Cold War

NINE

Marked against the sun’s 4.5 billion years of existence, the coming event was nothing truly anomalous, but a result of the natural interplay between its atmospheric and orbital processes.

A body of seething gas and plasma, the solar sphere does not rotate on its axis in the same coherent way as the solid globe we inhabit. Rather, its rotation is fluid, the radiative and convective zones that compose its outer layers — and 85 percent of its radius — turning faster at the equator than at its poles. This causes its lines of magnetic force, which run longitudinally from positive north to negative south, to stretch and twist.

The phenomenon is easily understood with this model:

Imagine a ball sliced into three crosswise sections. Now imagine rubber bands attached to it, top to bottom, with pins inserted into each section. Give the middle slice of the ball a faster spin than the others, and the rubber bands are stretched along with its movement. Continue spinning it faster and the rubber bands coil tightly around the ball, eventually tangling and kinking up in places… assuming they have sufficient elasticity not to snap first.

As the sun turns in its differential rotation, the lines of force running through its gaseous outer layers stretch and intertwine until they develop similar kinks — wide, swirling magnetic fields that most often occur in leader-follower pairs that are bonded by their opposite polarities and drift across the surface in unison with smaller fields strung out between them like ships in a flotilla. Attenuated lines of force bulge up from the positively charged leader fields, and are pulled back to the negative followers, forming closed bipolar loops that reach many thousands of miles outward toward the sun’s corona. Pressure exerted on the solar atmosphere by the intense magnetic fields dampens the upward flow of hot gas from the interior. The regions covered by the fields are, therefore, about two thousand degrees cooler than those surrounding them and appear as dark blemishes to observers on earth.

These we call sunspots, and their number rises from minimum to maximum levels in eleven-to-twelve-year cycles. A typical sunspot grows in size over a period of days or sometimes months, and then shrinks after the cycle peaks and the bands of magnetic force unwind. A spot moving across the sun as it rotates on its axis will take twenty-seven days to complete a journey around the equator and thirty-five days to circle the upper and lower hemispheres.

Like rubber bands, the lines of force extending upward from sunspots do occasionally snap. This happens when they stretch past a critical height 250,000 miles above the surface of the sun and break through its corona, releasing their stored energy in a fiery maelstrom of subatomic particles that lashes into outer space and goes sweeping across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

We call these solar flares, and their emissions will bombard Earth within days if angled toward it. Major flares have been known to cover eighty thousand square miles of the sun — an area ten times larger than our planet — and equal millions of hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb blasts in strength, triggering worldwide disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field. They cannot be forecast with absolute certainty, though any significant increase of sunspot activity is considered to be a possible indicator of solar flares in generation.

On the third day of March, during a peak in the sunspot cycle, a group of frecklelike spots that seemed the very definition of unremarkable to astronomers who routinely track them moved to the far side of the sun in their orbital course. There over the next two weeks, beyond the range of visual observation, they began to enlarge, multiply, and align in long, close-grouped strings. By the twelfth of the month the spots had become highly asymmetric; their heavy concentration resembled a spreading, blotchy rash on the hidden face of the sun. The escalated growth and proliferation would continue for several days to come.

Again, in the long view, this outbreak was a blip. A millennial tickle in the life of the sun.

Nothing extraordinary.

As the time line of human history goes, it was without documented scientific precedent.

Later, debate would arise over a suggestion by some scholars that the last comparable episode occurred in the summer of 480 B.C., a year for which Chinese, Korean, Babylonian, Celtic, and Mesoamerican records — including glyph-dated early Mayan stelae — present what has been interpreted as correlative evidence of rapidly changing sunspot patterns, and brilliant, tempestuous displays of the northern and southern lights many thousands of miles from the poles. That is the same summer King Leonidas I and his three hundred Spartan warriors made their heroic resistance against thousands of invading Persians at the Hot Gates, a narrow mountain pass between the Aegean coast and central Greece, only to be undone by a local betrayer, who showed the Persian force a route that led them over the mountains to a rear assault upon the defenders, killing them almost to a man.

A coincidence? Likely so. Although the oracle Leonidas consulted before deciding to hold the pass is said to have been influenced by his interpretation of some obscure cosmic portent.

Such speculation aside, it remains doubtful that a magnetic storm of even the greatest severity would have had a consequential impact on affairs in Greece or elsewhere in that ancient era.

