Beyond the Ice Limit

3

BACK AT EES headquarters on Little West 12th Street, in the boardroom high above the old Meatpacking District of New York City, Gideon took his place at the conference room table. There were only three of them, