The Ice Limit

He turned to look at her again.

"That's right. You had a pet theory once — something you believed in, despite the razzing of your peers. Isn't that right? And when you thought you'd finally found evidence for that theory, it got you into trouble. In all the excitement you lost your usual good judgment and shafted a friend. And in the end, your evidence turned out to be worthless."

McFarlane looked at her. "I didn't know you had a degree in psychiatry, along with everything else."

She leaned closer, pressing. "Sure, I heard the story. The point is, now you've got what you've been looking for all these years. You've got more than evidence. You've got proof. But you don't want to admit it. You're afraid to go down that road again."

McFarlane held her gaze for a minute. He felt his anger drain away. He slumped in his chair, his mind in turmoil. Could she be right? he wondered.

She laughed. "Take the color, for example. You know why no metals are deep red?"

"No."

"Objects are a certain color because of the way they interact with photons of light." Amira shoved a hand in her pocket and took out a crumpled paper bag. "Jolly Rancher?"

"What the hell's a Jolly Rancher?"

She tossed him a candy and shook another one into her hand. She held the green lozenge up between thumb and forefinger. "Every object, except for a perfect blackbody, absorbs some wavelengths of light and scatters others. Take this green candy. It's green because its scatters the green wavelengths of light back at our eye, while absorbing the rest. I've run a few pretty little calculations, and I can't find a single theoretical combination of alloyed metals that will scatter red light. It seems to be impossible for any known alloy to be deep red. Yellow, white, orange, purple, gray — but not red." She popped the green candy in her mouth, bit down with a loud crunch, and began to chew.

McFarlane placed his candy on the table. "So what are you saying?"

"You know what I'm saying. I'm saying it's made of some weird element we've never seen before. So stop being coy. I know that's what you've been thinking: This is it: this is an interstellar meteorite."

McFarlane raised his hand. "All right, it's true, I have been thinking about it."

"And?"

"All the meteorites ever found have been made from known elements — nickel, iron, carbon, silicon. They all formed here, in our own solar system, out of the primordial cloud of dust that once surrounded our sun." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "Obviously, you know I used to speculate about the possibility of meteorites coming from outside the solar system. A chunk of something that just happened to wander past and get caught in the sun's gravitational field. An interstellar meteorite."

Amira smiled knowingly. "But the mathematicians said it was impossible: a quintillion to one."

McFarlane nodded.

"I ran some calculations back on the ship. The mathematicians were wrong: they were working from faulty assumptions. It's only about a billion to one."

McFarlane laughed. "Yeah. Billion, quintillion, what's the difference?"

"It's a billion to one for any given year."

McFarlane stopped laughing.

"That's right," said Amira. "Over billions of years, there's a better than even chance that one did land on Earth. It's not only possible, it's probable. I resurrected your little theory for you. You owe me, big time."

A silence fell in the commissary hut, broken only by the rattle of wind. Then McFarlane began to speak. "You mean you really believe this meteorite is made of some alloy or metal that doesn't exist anywhere in the solar system?"

"Yup. And you believe it, too. That's why you haven't written your report."

McFarlane went on slowly, almost to himself. "If this metal did exist somewhere, we'd have found at least some trace of it. After all, the sun and the planets formed from the same dust cloud. So it must have come from beyond." He looked at her. "It's inescapable."

She grinned. "My thoughts exactly."

He fell silent and the two sat, absorbed for the moment. "We need to get our hands on a piece of it," Amira said at last. "I've got the perfect tool for the job, too, a highspeed diamond corer. I'd say five kilos would be a nice chunk to start with, wouldn't you?"

McFarlane nodded. "But let's just keep our speculations to ourselves for now. Lloyd and the rest are due here any minute."

As if on cue, there was a stomping outside the hut, and the door opened to reveal Lloyd, even more bearlike than usual in a heavy parka, framed against the dim blue light. Glinn followed, then Rochefort and Garza. Lloyd's assistant, Penfold, came last, shivering, his thick lips blue and pursed.

"Cold as a witch's tit out there," Lloyd cried, stamping his feet and holding his hands near the stove. He was bubbling over with good humor. The men from EES, on the other hand, simply sat down at the table, looking subdued.

Penfold took up a position in the far corner of the room, radio in hand. "Mr. Lloyd sir, we have to get to the landing site," he said. "Unless the helicopter leaves within the hour, you'll never get back to New York in time for the shareholders' meeting."

"Yes, yes. In a minute. I want to hear what Sam here has to say."

Penfold sighed and murmured into the radio.

Glinn glanced at McFarlane with his gray, serious eyes. "Is the report ready?"

"Sure." McFarlane nodded at the piece of paper.

Glinn glanced at it. "I'm not much in the mood for drollery, Dr. McFarlane."

It was the first time McFarlane had seen Glinn show irritation, or any strong emotion, for that matter. It occurred to him that Glinn, too, must have been shocked by what they found in the hole. This is a man who hates surprises, he thought. "Mr. Glinn, I can't base a report on speculation," he said. "I need to study it."

"I'll tell you what we need," Lloyd said loudly. "We need to get it the hell out of the ground and into international waters, before the Chileans get wind of this. You can study it later." It seemed to McFarlane that this was the latest salvo in a continuing argument between Glinn and Lloyd.

"Dr. McFarlane, perhaps I can simplify matters," Glinn said. "There's one thing I'm particularly interested in knowing. Is it dangerous?"

"We know it's not radioactive. It might be poisonous, I suppose. Most metals are, to one degree or another."

"How poisonous?"

McFarlane shrugged. "Palmer touched it, and he's still alive."

"He'll be the last one to do that," Glinn replied. "I've given orders that nobody is to come into direct contact with the meteorite, under any circumstances." He paused. "Anything else? Could it be harboring viruses?"

"It's been sitting there for millions of years, so any alien microbes would have dispersed long ago. It might be worth taking soil samples and collecting moss, lichen, and other plants from the area, to see if anything's unusual."

"What would one look for?"

"Mutations, perhaps, or signs of low-level exposure to toxins or teratogens."

Glinn nodded. "I'll speak to Dr. Brambell about it. Dr. Amira, any thoughts on its metallurgical properties? It is a metal, isn't it?"

There was another crunch of candy. "Yes, very likely, since it's ferromagnetic. Like gold, it doesn't oxidize. However, I can't figure out how a metal can be red. Dr. McFarlane and I were just discussing the need to take a sample."

"Sample?" Lloyd asked. The room fell silent at the change in his voice.

"Of course," said McFarlane after a moment. "It's standard procedure."

"You're going to cut a piece off my meteorite?"

McFarlane looked at Lloyd, and then at Glinn. "Is there a problem with that?"

"You're damn right there's a problem," Lloyd said. "This is a museum specimen. We're putting it on display. I don't want it chopped up or drilled."

"There isn't a major meteorite found that hasn't been sectioned. We're only talking about coring out a five-kilogram piece. That'll be enough for all the tests anyone could conceivably think of. A piece that large could be worked on for years."

Lloyd shook his head. "No way."

"We must do it," McFarlane said with vehemence. "There's no way to study this meteorite without vaporizing, melting, polishing, etching. Given the size of this thing, the sample would be a drop in the bucket."

"It ain't the Mona Lisa," Amira murmured.

"That's an ignorant comment," Lloyd said, rounding on her. Then he sank back with a sigh. "Cutting it up seems like such a — well, a sacrilege. Couldn't we just leave it a mystery?"

"Absolutely not," said Glinn. "We need to know more about it before I'll authorize moving it. Dr. McFarlane is right."

Lloyd stared at him, his face reddening. "Before you'll authorize moving it? Listen to me, Eli. I've gone along with all your little rules. I've played your game. But let's get one thing straight: I'm paying the bills. This is my meteorite. You signed a contract to get it for me. You like to brag that you've never failed. If this ship returns to New York without that meteorite, you will have failed. Am I right?"

Glinn looked at Lloyd. Then he spoke calmly, almost as one might speak to a child. "Mr. Lloyd, you will get your meteorite. I merely want to see you have it without anyone getting unnecessarily hurt. Isn't that what you want, too?"

Lloyd hesitated. "Of course it is."

McFarlane was amazed at how quickly Glinn had put the man on the defensive.

"Then all I am asking is that we proceed with care."

Lloyd licked his lips. "It's just that everything's come to a grinding halt. Why? The meteorite's red. So I ask you, what's wrong with red? I think it's great. Has everybody forgotten about our friend in the destroyer? Time is the one thing we don't have here."

"Mr. Lloyd!" Penfold said, holding up the radio appealingly, like a beggar might hold up an alms cup. "The helicopter. Please!"

"God damn it!" Lloyd cried. After a moment, he spun away. "All right, for chrissakes, take your sample. Just cap the hole so it isn't visible. And do it fast. By the time I get back to New York, I want that son of a bitch on the move."

He stomped out of the hut, Penfold at his heels. The door banged shut behind them. For a minute, maybe two, the room was still. Then Amira rose to her feet.

"Come on, Sam," she said. "Let's drill this sucker."

Isla Desolación,

2:15 P.M.

AFTER THE warmth of the hut, the wind felt keen as a knife. McFarlane shivered as he followed Amira to tech stores, thinking longingly of the dry heat of the Kalahari.

The container was longer and wider than the rest, dingy on the outside, clean and spacious on the inside. Monitors and rack-mounted diagnostic tools, powered by the central generator in a neighboring hut, glowed in the dim light. Amira made for a large metal table, which held a collapsed tripod and a high-speed portable mining drill. If it weren't for the leather sling around the drill, McFarlane would never have suspected it of being particularly "portable." It looked like a twenty-first-century bazooka.

Amira patted the drill affectionately. "Don't you just love high-tech toys that break things? Look at this mother. Ever seen one of these before?"

"Not one so big." McFarlane watched as she expertly broke the drill down and examined its components. Satisfied, she slapped it back together, plugged the end of a heavy cord into a socket, and ran the machine through its diagnostics.

"Check this out." She hefted a long, cruel-looking shaft of metal, one end bulbous and pocked like a club, with a hollow core. "Ten carats of industrial diamond in the bit alone." She pressed a button and the electronic chuck loosened with a snap. She slung the drill over her shoulder with a grunt and pressed its trigger, filling the room with a deep-throated growl. "Time to make a hole," she said, grinning.

They left the equipment hut and headed out into the gloom, McFarlane playing out the electrical cord behind them. A shoddy-looking maintenance shack had been erected over the exposed meteorite, concealing it from view. Inside, banks of halogen lights bathed the shallow cut in a cool glow. Glinn was already standing at the edge of the hole, peering down, radio in one hand, his small frame set into sharp relief by the light.

They joined Glinn at the edge of the hole. In the white light, the meteorite below their feet glowed almost purple, like a fresh bruise. Pulling off her gloves, Amira took the tripod from McFarlane, quickly set its legs, and fitted the drill into its housing. "This thing has a terrific vacuum system," she said, pointing to a narrow manifold that curved beneath the bit. "Sucks up every particle of dust. If the metal's poisonous, it won't matter."

"Even so, I'm evacuating the area," said Glinn, who raised the radio and spoke rapidly into it. "And remember, keep well back. Do not touch it." He motioned for the workmen to leave.

McFarlane watched as Amira snapped on the power switch, checked the indicator lights along the drill's flank, and deftly positioned the bit above the meteorite. "Looks like you've done this before," he said.

"Damn right. Eli here put me through this a dozen times."

McFarlane looked at Glinn. "You rehearsed this?"

"Every step," Amira said as she pulled a large remote from her pocket and began calibrating it. "And not just this. Everything. He plans all our projects like an invasion. D-Day. You practice your ass off, because you only get one shot at the real thing." She stepped back and blew on her hands. "Man, you should've seen the big ball of iron Eli made us dig up and schlepp all over creation, again and again. We called it Big Bertha. I really learned to hate that damn rock."

"Where did you do this?"

"Up at the Bar Cross Ranch near Bozeman, Montana. You didn't really think this was a first run, did you?"

With the remote calibrated and the drill fixed into position over the naked surface of the meteorite, Amira turned to a nearby case and snapped its hinges open. Pulling out a small metal can, she tore off its lid and — keeping well back — upended it over the meteorite. A black, gluey substance poured out, spreading over the red surface in a viscous layer. With a small brush, she applied the remainder to the end of the diamond bit. Then, reaching into the case again, she pulled out a thin sheet of rubber and gingerly pressed it down over the sealant.

"We'll give that a moment to get tacky," she explained "We don't want even the slightest speck of meteorite dust escaping into the air." She fumbled in her parka, extracted the cigar tube, glanced at the expressions on Glinn's and McFarlane's faces, sighed, and began cracking peanuts instead.

McFarlane shook his head. "Peanuts, candy, cigars. What else do you do that your mother would disapprove of?"

She looked at him. "Hot monkey sex, rock and roll, extreme skiing, and high-stakes blackjack."

McFarlane laughed. Then he asked, "Are you nervous?"

"Not so much nervous as incredibly excited. You?"

McFarlane thought about this for a moment. It was almost as if he was allowing himself to become excited; to grow used to the idea that this was, after all, the very thing he had hunted for all those years.

"Yeah," he said. "Excited."

Glinn pulled out his gold pocket watch, flicked open its cover, and glanced at its face. "It's time."

Amira returned to the drill and adjusted a dial. A low rumble began to fill the close air of the shack. She checked the position of the bit, then took a step back, making an adjustment with the remote. The rumble rose to a whine. She maneuvered a small hat switch on the remote, and the whirling bit obediently descended, then retracted.

"Five by five," she said, glancing at Glinn.

Glinn reached into the open case, pulled out three respirators, and tossed two of them to McFarlane and Amira. "We'll step outside now and work from the remote."

McFarlane snugged the respirator onto his head, seating the cold rubber around his jaws, and stepped outside. Without a hood, the wind cut cruelly around his ears and the nape of his neck. From inside, the angry, hornetlike whine of the idling drill was still clearly audible.

"Farther," Glinn said. "Minimum distance one hundred feet."

They stepped back from the building. Snow was tumbling into the air, turning the site into a filmy sea of white.

"If this turns out to be a spaceship," Amira said, her voice muffled, "somebody inside's gonna be mighty pissed when Mr. Diamond Head pokes through."

The shack was barely visible through the snow, the open door a dim rectangle of white in the swirling gray. "All ready."

"Good," Glinn replied. "Cut through the sealant. We'll pause at one millimeter below the surface of the meteorite to scan for outgassing."

Amira nodded and aimed the remote, fingering the hat switch. The whine grew louder for a moment, then suddenly became muffled. A few seconds went by.

"Funny, I'm not making any progress," said Amira.

"Raise the drill."

Amira pulled back on the hat, and the whine grew louder again, settling down quickly to a steady pitch. "Seems fine."

"RPM?"

"Twelve thousand."

"Raise it to sixteen and lower again."

The whine increased in pitch. As McFarlane listened, it grew muffled once again. There was a sharp grinding noise, then nothing.

Amira glanced at a small LED readout on the remote, its red numbers stark against the black casing. "It stopped," she said.

"Any idea why?"

"Seems to be running hot, maybe there's something wrong with the motor. But the internals all checked out."

"Retract and let it cool. Then double the torque, and lower again."

They waited while Amira fiddled with the remote. McFarlane kept his eyes on the open door of the shack. After a few moments, Amira grunted to herself and nosed the hat switch forward. The whine returned, throatier now. Suddenly, the note grew lower as the drill labored.

"Heating up again," Amira said. "Damn this thing." Her jaw set, and she gave the hat switch a jab.

The pitch changed abruptly. There was a sharp ripping sound, and a dull flicker of orange light burst from the doorway. It was followed by a loud crackle, then another, much quieter. And then all was silent.

"What happened?" Glinn asked sharply.

Amira peered out, frowning through her respirator. "I don't know."

She took an impulsive step toward the shack, but Glinn put out a hand to stop her. "No. Rachel, determine what happened first."

With a heavy sigh, Amira turned back to the remote. "There's a lot of gibberish I've never seen before," she said, scrolling back through the LED readout. "Wait, here's something. It says `Failure Code 47.'" She looked up and snorted. "That's just great. And the manual's probably back in Montana."

A small booklet appeared, as if by sleight of hand, in Glinn's right glove. He turned the pages. Then he stopped short. "Failure Code 47, you said?"

"Yup."

"Impossible."

There was a pause. "Eli, I don't think I've ever heard you use that word before," Amira replied.

Glinn looked up from the manual, alien in his parka and goonlike respirator. "The drill's burned out."

"Burned out? With the kind of horsepower that thing's sporting? I don't believe it."

Glinn slipped the manual back into the folds of his parka. "Believe it."

They looked at each other as the snowflakes curled around them.

"But that could only happen if the meteorite was harder than diamond," Amira said.

In answer, Glinn simply moved toward the hut.

Inside, the air was thick with the smell of burnt rubber. The drill was half obscured by smoke, the LED lights along its flank dark, its underside scorched. "It's not responding at all," Amira said, manipulating its controls by hand.

"Probably tripped the circuit breakers," said Glinn. "Retract the bit manually."

McFarlane watched as, inch by inch, the huge bit rose out of the acrid smoke. When the tip at last came into view, he saw that its serrated end was now an ugly, circular scar of metal, fused and burnt.

"Jesus," said Amira. "That was a five-thousand-dollar diamond-carborundum bit."

McFarlane looked over at Glinn, half hidden by the curls of smoke. The man's eyes were not on the drill bit; instead, they seemed to be contemplating something in the distance.

As McFarlane watched, he unclipped his respirator and pulled it free.

The wind rose suddenly, slamming the door shut, rattling its hinges and worrying the knob.

"What now?" Amira asked.

"We take the bit back to the Rolvaag for a thorough examination," Glinn said.

Amira turned to the drill, but Glinn's expression had lost none of its distance. "And it's time we took something else back with us as well," he added quietly.

Isla Desolación,

3:05 P.M.

OUTSIDE THE shack, McFarlane pulled off the respirator and snugged the hood of his parka tightly around his face. Wind gusted through the staging area, sending skeins of snow whirling across the frozen ground. By now, Lloyd must be well on his way back to New York. Already, what little light the heavy clouds permitted was fading from the sky. It would be dark in half an hour.

There was a crunch of snow, and Glinn and Amira appeared, returning from the stores hut. Amira held a fluorescent storm lantern in each hand, and Glinn was pulling a long, low aluminum sled behind him.

"What's that?" McFarlane asked, pointing to a large blue trunk of molded plastic that lay on the sled.

"Evidence locker," Glinn said. "For the remains." McFarlane felt a mounting queasiness in his gut. "Is this absolutely necessary?"

"I know it can't be easy for you," Glinn replied. "But it's an unknown. And at EES, we dislike unknowns."

As they approached the pile of rocks that marked Masangkay's grave, the snow flurries began to draw away. The Jaws of Hanuxa came into view, dark against an even darker sky. Beyond, McFarlane caught the merest patch of storm-flecked bay. On the distant horizon, the sharp peaks of Isla Wollaston clawed their way skyward. It was incredible how quickly the weather changed down here.

Already the wind had stuffed snow and ice into the crevices of the makeshift cairn, mortaring the grave in white. Without ceremony, Glinn pulled out the cross, laid it down, and began prying frozen rocks from the pile and rolling them aside. He glanced back at McFarlane. "It's fine if you'd rather hang back a bit."

McFarlane swallowed. There were very few things he could imagine less pleasant than this particular job. But if it had to be done, he wanted to be part of it. "No," he said. "I'll help."

It was much easier to pull the grave apart than it had been to assemble it. Soon, Masangkay's remains began to come into view. Glinn slowed his pace, working more gingerly. McFarlane stared at the broken bones; the split skull and broken teeth; the ropy pieces of gristle, the partly mummified flesh. It was hard to believe that this had once been his partner and friend. He felt his gorge rise, his breath come fast.

Darkness was falling quickly. Putting aside the last of the rocks, Glinn lit the lanterns and placed one on either side of the grave. With a pair of forceps he began placing the bones into the plastic-lined compartments of the locker. A few of the bones still adhered to each other, held together by strips of cartilage, skin, and desiccated gristle, but most looked as if they had been violently torn asunder.

"I'm no forensic pathologist," said Amira, "but this guy looks like he had a close encounter with a Peterbilt "

Glinn said nothing, forceps moving again and again from the ground to the locker, his face hidden by the folds of his hood. Then he stopped.

"What is it?" Amira asked.

Reaching out with the forceps, Glinn carefully pried something out of the frozen dirt. "This boot isn't just rotten," he said. "It's been burned. And some of these bones appear to have been burned, too."

"Do you suppose he was murdered for his equipment?" Amira asked. "And they burned the body to conceal the crime? It would be a hell of a lot easier than digging a grave in this soil."

"That would make Puppup a murderer," said McFarlane, feeling the hardness in his own voice.

Glinn held up a distal phalanx, examining it in the light like a small jewel. "Very unlikely," he said. "However, that's a question for the good doctor to answer."

"About time he had something to do," Amira said. "Instead of reading his books and wandering around the ship like a ghoul."

Glinn placed the bone into the evidence locker. Then he turned back to the gravesite and picked up something else with his forceps.

"This was underneath the boot," he said. He held the object up to the light, brushed off the clinging ice and dirt, and held it up again.

"A belt buckle," said Amira.

"What?" McFarlane asked. He pushed his way forward, staring.

"It's some kind of purple gemstone, placed in a silver setting," Amira said. "But look, it's been melted."

McFarlane sank back.

Amira looked at him. "Are you all right?" McFarlane merely passed a gloved hand across his eyes and shook his head. To see that here, of all places... Years ago, after they had scored big with the Atacama tektites, he had had a pair of belt buckles made, each with a sectioned tektite, to celebrate their coup. He'd lost his long ago. But despite everything, Nestor had still been wearing his at his death. It surprised McFarlane how very much that meant to him.

Without speaking, they gathered up the prospector's meager effects. Then Glinn fastened the locker, Amira gathered up the lights, and the two began trudging back. McFarlane remained a moment longer, staring at the cold jumble of rocks. Then he turned to follow.

Punta Arenas,

July 17, 8:00 A.M.

COMANDANTE VALLENAR stood over the tiny metal sink in his cabin, smoking the bitter end of a puro and lathering his face with sandalwood-scented shaving cream. He detested the fragrant shaving cream, just like he detested the razor that lay on the basin: a two-bladed disposable of bright yellow plastic. Typical American throwaway trash. Who else would build such a wasteful thing, two blades when just a single blade would do? But naval stores were capricious, especially for ships that spent most of their time in the far south. He stared at the little disposable in disgust, one of a pack of ten that the quartermaster had issued him that morning. It was either that or a straight razor. And on board ship, straight razors could be dangerous.

He rinsed the blade, then raised it to his left cheekbone. He always started with the left side of his face: he had never been comfortable shaving with his left hand, and this side was easier somehow.

At least the shaving cream hid the smell of the ship. Almirante Ramirez was the oldest destroyer in the fleet, purchased from the U.K. in the fifties. Decades of poor sanitation, vegetable peelings rotting in bilgewater, chemical solvents, faulty sewage disposal, and spilled diesel fuel had suffused the vessel with a stench that nothing short of sinking would eradicate.

The sudden blat of an airhom chased away the noise of crying birds and distant traffic. He glanced through the rusted porthole toward the piers and the city beyond. It was a brilliant day, with crystal skies and a brisk cold wind from the west.

The comandante returned to his shaving. He never liked anchoring in Punta Arenas; it was a poor place for a ship, especially in a westerly wind. He was surrounded, as usual, by fishing boats taking advantage of the destroyer's lee. It was typical South American anarchy; no discipline, no sense of the dignity due a military vessel.

There was a rap on the door. "Comandante," came the voice of Timmer, the signal officer.

"Enter," the comandante said without turning. In the mirror, he could see the door open and Timmer enter with another man in tow: a civilian, well-fed, prosperous, satisfied with himself.

Vallenar ran the blade a few times along his chin. Then he rinsed the blade in the metal basin and turned. "Thank you, Mr. Timmer," he said with a smile. "You may go. If you would be so kind as to post a man outside."

After Timmer left, Vallenar took a moment to examine the man before him. He stood before the desk, a slight smile on his face, no trace of apprehension. And why should he be afraid? Vallenar thought, without malice. Vallenar was a commander in name only. He had the oldest warship in the fleet, with the worst posting. So who could blame the man who stood here before him now for sticking out his chest ever so slightly, for feeling like a big man who could stare down the powerless comandante of a rusting vessel?

Vallenar took one last, deep drag on the puro, then flicked it out the open porthole. He laid down the razor and pulled a cigar box from a desk drawer with his good hand, offering the box to the stranger. The man glanced at the cigars with disdain and shook his head. Vallenar took one for himself.

"I apologize for the cigars," the comandante said, replacing the box. "They are of very poor quality. Here in the navy, you must take what you are given."

The man smiled condescendingly, staring at his withered right arm. Vallenar eyed the heavy sheen of pomade in the man's hair and the clear polish on his fingernails. "Sit down, my friend," he said, placing the cigar in his mouth. "Forgive me if I continue shaving while we talk."

The man took a seat in front of the desk, daintily propping one leg over the other.

"I understand you are a dealer in used electronic equipment — watches, computers, photocopiers, that sort of thing." Vallenar paused while drawing the razor across his upper lip. "Yes?"

"New and used equipment," the man said.

"I stand corrected," Vallenar said. "About four or five months ago — it would have been in March, I believe — you purchased a certain piece of equipment, a tomographic sounder. It is a tool used by prospectors, a set of long metal rods with a keyboard at its center. Did you not?"

"Mi Comandante, I have a large business. I cannot remember every piece of junk that crosses my door."

Vallenar turned. "I did not say it was junk. You said you sell new and used equipment, did you not?"

The merchant shrugged, raised his hands, and smiled. It was a smile that the comandante had seen countless times before from petty bureaucrats, officials, businessmen. It was a smile that said, I won't know anything, and I won't help you, until I get la mordida, the bribe. It was the same smile he had seen on the faces of the customs officials in Puerto Williams, a week before. And yet today, instead of rage, he felt only a great pity for this man. A man like this wasn't born polluted. He had been corrupted by degrees. It was a symptom of a greater sickness; a sickness that manifested itself all around him.

Sighing deeply, Vallenar came around the desk and perched on the edge closest to the merchant. He smiled at the man, feeling the shaving cream drying on his skin. The merchant nodded his head with a conspiratorial wink. As he did so, he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the universal gesture, laying the other manicured palm on the table.

As quick as a striking snake, the comandante's hand shot forward. With a sharp, digging movement, he sank the twin blades of the razor into the moon end of the merchant's middle fingernail. The man drew in his breath sharply. Terrified eyes stared up at the comandante, who met his gaze with perfect impassivity. Then the comandante gave a brutal tug and the man shrieked as the fingernail was torn away.

Vallenar shook the razor, flicking the bloody nail out the porthole. Then he turned to the mirror and resumed shaving. For a moment, the only sounds in the small cabin were the scrape of the blades against skin and the loud moaning of the merchant. Vallenar noticed, with faint interest, that the razor was leaving an unshaven stripe on his face; a piece of matter must have remained stuck between the blades.

He rinsed the blade again and finished shaving. Then, patting and drying his face, he turned to the merchant. The man had risen to his feet and was standing before the desk, swaying and moaning, and clutching his dripping finger.

Vallenar leaned over the desk, tugged a handkerchief out of his pocket, and gently wrapped it around the man's wounded finger. "Please, sit down," he said.

The merchant sat, whimpering softly, his jowls quivering with fright.

"You will do us both a service if you answer my questions quickly and precisely. Now, did you purchase a device such as I described?"

"Yes, I did," the man said instantly. "I did have an instrument like that, Comandante."

"And who bought it from you?"

"An American artist." He cradled his wounded finger.

"An artist?"

"A sculptor. He wanted to make a modern sculpture out of it to show in New York. It was rusted, useless for anything else."

Vallenar smiled. "An American sculptor. What was his name?"

"He did not give me his name."

Vallenar nodded, still smiling. The man was now so very eager to tell the truth. "Of course not. And now tell me, señor — but I realize I have not asked your name. How inconsiderate of me."

"Tornero, mi Comandante. Rafael Tornero Perea."

"Señor Tornero, tell me, from whom did you purchase the instrument?"

"A mestizo."

Vallenar paused. "A mestizo? What was his name?"

"I am sorry... I do not know."

Vallenar frowned. "You don't know his name? There are very few mestizos left, and fewer still come to Punta Arenas."

"I can't remember, Comandante, truly I can't." The man's eyes grew frantic as he searched his memory in desperation. Sweat trickled from the pomaded brow. "He was not from Punta Arenas, he was from the south. It was a strange name."

Suddenly, a flash came over Vallenar. "Was it Puppup? Juan Puppup?"

"Yes! Thank you, thank you, Comandante, for refreshing my memory. Puppup. That was the name."

"Did he say where he found it?"

"Yes. He said he found it on las Islas de Hornos. I didn't believe him. Why would anything of value be found down there?" The man was babbling urgently now, speaking as if he could not get the words out fast enough. "I thought he was trying to get a better price." His face brightened. "And now, I remember, there was a pick, and a strange-looking hammer, too. "

"A strange-looking hammer?"

"Yes. One end was long and curved. And there was a leather bag of rocks. The American bought all those things, too."

Vallenar leaned eagerly across the desk. "Rocks? Did you look at them?"

"Yes, sir, I certainly did. I looked at them."

"Were they gold?"

"Oh, no. They had no value."

"Ah. And you must be a geologist, of course, to know that they had no value?"

Though Vallenar's tone was mild, the man cringed in the chair. "Comandante, I showed them to Señor Alonso Torres, who owns the rock shop on Calle Colinas. I thought they might be valuable ores. But he said they were worthless. He said I should throw them away."

"And how would he know?"

"He knows, Comandante. He is an expert in rocks and minerals."

Vallenar walked toward the single porthole, limed and rusted from years of salt water. "Did he say what they were?"

"He said they were nothing."

Vallenar turned back to the merchant. "What did they look like?"

"They were just rocks. Ugly rocks."

Vallenar closed his eyes, trying hard to stem the anger rising within him. It would be unseemly to lose his temper, here in front of a guest on his own ship.

"I may have one more in my shop, Comandante."

Vallenar opened his eyes again. "You may?"

"Señor Torres kept one to do further tests. I got it back after the American bought the instrument. For a time, I used it as a paperweight. I, too, hoped it might be valuable, despite what Señor Torres said. Perhaps I can still locate it."

Comandante Vallenar suddenly smiled. He removed the unlit cigar from his mouth, examined the tip, and lit it from a box of wooden matches on his desk. "I should like to purchase this rock you mention."

"You are interested in this rock? It would be my privilege to give it to you. Let us not talk of purchase, Comandante."

Vallenar bowed slightly. "Then I would be pleased to accompany you, señor, to your place of business, to accept this kind gift." Then he took a deep drag on the cigar and, with the greatest of courtesy, ushered the merchant out of the cabin and into the foul central corridor of the Almirante Ramirez.