This was, after all, many centuries before civilization became dependent on the telecommunications networks and electrical power grids that would be thrown into utter chaos by its shock waves.

In more than one sense, Pete Nimec’s trip to the hallway rest room was another step up the learning curve he’d foreseen at McMurdo.

Nimec supposed it was partly his own fault. The three or four cups of coffee he’d drunk in Willy’s passenger lounge had worked their way through him soon after the Herc was off-deck, but a peek behind the shower curtain enclosing its cargo section’s makeshift latrine — a fifty-five-gallon steel drum with an attached funnel for a urinal, and a loathsome, sloshing plastic honey bucket — persuaded him to try to hold out until after he reached Cold Corners. And he’d succeeded, asking Megan to show him where he could make a pit stop on the way to her office.

Inside the unisex rest room’s single stall, Nimec had found tugging himself out from under his boxers, long johns, flannel-lined blue jeans, and various overlapped shirts an uncomfortable exercise in patience and control. But he managed to get his business done without embarrassment.

Now he filled the sink, soaped his hands under the automatic dispenser, and washed them in the plugged basin, complying with a sign above the sink that said its taps weren’t to be left running while you cleaned up. Nimec was about to splash his face with some fresh, cold water when he read the second item on the extensive list of dos and don’ts, and discovered the limit was one basinful per person. So much for that.

He dried his hands with a paper towel, tossed it in the trash receptacle, went to the door. A coin-operated condom machine was on the wall beside it. He paused and checked the sign. Unsurprisingly, the machine’s contents weren’t rationed.

Nimec emerged from the rest room. A small group of men and women looked askance at him as they walked past. Puzzled, he turned to where Megan was waiting for him down the hall.

He asked her about the plainly disagreeable glances once the two of them were seated in her office.

“I followed the rules,” he said, making the Scout’s-honor sign with his right hand. “Not that I can see how they’d know if I didn’t.”

She regarded him with amusement from across her desk.

“That bunch was mostly OAEs,” she said.

He pulled a face. “Mostly what?”

“Old Antarctic Explorers… longtimers on the ice,” she said. “Sorry. The lingo here gets contagious after a while.”

“And exactly how’s that supposed to have something to do with their attitude?”

“Isolation breeds a clannish mentality. The crew can be prickly toward outsiders. Or perceived outsiders. Their consumption of water is one of the things that raises spines.”

“Gracious,” Nimec said. “I hope they’re better hosts to those politicos who’re due for a visit.”

Megan Breen smiled her smile. It was always real. And always measured. Over the years Nimec had found that people either got the combination or they didn’t. The ones who did were usually charmed to helplessness. The ones who didn’t thought her calculating and manipulative. In the predominantly male world in which she functioned as Roger Gordian’s next-in-line, the split was close to even.

He got the smile completely.

“Our desalinization plant turns out fifteen thousand gallons of usable water on a good day,” she said. “That’s for cooking, cleaning, machine and vehicle use, hydroponics… the whole show. I know that may sound like a considerable amount, Pete. But it takes two gallons to wash your hands under a running tap, as opposed to one gallon washing in a filled basin. I could rattle off the comparative stats for high-versus-low-efficiency showers—”

“And toilets, I’m sure,” he said.

“One and a half gallons for ultra-low flush. Three to five for standard models.”

“You had that notice posted, didn’t you?”

“Worded it myself.”

“Then I won’t beat the issue of my lousy reception to death.”

They were both smiling now.

“Just wait till we get you a name patch,” she said. “When those malcontents find out who they offended, they’ll want to go scampering under a rug.”

Nimec sat a moment, glancing around the office. It was a small, well-ordered cubicle with bluish soundproof paneling and recessed overhead fluorescents. No windows. No decorative touches to enliven it. Two big maps covered nearly the entire wall to Megan’s right. One was a satellite image of the Antarctic continent. Shaped like a giant manta ray. The other showed the rugged topography of the Dry Valleys. There were three colored pins — red, yellow, blue — marking different points in the latter.

Nimec turned back to Megan. The last time he’d seen her, she had been the embodiment of corporate chic, letting the world know she was playing to win with a pricey designer suit and a smart wedge-cut hairstyle that just brushed the tops of her shoulders. Now her hair went tumbling loosely down over bib overalls and a maroon twill shirt, framing her face with thick auburn waves, highlighting her large emerald eyes like the deepest of sunsets over a wood of Irish pines. Nimec supposed she could dress herself in sackcloth and still be as lovely as ever.

