lab equipment.

“Not a problem.”

“I can’t corroborate any of it. Not from here, anyway.”

Marshall crossed one arm over the other. “I won’t tell the NMU board of regents if you won’t.”

“And I warn you that Sully’s going to-”

Marshall sighed in exasperation. “Just let me hear it.”

One last hesitation. “Okay.” Faraday cleared his throat, straightened the soup-stained tie he insisted on wearing under the lab coat. “I think I understand. About the melting in the vault, I mean.”

Marshall waited.

“I told you we went back up to get more ice samples from the cave. Well, we’ve been examining them with X-ray diffraction. And they’re very unusual.”

“Unusual how?”

“The crystalline structure is all wrong. For normally occurring precipitant ice, I mean.”

Marshall leaned against a lab table. “Go on.”

“You know how there are many different kinds of ice, right? I mean, other varieties beyond the kind we put in our lemonade or chop off our car windows.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “There’s ice-two, ice-three, five, six, seven, and so forth, up to ice-fourteen-each with its own crystalline structure, its own physical properties.”

“I remember something about that in my graduate-level physics course. It takes great pressure or extreme temperatures for the solid-state transformation to take place.”

“That’s right. But the really unusual thing about some of these types of ice is that-once they’ve formed-they can remain solid well above the freezing mark.” He handed Marshall a sheet of paper through the forest of test tubes. “Look. Here’s the structure diagram for ice-seven. Look at its unit cell. Under sufficient pressure, this form of ice can remain in solid form up to two hundred degrees centigrade.”

Marshall whistled. “That hot? We could have used that kind of ice in the vault yesterday.”

“But here’s the thing,” Faraday went on. “I read an article in Nature last month describing another type of ice that could theoretically exist: ice-fifteen. Ice that has just the opposite qualities.”

“You mean…” Marshall paused. “You mean, ice that would melt below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit?”

Faraday nodded.

“The key word is ‘theoretically,’” Chen added.

“And the unusual crystalline structure of this melted cave ice-does it match ice-fifteen?”

“There’s no way to be sure,” Faraday said. “But it may well.”

Marshall pushed away from the lab table, paced back and forth. “So possibly-just possibly-that ice melted on its own.”

“They were slowly raising the temperature overnight,” Faraday said. “And in all the commotion of finding their prize missing, nobody bothered to check the temperature in the vault. To verify it was actually above freezing inside.”

“That’s right.” Marshall stopped. “Nobody would have thought it necessary. They just left the door wide open and went off searching.”

“Allowing the temperature inside the vault to quickly return to the ambient level,” said Chen.

“So there might have been no saboteur at all,” Marshall said. “The thawing process was proceeding properly. It’s the ice itself that was the culprit.”

Faraday nodded.

“How would this unusual ice have formed?” Marshall asked.

“Therein lies the rub,” said Chen.

A brief silence settled over the lab.

“That’s a very interesting speculation,” said Marshall. “But even if you’re right, and there was no thief, no saboteur, the question remains: What happened to the cat?”

No sooner had he asked the question than he saw Faraday’s nervous expression deepen. “No, don’t tell me,” he went on. “Let me guess. It let itself out.”

“You saw my photographs of the vault flooring. Those marks were of something getting out, not in. And they weren’t saw marks, either.”

“True. They didn’t look like saw marks. But they didn’t look like cat claws, either. They were much too powerful for-” Marshall stopped abruptly. “Wait a minute. It’s a very clever theory, ice melting below freezing and all. But there’s an enormous problem. In order for the cat to break free of the remaining ice, to tear its way out of the vault, it would have to be alive. But it’s been dead for thousands of years.”

“That’s the problem we were discussing the last time you came in here,” Faraday said. “I’ve got an answer for that, too-again, a theoretical one.”

Marshall glanced at him. “Ice crystals would have formed in the cells as the animal froze. It would be fatal.”

“Maybe. Or maybe not. At an evolutionary biology conference in Berkeley last year, I listened to a lecture on the Beresovka mammoth.”

“Haven’t heard of it.”

“It was a woolly mammoth, found in Siberia in the early part of the twentieth century. Frozen solid, with fragments of a buttercup between its teeth.”

“And?”

“Well, the question is-how could the mammoth freeze so quickly in a spot warm enough for buttercups to bloom?”

Suddenly, Marshall understood. “A downdraft of cold air. Caused by an inversion layer.”

Faraday nodded. “Super-cold arctic air.”

“I see where you’re going. Because when your mammoth froze, it must have been summer, based on the buttercup. But here-in the dead of winter-” Marshall stopped.

For a moment there was silence. Then Chen continued. “Flash-freezing.”

“Terminal freeze,” added Faraday.

“And the faster it froze-if, say, high winds were involved-the smaller the ice crystals that would form in its cells. If it happened quickly enough, the creature could conceivably be frozen alive.” Marshall looked at them. “Do you suppose this terminal freeze could be reversed?”

Faraday blinked. “Reversed how?”

“If there could be a sudden downdraft of super-cold air in summer-couldn’t there just as easily be a downdraft of super-warm air in winter?”

Faraday nodded slowly. “In theory.”

“So what if the phenomenon was reversed? Sent down remarkably warm air? Don’t you remember how tropical it felt that night before the documentary was to go live?”

Faraday nodded again.

“It must have been close to freezing.” Marshall began to pace again. “The vault freezer would have kicked in-but if your ice-fifteen was involved, it wouldn’t have mattered. It would still have been close enough to freezing to cause a massive thaw.” He hesitated. “When you went back to get those ice samples in the cave, did the ice around the excavation site show any signs of melting?”

“No.”

“But it’s colder up there, by the glacier…” Then Marshall hesitated, shook his head. “I don’t know, Wright. It’s brilliant-but it seems pretty far-fetched.”

Faraday held up the phase diagram. “The crystalline structure doesn’t lie. We performed the X-ray test on the ice ourselves.”

A brief silence settled over the lab. Marshall looked at the diagram, then quietly placed it on the table.

“If you’re right about the reversal,” Faraday said slowly, “about the heated air, then it could explain something else.”

“What?” Marshall said.

“What we saw in the sky that night.”

“You mean, the bizarre aurora borealis? You think it was a side effect?”

“A side effect,” Faraday replied. “Or a causative agent. Or, perhaps, a harbinger.”

Another silence. Faraday thought back to the old shaman’s warning: Their wrath paints the sky with blood. The heavens cry out with the pain.

“What about the blood?” he asked. “That you found caked on the vault splinters?”

“We’ve been too busy analyzing the ice to check it yet.”

Another silence fell over the lab.

“Well, you’ve been busy,” Marshall said after a moment. “But this still begs two questions. If these unusual forms of ice require great pressure, or extreme temperature, how did they form here in the first place?”

Faraday took off his glasses, polished them on his tie, replaced them. “I don’t know,” he replied.

The three of them looked at one another a moment. “You said you had two questions,” said Chen.

“Yes. If your speculations are right, and the creature is still alive-and on the loose-where is it now?”

The question hung in the air. And this time the lab remained silent.