Rolvaag,

9:35 A.M.

THE DRILL bit was laid out on an examination table, its scorched head resting on a bed of white plastic. A bank of overhead lights bathed the hulk in blue. Sampling instruments were lined up beside it, individually sealed in plastic. McFarlane, dressed in scrubs, fitted a surgical mask into position over his head. The channel was unusually calm. In the windowless lab, it was hard to believe they were on board a ship.

"Scalpel, doctor?" Amira asked, her voice muffled by her mask.

McFarlane shook his head. "Nurse, I think we lost the patient."

Amira clucked in sympathy. Behind her, Eli Glinn watched, arms folded.

McFarlane moved to an electronic stereozoom microscope and swiveled it into position over the table. A highly magnified picture of the drill head flickered into view on a nearby workstation screen: a landscape of Armageddon, fused canyons and melted ridges. "Let's burn one," he said.

"Sure thing, doc," Amira said, sliding a writeable CD into the drive bay of the machine.

McFarlane pulled a swivel chair toward the table, sat down at the microscope, and snugged the twin eyepieces to his head. Slowly, he moved the eyepieces, scanning the crevasses, hoping the drill bit might have removed something, no matter how small, from the surface of the meteorite. But no telltale particles of red gleamed in the lunar landscape, even when he switched to UV light. As he searched, he was aware that Glinn had come forward and was staring at the video screen.

After several fruitless minutes, McFarlane sighed. "Go to 120x."

Amira adjusted the machine. The landscape leapt forward, looking even more grotesque. Again McFarlane scanned it, sector by sector.

"I can't believe it," said Amira, staring at the screen. "It should have picked up something."

McFarlane sat back with a sigh. "If it did, it's beyond the power of this microscope to see it."

"That suggests the meteorite must be one tenacious crystal lattice."

"It sure as hell isn't a normal metal." McFarlane slapped the two eyepieces together and folded them back into the machine.

"What now?" said Glinn, his voice low.

McFarlane swiveled in his chair. He pulled down the mask and thought for a moment. "There's always the electron microprobe."

"And that is...?"

"The planetary geologist's favorite tool. We've got one here. You put a sample of material in a vacuum chamber, shoot a high-speed beam of electrons at it. Normally, you analyze the X rays it produces, but you can heat up the electron beam to the point where it'll vaporize a tiny amount of the material, which will condense as a thin film on a gold plate. Voilà, your sample. Small, but viable."

"How do you know the electron beam will be able to vaporize a bit of the rock?" Glinn asked.

"The electrons are ejected from a filament at extremely high speed. You can ramp it up almost to the speed of light and focus it down to a micrometer. Believe me, it'll knock off at least a few atoms."

Glinn was silent, clearly weighing in his mind the possible danger against the need for more information. "Very well," he said. "Proceed. But remember, no one is to touch the meteorite directly."

McFarlane frowned. "The tricky part is how to do it. Normally, you bring the sample to the microprobe. This time we'll have to bring the microprobe to the sample. But the thing isn't portable — it weighs about six hundred pounds. And we'll have to jury-rig some sort of vacuum chamber over its surface."

Glinn removed a radio from his belt. "Garza? I want eight men up on the maindeck immediately. We'll need to get a sling and vehicle big enough to move a six-hundred-pound instrument on the first morning transport."

"Tell him we need a major power source, too," McFarlane added.

"And have a cable with a ground-fault interrupt able to carry up to twenty thousand watts."

McFarlane gave a low whistle. "That'll do it."

"You have one hour to get your samples. We have no more time." These words were spoken very slowly, and very clearly. "Garza will be here shortly. Be ready."

Glinn rose abruptly and left the lab, the door sucking in a gust of frigid air as it shut behind him.

McFarlane looked at Amira. "He's getting touchy."

"He hates not knowing," said Amira. "Uncertainty drives him around the bend."

"It must be hard to live life like that."

A distant look of pain crossed her face. "You haven't any idea."

McFarlane looked at her curiously, but Amira merely pulled down her mask and removed her gloves. "Let's break down the microprobe for transport," she said.

Isla Desolación,

1:45 P.M.

BY EARLY afternoon, the staging area had been prepped for the test. Inside the little shack, the light was brilliant, the air suffocatingly warm. McFarlane stood over the hole, looking down on the rich, deep red surface. Even in the harsh light it had a soft luster. The microprobe, a long cylinder of stainless steel, lay on a padded cradle. Amira was arranging the other equipment McFarlane had ordered: an inch-thick bell jar containing a filament and plug, a set of gold disks sealed in plastic, and an electromagnet for focusing the electron beam.

"I need one square foot of the meteorite cleaned to absolute perfection," McFarlane said to Glinn, who was standing nearby. "Otherwise we'll get contaminants."

"We'll make it happen," said Glinn. "Once we get the samples, what's your plan?"

"We'll run a series of tests on them. With any luck, we'll be able to determine its basic electrical, chemical, and physical properties."

"How long will that take?"

"Forty-eight hours. More, if we eat and sleep."

Glinn's lips compressed together. "We can't afford more than twelve hours. Confine yourself to the most essential tests." He checked his massive gold pocket watch. Another hour, and all was in readiness. The bell jar had been tightly sealed to the surface of the meteorite — an excruciatingly cautious operation. Inside the bell jar, ten tiny sample disks lay on pieces of glass, arrayed in a circle. A ring of electromagnets surrounded the jar. The electron microprobe lay nearby, partially open, its complex guts exposed. Multicolored wires and tubes streamed from it.

"Rachel, please turn on the vacuum pump," McFarlane said.

There was a whir as air was sucked from the bell jar. McFarlane monitored a screen on the microprobe. "What do you know. The seal's holding. Vacuum's down to five microbars."

Glinn moved closer, watching the small screen intently.

"Turn on the electromagnets," McFarlane said.

"You've got it," said Amira.

"Douse the lights."

The room went dark. The only light came from cracks in the walls of the ill-made shack and from the LEDs arranged along the microprobe's controls.

"I'm turning the beam on at low power," McFarlane whispered.

A faint bluish beam appeared in the bell jar. It flickered and rotated, casting a spectral light across the meteorite's surface, turning the crimson surface almost black. The walls of the shack danced and wavered.

McFarlane carefully turned two sets of dials, altering the magnetic fields around the jar. The beam stopped rotating and began to narrow, becoming brighter. Soon it looked like a blue pencil, its point resting on the meteorite's surface.

"We're there," he said. "Now I'm going to bring it to full power for five seconds."

He held his breath. If Glinn's concerns were justified—if the meteorite was somehow dangerous — this was when they might find out.

He pressed the timer. There was a sudden, much brighter, beam inside the jar. Where it touched the meteorite's surface, there was an intense violet pinpoint of light. Five seconds ticked off, and then everything went dark again. McFarlane felt himself relax involuntarily. "Lights."

As the lights came on, McFarlane knelt above the meteorite's surface, staring eagerly at the gold disks. He caught his breath. Each disk was now marked with the faintest blush of red. Not only that, but at the spot where the electron beam had touched the meteorite, he saw — or thought he saw — the tiniest pit, a gleaming speck on the smooth surface.

He straightened up.

"Well?" asked Glinn. "What happened?"

McFarlane grinned. "This baby isn't so tough, after all."

Isla Desolación,

July 18, 9:00 A.M.

MCFARLANE CRUNCHED across the staging area, Amira at his side. The site looked the same — the same rows of containers and Quonset huts; the same raw, frosted earth. Only he was different. He felt bone tired yet exhilarated. As they walked in silence, the crisp air seemed to magnify everything: the sound of his boots creaking in the fresh snow, the clatter of distant machinery, the rasp of his own breath. It helped clear his head of all the strange speculations that the night's experiments had aroused.

Reaching the bank of containers, he approached the main lab and held open the door for Amira. Inside, in the dim light, he could see Stonecipher, the project's second engineer, working on an open computer box, disks and circuit boards spread out fanwise. Stonecipher straightened up his short, narrow body at their arrival.

"Mr. Glinn wants to see you, on the double," he said.

"Where is he?" asked McFarlane.

"Underground. I'll take you."

Not far from the shack that covered the meteorite, a second shack had been erected, even more dilapidated than its cousin. The door to this shack opened and Garza emerged, wearing a hard hat beneath his hood and carrying several others in his hands. He tossed one to each of them.

"Come on in," he said, ushering them into the smaller shack. McFarlane looked around the dim space, wondering what was going on. The shack held nothing but some old tools and several nail kegs.

"What's this?" McFarlane asked.

"You'll see," said Garza with a grin. He rolled the nail kegs away from the center of the shack, exposing a steel plate, which he hooked open.

McFarlane drew in his breath in astonishment. The open trapdoor revealed a descending staircase in a tunnel, cut into the ground, and heavily reinforced with steel. White light blazed upward. "Pretty cloak-and-dagger," he said.

Garza laughed. "I call it the King Tut method. They hid the tunnel into King Tut's treasure chamber by locating it beneath the shack of an insignificant worker."

They descended the narrow staircase, single file, to a narrow tunnel illuminated by dual lines of fluorescent lights. The tunnel was so massively cribbed with I-beams that it seemed made entirely of steel. The group proceeded single file, their breath leaving fog trails in the frosty air. Icicles hung from the overhead struts, and hoarfrost grew in sheets and spikes along the walls. McFarlane caught his breath as he saw a patch of unmistakable color ahead of them, bright red against the shine of ice and steel.

"You're looking at a small section of the meteorite's underside," Garza said, stopping beside it.

Underneath the lustrous red surface, a row of jacks, each a foot in diameter, sat like squat pillars on fat, clawlike feet, bolted to the metal cribbing on the floor and walls.

"There they are," said Garza affectionately. "The bad boys who'll be doing the lifting." He patted the closest with a gloved hand. "At go-ahead, we'll lift the rock exactly six centimeters. Then we'll wedge it, reposition the jacks, and lift again. As soon as we get enough clearance, we'll start building the cradle underneath. It'll be cramped, and cold as hell, but it's the only way."

"We've placed fifty percent more jacks than we need," added Rochefort. His face had turned mottled in the cold, and his nose was blue. "The tunnel was designed to be stronger than the matrix of the earth itself. It's completely safe." He spoke very rapidly, his thin lips compressed in a disapproving frown, as if he felt any questioning of his work would be a waste of time as well as an affront.