He sat there a while, looking at her. He could think of a dozen matters they had to discuss, every one of them pressing, every one relating to the incidents that had brought him so far from home. But he was uncertain how to approach the subject he really wanted to talk about first.

“So,” he said. “How’ve you been?”

She shrugged, her hands on the desk.

“Cold,” she said. “And generally busy.”

“How about when you aren’t busy?”

“Cold and lonely.”

Nimec gave her a little nod. There had been photographs in her San Jose office. Vases with fresh flowers from the shop down the street. And abundant sunlight.

“I hear people come to Antarctica to find themselves,” he said. “Or reinvent themselves. It’s being away from everything they know. And the emptiness. I suppose they must feel like they’re filling it in. Writing their lives over on a blank page.”

Megan shrugged again.

“That may be true for some,” she said.

“And you?”

She paused a beat, but otherwise did a good job of seeming unaffected by the question.

“There’s no place else like this on earth. It’s magnificent. Beautiful in its way. It gives you the room and time to contemplate. But I’m doing this because Gord needed me here to get our operations off the ground.”

“So if not for his asking you to stay…”

“I’d scoot back to California like a kitten jumping onto a warm lap,” she replied, looking directly at him. No hesitation this time.

Nimec considered asking her what was actually on his mind. Instead he decided to change the topic. He cocked his head toward the map of the Dry Valleys.

“I figure those pins have got something to do with the missing search team,” he said.

“You figure right, Pete.” Meg swiveled in her chair, faced the map, and pointed. “The yellow one shows where they struck camp. It’s where McKelvey Valley crosses the northern mouth of Bull Pass. See?”

He nodded.

“The red pin would be about four miles from the camp-site, straight down into the pass,” she said. “That’s where they were last sighted.”

“By whom?”

“A chopper pilot named Russ Granger. He’s been at McMurdo forever, makes regular air runs to its research bases in the valley system.”

“He have any contact with the team?”

“No,” she said, and then thought a moment. “Well, let me revise that. They did exchange hellos. But it was just a fluke that Russ passed over Scarborough and the others at all.” She paused. “He says they seemed perfectly fine to him.”

“When would that have been? The time of day, I mean.”

“Ordinarily we’d be entering vague territory. But I think I know where you’re heading, so let me put my answer in context,” she said. “Time measurement becomes almost arbitrary when the whole year’s roughly divided into six months of daylight, and six months of darkness. Most stations set their clocks to match up with a time zone in their home countries for ease of communications… though that can lead to chaos when they have to make arrangements with other bases. Here at Cold Corners we’ve opted for Greenwich time simply because that’s what they use at MacTown, and there’s considerable interaction between us.”

“Then whatever time it was for Scarborough’s group would’ve corresponded with the pilot’s.”

“Yes,” Megan said. “Russ was heading to Marble Point.” She gestured toward its position on the Dry Valleys map. “That’s a little refueling facility at the foot of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier, about fifty miles northwest of McMurdo. He’d made the first two stops of his shift, and thinks it was about seven A.M. when he saw our party.”

“And your best guess about how long they’d been out on foot…?”

“Two hours at most. The area they covered had some tedious rocky patches, but Scarborough would have left camp early.”

“Old military habit?”

She nodded. “He isn’t the type to waste a minute.”

Nimec contemplated that, peering at the map.

“They were just getting started,” he said.

“Yes.”

“What about after the pilot saw them that morning? They report in to Cold Corners at any point?”

Meg was shaking her head now.

“That would have been largely at their discretion. Of course we’d have expected to hear from them if they located the rover. Obviously if they needed assistance. But we never received a Mayday. It’s the part that drives me crazy, Pete… trying to understand why Scar wouldn’t have let us know he was in trouble.”

“Had me and the boss wondering too.” Nimec rubbed his chin. “Any chance I could talk to the pilot myself?”

“It should be easy to arrange. Russ drops by to help us often enough.”

Nimec nodded, pleased. He was still looking at the map.

“I assume the blue pin marks the spot where Scout’s transmissions zilched.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s at the opposite end of the pass from our recovery team’s camp. A span of twelve miles.”

“How come they didn’t pitch their tents closer to it?”

“The only way into the valleys is by chopper, and landing one in Bull Pass is a dangerous proposition. It’s narrow in places, and winds are fickle. That leaves us having to choose between drop zones at McKelvey to the north and Wright to the south. And the approach from Wright Valley on foot is full of obstacles. There are ridges, hills, all kinds of steep elevations.”

Nimec was silent, thinking. Then he turned from the wall map to look at Megan.

“How soon can you have a helicopter ready so I can check out the area for myself?”

She faced him across the desk, a wan smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“What’s on your mind?” he said.

“Pete, if anybody else had spoken those words, I’d be positive he was kidding. You arrived less than an hour ago. Get some food into your stomach. Rest up. Then we can start to talk about making plans.”

“I caught a few winks on the plane,” he said.

She pursed her lips. The smile did not quite leave them.

“How about we strike a compromise,” she said. “Grab a bite together in the cafeteria.”

“I’m not hungry—”

“Today’s special is a hot turkey breast sandwich on homemade club. You won’t believe our greenhouse tomatoes. And the coffee. We have a selection of lattes and mochas. Cappuccino too. And espresso. Also four or five blends of ordinary roast if your taste leans toward the pedestrian side.”

He looked at her.

“Lattes in Antarctica,” he said.

She nodded. “This is an UpLink base. Moreover, it’s my base. And despite these ghastly earth-mother clothes, I’m still Megan Breen.”

Nimec suddenly couldn’t help but crack a smile of his own.

“Okay, princess,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

The satellite glided through deep space like a solitary night bird, its keen electronic sensors picking up signs of the coming storm as they were swept toward it on the solar wind.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory — or SOHO — was a joint space probe conceived by NASA and the European Space Agency in the 1990’s for gathering a wealth of scientific information about the sun and its atmospheric emissions. In early March 1996, fourteen months after its liftoff from Cape Canaveral aboard the upper stage of an Atlas IIAS (Atlas/Centaur) launch vehicle, the satellite was injected into a counterclockwise halo orbit around the sun at what is known as the L1 Lagrangian point — named after the eighteenth-century French astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who theorized there were calculable distances at which a small object in space could remain in fixed orbital positions between two larger bodies exerting strong gravitational pulls upon it.

The mathematical formulations must be precise. Should an object in the middle of this interplanetary tug of war wander from its position by more than a few degrees, the delicate equilibrium becomes upset and its orbit will rapidly degrade.

In SOHO’s case the L1 point equaled four times the distance from our world to the moon, with any significant deviation from that point certain to result in an uncontrolled plunge toward either the earth or sun. One complication the observatory’s development team had to address, however, was that their preferred orbital position for SOHO was slightly off the L1 point, since the radio interference that would occur when it was in direct line between the two opposing spheres was bound to corrupt its data transmissions with static. A second problem was that other bodies in the solar system — distant planets, moons, asteroids — had their own weaker attractions that could jiggle SOHO’s path a little bit this way or that to ultimately disastrous effect.

The team’s solution to both these problems was to equip SOHO with an onboard propulsion system for periodic orbital adjustments, knowing this imposed an inherent limitation on its mission life. For once it exhausted the hydrazine fuel that powered its thrusters, SOHO would slip from its desired Lagrangian station and go tumbling off through space beyond recovery.

Original projections were that the billion-dollar spacecraft would be able to conduct its observations and experiments for from two to five years before the propellent reserves went dry and its mission reached an end.

Six years later and counting, it was still plugging away.

Some things are still built to last, and every so often they last longer than expected.

In March 2002, SOHO’s SWAN and MDI/SOI instruments, two of a dozen scientific devices in its payload module, sniffed the astrophysical equivalent of what American prairie farmers once would have called a locust wind.

An acronym for Solar Wind Anisotropies, SWAN is an ultraviolet survey of the dispersed hydrogen cloud around our planetary system that can detect glowing hot spots in space caused by fluctuations of solar radiation. To the SWAN’s wide-angle eye, which charts the full sky around the sun three times each week, a surge in the emissions striking these areas will cause them to light up like flashes from warning beacons even if the surge originates beyond the sun’s visible face, outside the range of earthbound telescopes.

MDI/SOI — short for Michelson Doppler Imager/Solar Oscillations Investigation — is more direct in its approach, measuring wave motions that vibrate through the convective layer of the sun. Depending on their amplitude, deviations from the wavelengths commonly registered by MDI/ SOI can put scientists on the lookout for helioseismological events that are roughly analogous to earthquakes and may be indicators of impending solar flare activity.