Garza turned away from the meteorite and led the group down a tunnel that branched away at right angles. Several smaller tunnels curved away from its right-hand wall, heading to other exposed areas of the meteorite's underside and additional banks of jacks. After about a hundred feet, the tunnel opened into a huge subterranean storage room. It had a packed dirt floor and was roofed with caisson plates. Inside, I-beams, laminated timbers, and structural steel were stacked in orderly rows, along with a variety of construction equipment. Glinn stood at the far end of the space, talking quietly to a technician.

"Jesus," breathed McFarlane. "This place is huge. I can't believe you built it in a couple of days."

"We don't want anyone nosing around our warehouse," said Garza. "If an engineer saw all this, he'd know immediately we weren't mining iron. Or gold. This will be used to build the cradle, bit by bit, as we jack up the meteorite and get a better understanding of its contours. Over there are precision arc welders, acetylene torches, hot riveting equipment, and some good old-fashioned woodworking tools."

Glinn came over, nodding first at McFarlane, then at Amira. "Rachel, please sit down. You look tired." He indicated a pile of I-beams as a seat.

"Tired." She gave a wan smile. "And amazed."

"I'm eager to hear your report."

McFarlane squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. "Nothing's written up yet. If you want a briefing, you'll have to settle for a verbal one."

Glinn tented his gloved fingers together, nodding as McFarlane removed a dog-eared lab notebook from his jacket. Every breath was sending up a plume of frost. He opened it and flipped briefly through many pages of scribbled notes.

"I want to say up front that this is just the beginning. Twelve hours gave us barely enough time to scratch the surface."

Glinn nodded again, silently.

"I'll describe the results of the tests, but I warn you: they don't make a whole lot of sense. We started by trying to determine the metal's basic properties — melting point, density, electrical resistance, atomic weight, valence — that sort of thing. First off, we heated a sample to find its melting point. We brought it up to over fifty thousand degrees K, vaporizing the gold substrate. It still remained solid."

Glinn's eyes were half-lidded. He murmured, "So that's how it survived the impact."

"Exactly," said Amira.

"Then we tried to use a mass spectrometer to find its atomic weight. Because of the high melting point, the experiment didn't fly. Even with the microprobe, we couldn't get it to remain a gas long enough to run the test."

McFarlane flipped some pages. "Likewise with specific gravity. The microprobe didn't give us a large enough sample to determine that. It appears to be chemically inactive — we hit it with every solvent, acid, and reactive substance we could find in the lab at room temperature and pressure, as well as at high temperatures and pressures. Totally inert. It's like a noble gas, except it's solid. No valence electrons."

"Go on."

"Then we wired it up to test its electromagnetic properties. And that's when we hit pay dirt. Basically, the meteorite seems to be a room-temperature superconductor: it conducts electricity without resistance. You put a current into it, and it will circulate forever unless something breaks it out."

If he was surprised at this, Glinn did not show it.

"Then we hit it with a beam of neutrons. It's a standard test on an unknown material: the neutrons cause the material to emit X rays, which tell you what's inside it. But in this case, the neutrons just disappeared. Swallowed up. Gone. It did the same thing with a beam of protons."

Now Glinn raised his eyebrows.

"That would be like shooting a forty-four magnum at a piece of paper, and having the bullet vanish into the paper," said Amira.

Glinn looked at her. "Any explanation?"

She shook her head. "I tried to do a quantum mechanical analysis of what might be happening. No luck. It appears to be impossible."

McFarlane continued to flip through his notes. "The last test we did was X-ray diffraction."

"Explain," Glinn murmured.

"You shine X rays through the material, then you make a picture of the diffraction pattern that results. A computer reverse-engineers those patterns and tells you what kind of crystal lattice generated them. Well, we got a seriously weird diffraction pattern — virtually fractal. Rachel wrote a program that tried to calculate what kind of crystal structure would produce such a pattern."

"It's still trying," Amira said. "It's probably gagged on it by now. It's one hell of a computation, if it can be done at all."

"One other thing," said McFarlane. "We used fission-track analysis to date the coesite from the staging area. We've now got a date on when the meteorite struck: thirty-two million years ago."

As he listened, Glinn's gaze had slowly dropped to the frozen dirt floor. "Conclusions?" he said at last, very quietly.

"They're very preliminary" McFarlane said.

"Understood."

McFarlane took a deep breath. "Have you heard of the hypothetical `island of stability' on the periodic table?"

"No."

"For years, scientists have been searching for heavier and heavier elements higher on the periodic table. Most of the ones they've found are very short-lived: they last only a few billionths of a second before they decay into some other element. But there's a theory that way, way up on the periodic table might be a group of elements that are stable — that don't decay. An island of stability. Nobody knows what kind of properties these elements would have, but they would be extremely strange, and very, very heavy. You couldn't synthesize them even with the largest of today's particle accelerators."

"And you think this might be such an element?"

"I'm fairly sure of it, actually."

"How would such an element be created?"

"Only in the most violent event in the known universe: a hypernova."

"A hypernova?"

"Yes. It's much bigger than a supernova. It occurs when a giant star collapses into a black hole, or when two neutron stars collide to form a black hole. For about ten seconds, a hypernova produces as much energy as the rest of the known universe put together. Such a thing just might have enough energy to create these strange elements. It also might have had enough energy to accelerate this meteorite into space at a speed that would carry it across the vast distances between stars, to land on Earth."

"An interstellar meteorite," Glinn said in a flat tone.

McFarlane noticed, with surprise, a brief but significant exchange of glances between Glinn and Amira. He tensed immediately, but Glinn merely nodded.

"You've given me more questions than answers."

"You gave us only twelve hours."

There was a brief silence.

"Let's return to the most basic question," Glinn said. "Is it dangerous?"

"We don't have to worry about it poisoning anybody," said Amira. "It's not radioactive or reactive. It's totally inert. I believe it's safe. I wouldn't, however, mess around with it electrically. Being a room-temperature superconductor, it has powerful and strange electromagnetic properties."

Glinn turned. "Dr. McFarlane?"

"It's a mass of contradictions," McFarlane said, keeping his voice neutral. "We haven't discovered anything specifically dangerous. But then again, we haven't shown it to be completely safe, either. We've got a second set of tests running now, and if that sheds any more light we'll let you know. But it will take years to really answer these questions, not twelve hours."

"I see." Glinn sighed, a small hissing sound that in anybody else would have been irritation. "As it happens, we have discovered something about the meteorite that may be of interest to you."

"What's that?"

"We'd originally estimated it to be about twelve hundred cubic meters in size, or about forty-two feet in diameter. Garza and his crew have been mapping the external contours of the meteorite as they prepare these tunnels. It turns out the meteorite is a lot smaller than we believed. It's only about twenty feet in diameter."

McFarlane's mind tried to fit this fact in. In an odd way, he felt disappointment. It wasn't much bigger than the Ahnighito, at the museum in New York.

"It's difficult to measure its mass at this point," Glinn said. "But all indications are that the meteorite still weighs at least ten thousand tons."

McFarlane suddenly forgot his disappointment. "That means it has a specific gravity of —"

"Jesus, at least seventy-five," said Amira.

Glinn raised an eyebrow. "And what does that signify?"

"The two heaviest known elements are osmium and iridium," Amira said. "They each have a specific gravity of around twenty-two. With a specific gravity of seventy-five, this meteorite is more than three times denser than any known element on Earth."

"There's your proof," murmured McFarlane. He felt his heart pounding.

"I'm sorry?" said Glinn.

It was as if a weight was suddenly plucked from McFarlane's shoulders. He looked Glinn in the face. "There can't be any doubt now. It's interstellar."

Glinn remained inscrutable.

"There's no way anything that dense originated in our solar system. It must have come from somewhere else. A place in the universe very different from our own. The region of a hypernova."

There was a very long moment of silence. McFarlane could hear workmen shouting in the distant tunnels, and the muffled sound of jackhammers and welding. Finally Glinn cleared his throat. "Dr. McFarlane," he began quietly. "Sam. I apologize if I seem doubtful. Understand that we're operating outside the parameters of any conceivable model. There's no precedent to guide us. I realize you haven't had adequate time for your tests. But our window of opportunity is about to close. I want your best guess — as a scientist, and as a human being — whether it's safe to proceed, or whether we should close down the operation and go home."

McFarlane took a deep breath. He understood what Glinn was asking. But he also knew, quite clearly, what Glinn had left unsaid. As a scientist, and as a human being ... Glinn was asking him to look at the question objectively — not as the man who betrayed his friend over this precise thing five years before. Several pictures flashed through his mind: Lloyd, pacing before his pyramid; the glittering black eyes of the destroyer comandante; the broken, weathered bones of his dead partner.

McFarlane began slowly. "It's been lying here for thirty-two million years without apparent problems. But the truth is, we don't know. All I can say is, this is a scientific discovery of the highest importance. Are the risks worth it? Nothing truly great is ever accomplished without risk."

Glinn's eyes seemed to go very far away. His expression was as unreadable as always, but McFarlane sensed he had articulated the man's own thoughts.

Glinn pulled out his pocket watch, opening it with a smart snap of his wrist. He had made a decision. "We'll lift the rock in thirty minutes. Rachel, if you and Gene will test the servo connections, we'll be ready."

McFarlane felt a sudden flood of emotion — excitement or anticipation, he couldn't be precisely sure.

"We have to be topside for those tests," Garza said, glancing at his watch. "Nobody is allowed down here."

The feeling ebbed quickly. "I thought you said it was completely safe," McFarlane said.

"Double overage," Glinn murmured. Then, leading the way, he walked out of the storage vault and led the way down the narrow tunnel.

Rolvaag,

9:30 A.M.

DR. PATRICK Brambell lay snug in his bunk, reading Spenser's The Faerie Queen. The tanker rode peacefully in the sound, and the mattress was delightfully soft. The temperature in the medical suite had been cranked up to eighty-six degrees: exactly the way he liked it. Everyone but a skeleton crew was ashore, preparing to lift the meteorite, and the ship was quiet. He was aware of no discomfort, no annoyance in the world — save perhaps that his arm, which had been propping up the book in front of his nose for the last half hour, had begun to fall asleep. And that was a problem easily remedied. With a sigh of contentment, he transferred the book to his other hand, turned the page, and immersed himself again in Spenser's elegant verse.

Then he stopped. There was, in fact, one other annoyance. His glance fell reluctantly through the open doorway, past the hall and into the medical laboratory beyond. On a gleaming metal gurney sat the blue evidence locker, clasps loosened but lid unopened. There was something forlorn, almost reproachful, about it. Glinn wanted the examination by the end of the day.