Relayed to earth by its telemetry arrays in near-real time, SOHO’s information about the flurry of concurrent beacon flashes and solar tremors did not take long to create a stir of excitement in its command-and-control center in Maryland.

Two men in particular got the headline-making jump on the rest of the pack.

Nimec ate the last bit of his turkey sandwich and set the empty plate onto a cafeteria tray beside him. Then he lifted his demitasse off the table and sipped.

“Well?” Megan said. “I await your verdict.”

“Mmm-mm,” he said.

“I may be a princess,” she said. “But I’m known for my benevolence, truthfulness, and good taste.”

He grunted. “About arranging for that helicopter…”

She made a preemptive gesture. “After we’ve had our coffee.”

He sat with the steaming espresso in his hand, watching her drink from her cup. It contained a double something-or-other with caffeine, flavored syrup, and a light head of froth.

Several minutes passed in silence that way.

“Okay, Pete,” she said at last, dabbing her upper lip with a napkin. “The chopper aside, what’s on your mind?”

“That line sounds very familiar,” he said.

She nodded. “It does. It also got a straight answer out of me.”

He looked at her without comment.

“Come on,” she said. “I didn’t miss your backpacker’s travel guide remarks about hearing how people find spiritual cleansing, harmony, and oneness among the king penguins. Or your question about whether I’ve joined that righteous crowd. Or most of all your long looks. Something’s bothering you. I think we should get it out in the open.”

Nimec kept looking at her, then finally expelled a breath.

“You told me you came to Antarctica because the boss asked,” he said. “Or at least you implied that. But I hear you volunteered.”

Megan lowered her cup into its saucer, waited as someone came moving past on his way from the service counter to another table.

“It seems you’ve been hearing a lot of things,” she said when he’d gone.

“Not from you,” he said. “That’s the problem. We never consulted about your reassignment.”

“You’re being unfair. I let you know a month beforehand.”

“After the decision was already made.”

“Pete—”

“I’d just like you to tell me why I wasn’t advised sooner,” he said. “All the years we’ve worked together, depended on each other, you never left me hanging. And then you did.”

“Pete, I’m sorry. Honestly. I didn’t realize that was how you felt.”

“Then tell me. Straight answer.”

Their eyes met. And held.

“It’s sort of complicated,” she said. “Gord wanting me here is the truth, but he’s the one to give you his reasons. As for myself, there were personal issues.”

“They involve Bob Lang?”

“Yes,” she said. “I preferred not to share them at the time.”

He nodded. Their eyes remained locked.

“And now?”

“I’d still rather not.”

“You change your mind, I’ll be ready to listen.”

“I know, Pete,” she said. “And thank you.”

He nodded again and sat there quietly finishing his espresso.

She reached out, touched his arm.

“Are we okay, Pete? Settled, I mean.”

“Settled.”

They were silent another minute, her hand still on his arm, squeezing it gently.

“All right,” he said then. “Coffee’s done. We should discuss the helicopter.”

She nodded, reached down into the kangaroo pocket of her bib-alls, and extracted a connected Palm computer.

“All the luxuries of home,” he commented.

Megan slipped the computer’s stylus out of its silo and tapped its “on” button.

“We try to be with it,” she said with a shrug. “Now hush, I need to jot out an e-mail. We’re presently short-handed as far as pilots go, but I’ll explain that later. Meanwhile, I think I’ve figured out how to kill two birds with one electronic stone.”

The men were known as Ketchup and Fries.

These were of course not their given names.

Ketchup was really Jonathan Ketchum, a sixty-year-old project scientist at the Experimenters’ Operations Facility in Goddard’s Building 26, the operational nucleus of the SOHO project. He had been with the EOF’s permanent MDI/SOI team since its establishment in the mid-nineties, and was considered one of its top men by the principal investigator.

Fries was Richard Frye, another member of the MDI/ SOI team. At twenty-six, he was its most recent addition, regarded as a babe in the woods by senior group members. This is the embedded reflex of those with tenure who are protective of their own status. Ketchum saw in Frye an inquisitiveness and joy of discovery that was like a bright reflection of himself as a young man. He knew Frye was already a better scientist than most, and had potential to be the best by far.

Ketchum had taken Frye under his wing from the start of the young man’s NASA employment, but their student-mentor relationship soon grew into an intellectually stimulating bond of equals. Ketchum imparted a maturity of understanding to Frye; Frye helped recharge Ketchum’s sense of wonderment daily.

Together they had become a team within a team.

Ketchup and Fries.

Nobody could say with any certainty who had cooked up the nickname. Because its ingredients included a heaping measure of disparagement, and perhaps a pinch of envy, credit went unclaimed and unassigned.

In the beginning they found the label vexatious. Eventually, however, they came to bear it with a certain defiant fondness. At some point their feelings became almost proprietary. Ketchup. Fries. What would one be without the other?

Besides, just look at the crap the visiting observers regularly threw at them.

The Auslanders, as they’d been tagged (again without attribution), were a group of scientists from institutions in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.K., and a handful of other European Space Agency nations who had either contributed to the design and construction of SOHO’s gadgetry or were involved in studying its returns. All SOHO’s participants could retrieve this information from an archived, indexed, easily searchable electronic database without ever leaving their respective countries, but guest committees from abroad would sometimes show up at Goddard during research campaigns that engaged several of the observatory’s instruments at once.

Ostensibly their motivation was pure and unselfish, springing from a desire to help foster a spirit of international collaboration and share in the immediacy and excitement of these campaigns. The real, dirty scrub was that the Web curators of “collaborating” institutions often delayed inputting e-base updates about major discoveries, while their employers raced to contact news organizations and grab the glory — and subsequent funding windfalls — for themselves. It was a good bet that every principal investigator had a number that would provide fast access to a local CNN bureau chief programmed into his phone’s memory.

A joint operation to examine the current cyclical peak of sunspot activity had been under way for over two years now without the EOF group’s foreign colleagues showing any inclination whatsoever to pay them a house call. Then, lo and behold, with the recent evidence from SWAN and MDI/SOI that the sun had developed an acute case of the measles on its far side, they had come pouring into Goddard from astrophysics labs around the world, arriving with effervescent camaraderie, bon jour, gutten tag, and cheerio. And though the NASA scientists did acknowledge that both solar observation devices primarily responsible for the new findings were European in origin, they were resentfully convinced their co-investigators — a.k.a. unwanted party crashers, a.k.a. the Auslanders — were pushing and bumping their way through the door for one reason, and one alone: to make sure nobody at NASA beat them to the flash-dial button.

Today Frye had made it his godly mission to get to the EOF well ahead of the polyglot horde, and was probably at his workstation hours before they had begun to yawn, blink, and stretch through their morning wake-up routines. He himself had been unable to catch any sleep after bringing home printouts of the previous evening’s final MDI/ SOI data logs, and using them as the basis for an intricate series of equations prepared with what remained his three favorite computational tools — a #3 pencil, a legal pad, and his own scrupulously logical brain. All the observables told him that the sun’s helioseismologic agitation had increased by tremendous — in fact, nearly exponential — leaps and bounds in the last twenty-four hour period, and he’d been eager to do two things: check the overnight logs for further changes, and see how his data and math jibed with the latest information from SWAN, whose nonresident Auslander monitoring area just happened to be on the other side of a glass partition from his own true-blue resident project scientist area… and, well, well, wouldn’t you know, it also just happened to be unoccupied at that early hour.

Now he sat at a bank of display terminals, pondering SWAN’s most recent full-sky maps of the sun… or more accurately, the sun’s hydrogen envelope. Each spectroscopic image had been composed over a regular three-day interval, and was color-graded to profile the radiation intensities—“hot” and “cool” spots — of different coordinates on the envelope. Because the probe was in an almost stationary position relative to earth, following its elliptical revolutions around the sun, the equatorial solar plane showed up as elongated, and each map resembled an Easter egg splashed with various shades of purple, orange, green, and yellow.

Soon Frye’s heart was pounding. He got out his cellular phone and rang his complementary half at home.

“Hello?”

“Ketch, what’re you doing?”

“Dripping shower water on my bedroom carpet at the moment,” Ketchum said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Time for you to get your ass over here to the center.”

“What’ve you turned up?” Ketchum’s tone had abruptly swung from mild annoyance to sharpest curiosity.

“Look, you remember that bullet we dodged last April… the solar flare that would’ve been all hell if it hadn’t missed Earth?”

“Of course,” Ketchum said. “The X-17…”

“Well, I think we’re about to find ourselves downstream from a roarer that’ll make our X-17 look like a cap gun popping off.”