Brambell stared at it for a moment. Then he laid the book aside, rose regretfully from his bunk, and straightened his surgical smock. Though he rarely practiced medicine, and even more rarely performed surgery, he delighted in wearing a surgical smock and never took one off while awake. As a uniform, he found it vastly more intimidating than a policeman's and only a little less so than the grim reaper's. Surgical smocks, especially when flecked with blood, tended to hurry office visits along and speed unnecessary conversations.

He stepped out of his cabin and paused in the long hallway of the medical suite, surveying the parallel lines of open doorways. Nobody in the waiting room. Ten beds, all empty. It was most satisfactory.

Entering the medical laboratory, he washed his hands in the oversized sink, then flicked the water from his fingers while turning in a small circle, in an irreverent imitation of a priest. Nudging the hot-air dryer with his elbow, he rubbed his knobbed old hands before the gush of air. As he did so, he gazed around at the neat rows of well-worn books: overflow from his cabin. Above them he had hung two pictures: a depiction of Jesus Christ, with the fire and thorns of the sacred heart; and a small, faded photograph of two identical babies in sailor suits. The picture of Christ reminded him of many things, some self-contradictory but always interesting. The picture of himself and his twin brother, Simon, who had been murdered by a mugger in New York City, reminded him of why he had never married or had children.

He pulled on a pair of latex gloves, snapped on the ring light, and swiveled the magnifying glass into place over the gurney. Then he opened the evidence locker and stared disapprovingly at the jumble of bones. He could see right away that several were missing, and the rest had been tossed in higgledy-piggledy, with no regard for anatomy. He shook his wizened head at the general incompetence of the world.

He began removing the bones, identifying them, and arranging them in their proper places on the gurney. Not much sign of animal damage, beyond the nibblings of rodents. Then his brow furrowed. The number of perimortem breaks was unusual, even remarkable. He paused, a nugget of bone suspended halfway between locker and gurney. Then, more slowly, he placed it on the metal surface. There was a stillness in the medical suite as Brambell stepped back, folded his green-suited arms, and stared at the remains.

Ever since his Dublin childhood, his mother had entertained dreams of her twin lads growing up to be doctors. Ma Brambell had been an irresistible natural force, and so, like his brother Simon, Patrick had gone to medical school. While Simon had relished the job and gone on to great acclaim as a medical examiner in New York, Patrick found himself resenting the time away from literature. Over the years, he had gravitated to ships, most recently to large tankers, where the crews were small and the accommodations comfortable. And so far, the Rolvaag had lived up to his expectations. No parade of broken bones, raging fevers, or dripping cases of clap. Aside from a few bouts of seasickness, a sinus infection, and of course Glinn's preoccupation with the meteorite hunter, he had been left to read his books. Until now.

But as he stared at the collection of broken bones, Brambell felt an uncharacteristic curiosity stirring within him. The silence of the medical lab was broken by the whistled strains of "The Sprig of Shillelagh."

More quickly now, Brambell, whistling merrily, finished laying out the skeleton. He examined the effects: buttons, bits of clothing, an old boot. Of course there was only one boot; the daft beggars had missed the other. Along with the right clavicle, a piece of the ilium, the left radius, carpals and intercarpals... He made a mental list of the missing bones. At least the skull was there, if in several pieces.

He bent closer. It, too, was webbed with perimortem fractures. The rim of the orbit was heavy; the mandible robust; definitely a male. From the state of the sutural closing he would be about thirty-five, maybe forty. A small man, no more than five foot seven, but powerfully built, with well-developed muscle attachments. Years of fieldwork, no doubt. This fit the profile of the planetary geologist Nestor Masangkay that Glinn had given him.

Many of the teeth were snapped off at the root. It looked like the poor man had convulsed so hard in his death throes that he had broken all his teeth, and even split his jaw.

Still whistling, Brambell turned his attention to the postcranial skeleton. Virtually every bone that could be broken was broken. He wondered what could have caused such massive trauma. It was apparently a blow to the front, striking simultaneously from toe to crown. He was reminded of a poor skydiver he had autopsied in medical school; the man had packed his chute wrong and fallen three thousand feet onto the middle of I-95.

Brambell caught his breath, "The Sprig of Shillelagh" suddenly dying on his lips. He had been so caught up by the fracturing of the bones that he had not stopped to examine their other characteristics. But now, as he did so, he could see that the proximal phalanges showed flaking and crumbling characteristic of high heat — or severe burning. Almost all of the distal phalanges were missing, probably completely burned up. Toes and fingers. He bent closer. The broken teeth were scorched, the brittle enamel spalling off.

His eyes made a circuit of the remains. The parietal showed heavy burn damage, the bone soft and crumbling. He bent down, sniffed. Ah, yes: he could even smell it. And what was this? Brambell picked up a belt buckle. The bloody thing was melted. And the single boot wasn't just rotten — it too had burned. The bits of cloth were also scorched. That devil, Glinn, hadn't mentioned a word of this, although he surely must have noticed.

Then Brambell rocked back on his feet. It was with a twinge of regret that he realized there was no mystery here, after all. He now knew exactly how the prospector had died.

In the dim light of the medical spaces, "The Sprig of Shillelagh" started up once again, the merry tune now sounding a little mournful, as Brambell carefully closed up the evidence locker and returned to his bunk.

Isla Desolación,

10:00 A.M.

MCFARLANE STOOD at the frosted window of the communications center, melting a hole with his hand. Clouds hung heavy over the Jaws of Hanuxa, casting a pall of darkness over the Cape Horn islands. Behind him, Rochefort, more tense than usual, was typing at a Silicon Graphics workstation.

The last half hour had seen a frenzy of activity. The corrugated-metal shack that shielded the meteorite from view had been moved to one side, and the area above the rock had been freshly bladed down to dirt, a dark brown scar on the white fairyland of snow. A small army of workers swarmed about, each at some obscure task. The radio traffic had been a perfect Babel of technical incomprehension.

Outside, a deep-throated whistle blew. McFarlane felt his pulse quicken.

The door to the hut banged open and Amira entered, a wide smile on her face. Coming in behind, Glinn closed the door carefully, then went to stand behind Rochefort. "Lift sequence ready?" he asked.

"Check."

Glinn lifted a radio and spoke into it. "Mr. Garza? Five minutes to lift. Please monitor this frequency." He dropped the radio and glanced at Amira, who had taken a seat at a nearby console and was fitting an earphone. "Servos?"

"On line," she replied.

"So what will we see?" McFarlane asked. Already, he could anticipate Lloyd's barrage of questions during the next videoconference.

"Nothing," said Glinn. "We're only raising it six centimeters. There might be a little crackling of the earth above." He nodded to Rochefort. "Bring the jacks up to sixty tons each."

Rochefort's hands moved across the keyboard. "Jacks are uniformly engaging. No slippage."

There was a faint, subaudible vibration in the ground. Glinn and Rochefort bent close to the screen, examining the data that scrolled past. They seemed perfectly calm and unconcerned. Typing, waiting, typing some more. It seemed so routine. Not exactly the kind of meteorite hunting McFarlane was used to: digging in some sheikh's backyard by moonlight, heart in mouth, muffling every bite of the shovel.

"Bring the jacks up to seventy," said Glinn.

"Done."

There was a long, boring wait.

"Damn," Rochefort muttered. "I'm getting no movement. Nothing."

"Bring them up to eighty."

Rochefort tapped on some keys. There was a pause, then he shook his head.

"Rachel?" Glinn asked.

"Nothing wrong with the servos."

There was another silence, longer this time.

"We should have seen movement at sixty-seven tons per jack." Glinn waited a moment, then spoke again. "Raise it to one hundred."

Rochefort tapped the keyboard. McFarlane glanced at the two faces illuminated in the gleam of Rochefort's monitor. Suddenly, the tension in the hut had risen dramatically.

"Nothing?" asked Glinn, something like concern in his voice.

"It's still sitting there." Rochefort's face was even more pinched than usual.

Glinn straightened up. He slowly walked to the window, his fingers squeaking on the glass as he cleared a hole through the frost.

Minutes crawled by while Rochefort remained glued to the computer and Amira monitored the servos. Then Glinn turned.

"All right. Let's lower the jacks, examine the settings, and try again."

Suddenly a strange keening seemed to fill the room, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was almost ghostly. McFarlane felt his skin crawl.

Rochefort was suddenly intent on the monitor. "Slumping in sector six," he said, his fingers flying over the keyboard.

The sound subsided.

"What the hell was that?" McFarlane asked.

Glinn shook his head. "It looks like we might have lifted the meteorite just a millimeter in sector six, but then it subsided and pushed the jacks back."

"Getting another shift," Rochefort said suddenly, a note of alarm in his voice.

Glinn strode over and peered at the screen. "It's asymmetrical. Lower the jacks to ninety, quickly."

A patter of keystrokes, and Glinn stepped back, frowning. "What's with sector six?"

"The jacks seemed to have locked at a hundred tons," Rochefort said. "They won't go down."

"Your analysis?"

"The rock may be settling toward that sector. If so, a lot of weight has just shifted onto them."

"Zero out all the jacks."

To McFarlane, the scene seemed almost surreal. There was no sound, no dramatic subterranean rumbling; just a group of tense people gathered around flickering monitors.

Rochefort stopped typing. "All of sector six has locked up. The jacks must have frozen under the weight."

"Can we zero the rest?"

"If I do that, the meteorite might destabilize."

"Destabilize," McFarlane repeated. "You mean, as in tilt?"

Glinn's eyes glided toward him, then returned to the computer screen. "Suggestions, Mr. Rochefort?" he asked coolly.

The engineer leaned back, licked the tip of his left index finger, and placed it against his right thumb. "Here's what I think. We leave the jacks as is. Keep them in position. Then we release the fluid from the emergency hydraulic valves on the sector six jacks. Unfreeze them."

"How?" Glinn asked.

After a moment, Rochefort replied, "Manually."

Glinn held up his radio. "Garza?"

"Roger."

"You follow this?"

"Roger that."

"Your opinion?"

"I agree with Gene. We must've seriously underestimated the weight of this baby."

Glinn swiveled his gray eyes back to Rochefort. "And who do you suggest should drain the jacks?"

"I wouldn't ask anyone to do it but myself. Then we'll let the meteorite settle back down to a stable resting place, set additional jacks, and try again."

"You're going to need a second person," came Garza's voice over the radio. "That would be me."

"I'm not going to send both my chief engineer and my construction manager underneath that rock," said Glinn. "Mr. Rochefort, analyze the risk."

Rochefort did some calculations on a pocket calculator. "The jacks are rated to stand maximum pressure for sixteen hours."

"What about higher-than-maximum? Assume one hundred percent above maximum."

"The time-failure rate gets shorter." Rochefort made another series of calculations. "However, the chance of failure in the next thirty minutes is less than one percent."

"That's acceptable," said Glinn. "Mr. Rochefort, take a crew member of your choice along." He glanced at his pocket watch. "You have thirty minutes from this moment, not one second more. Good luck."

Rochefort stood up and looked at them, his face pale. "Remember, sir, we don't believe in luck," he said. "But thank you all the same."

Isla Desolación,

10:24 A.M.

ROCHEFORT OPENED the door to the decrepit hut and moved the nail kegs aside, exposing the access tube and its halo of bright fluorescent light. He gripped the rungs of the ladder and began to descend, palmtop computer and radio jiggling on his belt. Evans followed behind, humming an off-key variant of "Muskrat Ramble."

The main emotion Rochefort felt was embarrassment. Brief as it was, the walk from the communications hut had taken an eternity. Although the staging area was deserted, he had nevertheless sensed dozens of eyes trained directly — and no doubt reproachfully — on his back.

He had set fifty percent more jacks than deemed necessary. It was within EES operating guidelines, and it had seemed like a safe margin. But he had miscalculated. He should have invoked double overage, set two hundred jacks. But the time pressure had always been there, hovering over everything, flowing from Lloyd to Glinn and infecting everything they did. So Rochefort had suggested a hundred and fifty, and Glinn had not questioned his decision. The fact was, nobody had said anything to him about the mistake — or even hinted one was made. But that did not negate the fact that he had been wrong. And Rochefort could not bear to be wrong. He felt saturated by bitterness. Reaching the bottom, he moved quickly along the tunnel, ducking his head instinctively below the lines of fluorescent lights. Chains of ice crystals, formed from the condensed breath of the workers, stuck like feathers to the spars and trusses. Evans, coming up behind, dragged a finger through them as he whistled.

Rochefort was humiliated, not worried. He knew that even if the jacks in sector six failed — a minuscule possibility — it was unlikely the meteorite would do anything except settle back down into place. It had sat there for untold millennia, and the forces of mass and inertia dictated it would probably stay that way. The worst-case scenario meant they'd be back where they started from.

Back where they started from ... His mouth set in a hard line. It meant setting more jacks, perhaps even digging a few more tunnels. He had strongly recommended to Glinn that all Lloyd Museum personnel be left behind; that it should be strictly an EES expedition; that Lloyd's only personal involvement should be to take final possession of the meteorite and pay the bill. For some unknown reason of his own, Glinn had allowed Lloyd to get daily updates. This was the sort of thing that resulted.

The tunnel reached sector one, then veered left at a ninety-degree angle. Rochefort followed the main tunnel another forty feet, then took one of the side branches that curved around toward the far side of the meteorite. The radio burbled and he pulled it from his belt. "Approaching sector six," he said.

"Diagnostics indicate that all jacks in that sector, with the exception of four and six, need to be unlocked," said Glinn. "We estimate you can complete the task in sixteen minutes."

Twelve, thought Rochefort, but he responded, "Affirmative."

The side tunnel angled around the front of the meteorite and split into three access tubes. Rochefort chose the center tube. Ahead, he could see the jacks of sector six, yellow against the bloodred meteorite. They ran ahead in a long line from the end of the access tube. Walking forward, he examined all fifteen in turn. They looked perfectly secure, their claw feet firmly anchored to the base of the wall struts, servo cables running away in rivers of wire and cable. The jacks did not appear to have moved in the slightest. It was hard to believe they were each frozen under a hundred tons of strain.

With a sigh of irritation, he crouched by the first jack. The belly of the meteorite curved above him, ribbed as smoothly and as regularly as if worked by a machine. Evans came forward with a small cami-tool for unlocking the hydraulic valves. "Looks like a great big bowling ball, doesn't it?" he said cheerfully.

Rochefort grunted and pointed toward the valve stem of the first jack. Evans knelt beside it, gripped the stem with his cami, and began to turn it gingerly.

"Don't worry, it's not going to break," Rochefort snapped. "Let's move. We've got another twelve waiting."

"More rapidly, Evans spun the stem through a ninety-degree twist. With a small hammer, Rochefort adroitly tapped out the manual slide on the rear of the jack, exposing the safety plate. A red light went on, indicating the valve was unlocked and ready to open.

After the first jack, Evans grew less hesitant, and they began to work quickly in tandem, moving down the line, skipping the jacks numbered four and six. At the last jack, number fifteen, they stopped. Rochefort looked at his watch. It had taken only eight minutes. All that was left was to go back down the line, punching the release buttons on each valve. Although the fluid was under intense pressure, an internal regulator would ensure even drainage, slowly easing the load off the jack. Meanwhile, the controlling computer back in the communications hut would be lowering in tandem the hydraulic pressure on all the other jacks. The situation would return to normal, and then all they needed to do was set more jacks and try again. He'd do Glinn one better, set three hundred jacks. But they would need at least a day to ferry them over from the ship, get them in place, wire the servos, run diagnostics. They would need more tunnels, too... He shook his head. He should have started with three hundred the first time.

"Feels hot in here," said Evans, tugging back his hood.

Rochefort didn't answer. Heat and cold were one and the same to him. The two men turned and began walking down the line of jacks, stopping at each to raise the safety plate and push the emergency fluid release button.

Halfway down the line, a faint, mouselike sound brought Rochefort to a halt.

Although it was important to begin releasing fluid from all the jacks together, the sound was so unusual that Rochefort glanced down the row of jacks, trying to determine its source. It seemed to have come from the front of the row of jacks. As he looked in that direction, the sound came again: a kind of whispered, agonized creak. He narrowed his eyes. Jack number one didn't look right; it seemed oddly crooked.

He didn't need time to think. "Get out!" he shouted. "Now!"

He rose to his feet and sprinted for the access tube, Evans at his heels. He knew that there must be more weight on those jacks than they had guessed in even their most pessimistic assumptions: a lot more weight. Just how much more would determine whether they would get out in time.

He could hear Evans running behind him, feet thudding, grunting with each step. But even before they reached the access tube the first jack gave with a terrifying crack, followed by a second crack, and then a third, as the jacks failed in sequence. There was a pause, then a stuttering series of pops, like a burst of machine gun fire, as the rest of the jacks failed. Instantly, Rochefort was surrounded by blinding sprays of hydraulic fluid. There was a sound like a whirr of a vast sewing machine as the tunnel's struts and braces began to unravel. He ran desperately through the spray, the intense force of the pressurized fluid tearing his coat to ribbons and searing his flesh. He calculated that the probability of survival was dropping fast.

He knew it was exactly zero when the meteorite tipped toward him with a great hollow boom, buckling steel as it came, squirting dirt and mud and ice, looming into his field of vision until all he saw was a shining, inexorable, pitiless red.

Rolvaag,

Noon

WHEN MCFARLANE arrived at the Rolvaag's library, he found a hushed group scattered among the chairs and couches. Shock and discouragement hung in the air. Garza stared, unmoving, out of the wall of windows, across the Franklin Channel toward Isla Deceit. Amira sat in a corner, knees huddled beneath her chin. Britton and First Mate Howell were speaking in low tones. Even the reclusive Dr. Brambell was on hand, drumming his fingers on the arms of his chair and glancing impatiently at his watch. Of the major players, only Glinn was absent. As McFarlane took a seat, the library door opened again and the head of EES slipped in, a slim folder beneath one arm. On his heels was John Puppup, his smile and sprightly step out of place among the somber group. McFarlane was not surprised to see him: though Puppup was disinclined to go ashore, while Glinn was on board the Rolvaag the Yaghan seemed perpetually at his side, following him around like a faithful dog.

All eyes turned to Glinn as he stepped into the middle of the room. Privately, McFarlane wondered just how hard the man was taking all this: two of his men, including his chief engineer, dead. But he seemed, as usual, calm, neutral, unaffected.

Glinn's gray eyes flickered over the group. "Gene Rochefort had been with Effective Engineering Solutions from the beginning. Frank Evans was a relatively new employee, but his death is no less regretted. This is a tragedy for all of us in this room. But I'm not here to eulogize. Neither Gene nor Frank would have wanted that. We made an important discovery, but we made it the hard way. The Desolación meteorite is a great deal heavier than any of us predicted. Careful analysis of the failure data from the jacks, along with some highly sensitive gravimetric measurements, have given us a new and more accurate estimate of mass. And that mass is twenty-five thousand tons."

Despite his lingering sense of shock, McFarlane felt himself go cold at these words. He made a quick calculation: that gave it a specific gravity of about 190. One hundred and ninety times denser than water. A cubic foot of it would weigh... Good Lord. Almost six tons.

But two men were dead. Two more men, McFarlane corrected himself, thinking of the pathetic litter of bones that had been his ex-partner.

"Double overage is our policy," Glinn was saying. "We planned as if everything would be twice our best estimate-twice the expense, twice the effort — and twice the mass. That means we already planned for a rock that weighed almost this much. So I'm here to tell you that we can proceed on schedule. We still have the means at our disposal to retrieve it, bring it to the ship, and load it into the holding tank."

It seemed to McFarlane as if, mingled among Glinn's cool tones, there was an odd note: of something almost like triumph.

"Just a minute," McFarlane said. "Two men just died. We have a responsibility —"

"You are not responsible," Glinn interrupted smoothly. "We are. And we're fully insured."

"I'm not talking about insurance. I'm talking about two people's lives. Two people were killed trying to move this meteorite."

"We took every reasonable precaution. The probability of failure was less than one percent. Nothing is free of risk, as you yourself so recently pointed out. And in terms of casualties, we're actually on schedule."

"On schedule?" McFarlane could hardly believe what he heard. He glanced at Amira, and then at Garza, failing to see in their faces the outrage he felt. "What the hell does that mean?"

"In any complex engineering situation, no matter how much care is taken, casualties occur. By this stage, we had expected two casualties."

"Jesus, that's a heartless calculation."

"On the contrary. When the Golden Gate Bridge was being designed, it was estimated that three dozen men would lose their lives during construction. That was neither coldblooded nor heartless — it was just part of the planning process. What is heartless is bringing people into danger without calculating the risk. Rochefort and Evans knew those risks, and accepted them." Glinn looked straight at McFarlane, speaking almost in a monotone. "I assure you, I'm grieving in ways you will never know. But I was hired to retrieve this meteorite, and that's what I intend to do. I can't afford to let personal feelings cloud my judgment or weaken my resolve."