“Are you certain you’re not overestimating—”

“This one looks like the beast, Ketch. I mean it. The fucking beast. And it’ll be charging right at us once it’s hatched.”

Ketchum took an audible breath at the other end of the line.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

“Hey, Russ, you’re back in right the nick. Got an e-mail inside from that unbelievable redhead over at Cold Corners.”

Russ Granger jumped from the Bell’s cockpit onto the helipad, his boots mashing down on thumbnail ripples of white powdery snow, a coat he figured had to be close to a foot deep. When he’d left two hours earlier to fly a sling-load of food rations out to the Lake Hoare camp in Taylor Valley, the landing area was clear, its markings visible from a good altitude. But that was how it was in this place. Sastrugi, as the wavy drifts of snow were called, formed quickly parallel to a rising wind, and it had picked up a great deal since his departure.

He looked at the parka-clad station manager. Though the sky was still showing a lot of blue, snowflakes were blowing through the air from some widely spaced cloud scuds that had come in over the ice shelf.

“Megan Breen?” Granger said.

The station manager’s hooded head bobbed up and down. “You heard me say ‘unbelievable,’ right? Should I have added the word ‘hot’?”

Granger pulled up his own fleece-trimmed hood against the stinging flurries.

“That woman’s a hundred percent business, Chuck,” he said. “Take my word for it, there’s nothing in that message to make either of us sweaty.”

Chuck Trewillen motioned to his rear. Beyond the depot’s fuel lines stood three orange Quonset huts and a couple of old dozers, their shovels heaped with snow. Beyond them was another small building that had served as Trewillen’s isolated home for the half decade he’d held his job at Marble Point. Beyond that building there was only the great sawtoothed jut of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier.

“You ought to hear the noises that glacier makes when it’s calving bergs,” Trewillen said. “It sort of pants and moans. I’m talking loud, deep moooooans.” He shrugged. “Sometimes they’re enough to get me worked up.”

Granger smiled, clapped Trewillen on the shoulder. “You’ve been out here alone way too long, man,” he said, and started toward the computer hut.

Granger paused in the entrance to the air-heated Quonset, stamped caked snow off his boots, and unzipped his jacket. Then he sat at the desktop and tapped a key to erase its screen-saver — flamingos on a tropical beach, lush palms and turquoise water in the background.

The beach scene gave way to an e-mail application’s opening window. Granger dragged and clicked to the In-box, and saw Megan Breen’s message at the top of its queue — the single new one. Its title was simply his first name in caps followed by a string of exclamation marks.

Typical Megan, he thought.

The message itself was also characteristically brief and straight to the point:

Granger fished a hard pack of Marlboros from his open jacket, put a smoke in his mouth, and fired it up with his disposable lighter. Given the extreme urgency of Megan’s request, he knew that clearing it with his bosses at McMurdo wasn’t anything to worry about.

He frowned, dragging on the cigarette.

No, it definitely wouldn’t be a problem.

The real problem was this “colleague” she’d mentioned, and the complications his arrival could bring about for the people who really padded Granger’s bankroll enough to make living in this stinking, abominable icebox worthwhile… and further down the line, the serious mess it could churn up for Granger himself.

He took another deep hit off the cig and its tip flared. It wouldn’t be much fun springing the bad news on the Consortium, but he’d have to get in touch with them, see how they wanted him to handle the situation.

Yeah, he thought. The thing was to contact Zurich directly, let the kingfish have it in front of him.

ASAP.

Nan Gorrie looked again at her watch and once more at the stove, where a fine piece of mutton sat in a soup of juice and rapidly coagulating fat. Her husband usually rang ahead the few times a year he might be late; he’d been awfully distracted this past week, and she preferred to hope that he had forgotten, rather than worrying something had happened to him. There had been a few occasions as a constable that he’d gotten into scrapes, but none that had risen to the level of what she might call actual danger. As a detective, his days ran at an even pace. His nature helped pour oil on the seas, smoothing the swells; if he felt apprehension, she had rarely known it.

But the way he’d been going lately, rising in the middle of the night, pacing and rocking, rocking and pacing… Frank Gorrie was not a pensive man — not a fool nor shallow by any means, but no brooder. Some men — James Fitz came to mind, the Irishman who lived in the next house but one — spent their time staring into space, contemplating the whys and wherefores of the universe. Frank was more a solid sort — a piece of mutton who knew what he was about, which had been a large part of their attraction.