Suddenly Britton spoke up. McFarlane could see outrage glittering in her eyes. "Tell me, Mr. Glinn. Just how many others have you calculated need to die before we bring the Desolación meteorite home?"

For the briefest of moments, Glinn's neutral veneer seemed to slip at this salvo from an unexpected direction. "None, if I can help it," he said more coldly. "We will do everything in our power to prevent anyone from getting hurt or killed. And your implication that I find a certain number of deaths acceptable only shows your ignorance of risk assessment. The point is this: no matter how careful we are, there may be casualties. It's like flying: despite everyone's best efforts, planes crash. You can calculate the probable death rate for any particular flight. But we still continue to fly. That decision to keep flying doesn't make the deaths any more acceptable. Do I make myself understood?"

Britton stared fixedly at Glinn but said nothing further.

Then Glinn's voice suddenly became gentle. "Your concerns are genuine, and understandable. I appreciate that." He turned, and his voice hardened slightly. "But Dr. McFarlane, we can't retrieve this meteorite by half measures."

McFarlane flushed. "I don't want anyone else getting hurt. That's not the way I operate."

"I can't make that promise," Glinn said. "You, of all people, know how unique this meteorite is. You can't assign it a value in dollars, and you can't assign it a value in human life. It all boils down to the one question, which I will direct to you as the representative of the Lloyd Museum — do you still want it?"

McFarlane glanced around the room. All eyes had turned toward him. In the silence that followed, he realized he could not bring himself to answer the question.

After a moment, Glinn nodded slowly. "We'll recover the bodies and give them a heroes' burial when we return to New York."

Dr. Brambell cleared his throat, and his querulous Irish voice sang out. "I'm afraid, Mr. Glinn, there won't be anything more to bury than, ah, two boxes of wet dirt."

Glinn darted Brambell an icy look. "Do you have anything else of substance to add, Doctor?"

Brambell crossed one green-smocked leg over the other and tented his fingers. "I can tell you how Dr. Masangkay died."

There was a sudden hush.

"Go on," said Glinn finally.

"He was struck by a bolt of lightning."

McFarlane struggled to absorb this. His old partner, at the very moment of making the discovery of a lifetime — struck and killed by lightning? It seemed like something out of a bad novel. And yet in hindsight, it made sense. The fulgurites he'd seen at the site were a tip-off. On top of everything else, the meteorite was a gigantic lightning rod.

"Your evidence?" Glinn asked.

"The bones were burned in a pattern that suggested lightning — a massive charge of electricity passing through the body. I've seen it before. And only an electrical blast on the order of lightning could cause the kind of scaling and shattering those bones evidenced. Lightning, you see, not only burns bones and instantly boils the blood, causing an explosive release of steam, but it also triggers sudden muscle contractions that shatter bones. In some cases, it strikes the body with such force that it mimics, say, being hit by a truck. Dr. Masangkay's body virtually exploded."

The doctor dawdled over the word "exploded," lingering on each syllable with a loving drawl. McFarlane shuddered.

"Thank you, Doctor," said Glinn dryly. "I will also be eager to hear your analysis of the biota found in the eighty bags of sample earth we removed from the vicinity of the meteorite. I'll have them sent down to the medical lab right away."

Glinn opened his folder. "If the meteorite attracts lightning, that's yet another reason to keep it covered. Let's move on. A moment ago, I said we could proceed on schedule. There will, however, have to be some adjustments. For example, the weight of the meteorite is so great that we are now forced to take the absolute shortest path from the impact site to the ship. That means bringing the meteorite through the snowfield, rather than around it. The meteorite can only be moved in a straight line, along a slope of constant descent. It won't be easy, and it will mean a lot of cutting and filling, but it can be done. Also, Captain Britton has advised me that a winter storm is moving in our direction. If it stays on course, we will have to factor it into our plans. To a certain extent, the cover will be welcome." He stood up. "I'll be preparing letters for the family of Gene Rochefort and for the widow of Frank Evans. If any of you would like to include a personal note, please get it to me before we dock in New York. And now, one final thing."

He glanced at McFarlane. "You told me that the coesite and impactite around the meteorite was formed thirty-two million years ago."

"Yes," said McFarlane.

"I want you to collect samples of the basalt flows and volcanic plug beyond the camp and date them as well. We clearly need to know more about the geology of this island. Did your second series of tests bring about any fresh conclusions?"

"Only fresh puzzles."

"In that case, island geology will be your next project." He looked around. "Anything else before we get back to work?"

"Yes, guv," came the reedy voice from the corner of the library. It was Puppup, forgotten by all. He was sitting in a straight-backed chair, hair disheveled, raising his hand and waving it like a schoolboy.

"Yes?" Glinn asked.

"You said that two people died."

Glinn did not answer. McFarlane, watching, noticed that Glinn did not meet Puppup's eyes in the way he met everyone else's.

"You said that maybe some more people are going to die."

"I said nothing of the sort," said Glinn crisply. "Now, if we're finished here —"

"What happens if everybody dies?" Puppup asked, his voice suddenly loud.

There was an awkward moment.

"Damn lunatic," Garza muttered under his breath.

Puppup merely pointed out the grimy window. All eyes turned.

Just beyond the rocky outline of Isla Deceit, dark against the failing sky, the gaunt prow of a destroyer was easing into view, its guns trained on the tanker.

Rolvaag,

12:25 P.M.

GLINN SLIPPED a hand into his pocket, withdrew a pair of miniature binoculars, and examined the ship. He had expected Vallenar to make another move; and this, apparently, was it.

Britton leapt out of her seat and strode to the window. "He looks like he's about to blow us out of the water," she said.

Glinn first examined the masts, and then the four-inch guns. He lowered the binoculars. "It's a bluff."

"How do you know that?"

"Check your Slick 32."

Britton turned to Howell.

"Slick shows no fire-control radar active along that line of bearing."

Britton glanced back at Glinn with a curious expression in her face.

Glinn handed her the binoculars. "He's pointing the guns at us, but he has no intention of firing them. You'll notice the fire-control radars aren't rotating."

"So I see." Britton returned the binoculars. "Stations fore and aft, Mr. Howell."

"Mr. Garza, will you make sure our reception room is ready, just in case?" Glinn pocketed the binoculars and glanced at Puppup. The mestizo had slumped back in his chair and was stroking his long, drooping mustaches. "Mr. Puppup, I would like to take a turn with you on deck, if you please."

Puppup's expression did not change. He stood and followed Glinn out of the library and down the wide corridor. Outside, a bitter wind blew across the bay, raising dancing whitecaps. Pieces of ice skittered across the deck. Glinn walked ahead, the little old man at his heels, until they reached the great rise of the bow. Here, Glinn stopped and leaned against an anchor windlass, gazing out at the distant destroyer. Now that Vallenar had made his move, the problem would be to anticipate his future actions. Glinn glanced covertly at Puppup. The only person on board who could shed light on Vallenar was the one he understood least. He had found himself unable to predict or control Puppup's actions. And the man dogged him like a shadow. It had proved surprisingly unsettling.

"Got a cigarette?" Puppup asked.

Glinn slid a new pack out of his pocket — Marlboros, worth their weight in gold — and handed it to Puppup. The man tore it open and tapped out a cigarette. "Match?"

Glinn lit his cigarette with a lighter.

"Thanks, guv." Puppup took a deep drag on the cigarette. "Bit parky out today, eh?"

"Yes it is." There was a pause. "Where did you learn your English, Mr. Puppup?"

"From the missionaries, didn't I? The only bit of schooling I had was from them."

"Did one of them come from London, by chance?"

"Both of them as did, sir."

Glinn waited a moment while Puppup smoked. Even considering the cultural differences, the man was remarkably difficult to read. In fact, Glinn had never met such an opaque individual.

He began slowly. "That's a nice ring," he said, pointing offhandedly at a little gold ring on the mestizo's pinkie.

Puppup held it up with a grin. "That it is. Pure gold, a pearl, two rubies, and all."

"A gift from Queen Adelaide, I presume?"

Puppup started, the cigarette jiggling in his mouth. But he recovered quickly. "Right you are."

"And what happened to the queen's bonnet?"

Puppup looked at him curiously. "Buried with the missus. Looked a fair old treat in it, too."

"Was Fuegia Basket your great-great-great-grandmother, then?"

"In a manner of speaking." Puppup's eyes remained veiled.

"You come from a distinguished family." As Glinn spoke, he looked very closely at Puppup's eyes. When they flicked away, he knew the comment had had its intended effect. Still, it was essential that this be handled with the greatest finesse. He would have only one chance to unlock John Puppup.

"Your wife must have died a long time ago."

Puppup still didn't answer.

"Smallpox?"

Puppup shook his head. "Measles."

"Ah," Glinn said. "My grandfather died of measles, also." This was, in fact, true.

Puppup nodded.

"We have something else in common," said Glinn.

Puppup looked at him sideways.

"My great-great-great-grandfather was Captain Fitzroy." Glinn spoke the lie very carefully, keeping his eyes unmoving.

Puppup's own eyes slid back out to sea, but Glinn could see the uncertainty in them. The eyes betrayed, every time. Unless, of course, you trained them.

"Strange how history repeats itself," he went on. "I have an engraving of your great-great-great-grandmother, when she was a little girl, meeting the queen. It hangs in my parlor." For the Yaghan, establishing the family connection was everything, if Glinn's reading of the ethnographic literature was correct.

As he listened, Puppup grew tense.

"John, may I see the ring again?"

Without looking at him, Puppup raised his brown hand Glinn took it gently in his own, applying a warm pressure to the palm. He had noticed the ring the first time he had seen him, drunk in the snug in Puerto Williams. It had taken his people back in New York a few days to determine what it was, and where it had come from.

"Fate is a strange thing, John. My great-great-greatgrandfather, Captain Fitzroy, of the HMS Beagle, kidnapped your great-great-great-grandmother, Fuegia Basket, and took her to England to meet the queen. And now I have kidnapped you," he added with a smile. "Ironic, isn't it? Except that I won't be taking you to England. Soon, you'll be home again." It was popular in those days to bring "primitives" back from the farthest reaches of the earth to display at court. Fuegia Basket had gone back to Tierra del Fuego on the Beagle several years later, with the bonnet and ring given her by the queen. Another passenger on that voyage had been Mr. Charles Darwin.

Although Puppup did not look at him, the opacity seemed to be fading from his eyes.