She suspected the wee child at Eriskay had distracted him. The social worker had called him twice now to report on the infant’s progress.

She too had sympathy for the infant, but the matter went beyond that. They were well past their inability to have a child. She was. It had struck her hard but she had come to accept it, a decree from God. Artificial measures were not so commonplace fifteen years ago, and even now the idea seemed foreign.

The doorbell rang. Nan took a towel in her hands, wiping them though they weren’t wet as she walked through the front room to the door. As her hand reached the doorknob she felt her breathing grow quite sharp.

“Sorry to bother you, mum,” said a thin young man in a blue jumpsuit. He had a small box in his hand, an instrument of some sort. “Report of gas in the neighborhood.”

“Here?” she said, rubbing her hands together as her breathing relaxed.

“Trying to trace it,” he said. “Have you smelled anything?”

“Afraid not.”

“Well that’s a good thing then,” said the man, already heading next door.

The phone rang as she closed the door.

“I hadn’t realized the time, sweets,” said her husband when she picked up.

“Losh, Frank — where are ya now?”

“At the office. I have some calls to make — would you eat without me?”

“Well of course, if I’m hungry.” She glanced back at the stove.

He was quiet for a moment. Nan thought of saying something about the child, but couldn’t find the words.

“I may be here a bit,” Frank told her. “Some calls to make.”

“Well, be here by eight, would you? We have a guest coming round.”

“Not your brother, I hope — he’ll be asking for cigars.”

“Don’t you go encouraging him to smoke now.”

“Who’s the guest?”

“An American teacher. She’s been on holiday and today she came to the school to see our methods. Head-mistress brought her over. Very nice Yank.”

“You should have invited her for dinner.”

“And that would have been sweet, wouldn’t it, with you standing us up.”

Actually, she had, but the American had said she had another engagement. She had seemed charming, however. A little too enthusiastic — but that was a good fault to have when you were young.

“By eight,” she reminded her husband.

“Count on it, Sweets.”

In the red-lit room at UpLink’s satellite recording center in Glasgow, Glyn Lowry banged the space bar on his keyboard in frustration. For the past three nights, an intruder had been attempting to hack his way into one of the UpLink e-mail servers. The attempt seemed to be the work of an amateur, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t do considerable damage. Nor could it be allowed to continue. UpLink’s security programs easily kept the intruder at bay — but for some reason the powerful sniffers that Lowry launched to track him down had failed miserably.

It looked like the same story tonight. The sniffer pretended to allow access to the UpLink system, downloading a large graphic file. As the file loaded on the hacker’s computer, it activated a Trojan horse. That program would then give Lowry a complete rundown of the route back to the hacker. It would also give Lowry access to the hard drives on the hacker’s computer.

But as the seconds ticked away, it became increasingly clear that it had failed again. They were obviously being attacked by someone more sophisticated than the average thirteen-year-old.

Had to be fourteen at least.

His computer appeared to have hung, just as it had last night. Lowry picked up his cola and reached to reboot. Just as his fingers touched the keyboard, the cursor began running across the top of the screen.

“No shit,” said Lowry. He leaned back in his swivel chair and gulped the last bit of the soda. Then he tossed the can and slid back the keyboard. “Let’s have a look at our sweetheart’s life, eh?”

Besides the normal systems programs — Windows ME, definitely an amateur — and office suites, the hacker chap had a good store of perv pix-nudie shots that confirmed for Lowry that he was indeed dealing with a teenage boy. There were a number of word-processing files that looked like German to his admittedly unfamiliar eye. He flipped through a few, took a look at some more of the porn, and then found a directory of the standard plug-and-play hacker scripts that allowed so many idiot brats to pretend they were true geeks.

But it was when he started to examine the contents of the lad’s D: drive that things got interesting.

The chap liked to break into e-mail systems. He had accessed a Fleet Street newspaper, which included quite a few off-color remarks about the Queen. He’d also gotten into UKAE, the regulatory agency for British nuclear power. Lowry glanced through the texts, which were run together with the headers indicating when they had been sent. He was on the second page and giving thought to returning to the nudies when a message in the middle of the page caught his attention.

The Highland Camerons were not the most renowned family in northern Scotland, but they were well known enough to have been included in several of the lectures on local history Lowry had attended over the past few months on the days he kept his mom company in Inverness; the Cameron estate was located about a mile from her home.

As Lowry continued to read the messages, he picked up the phone and called his supervisor.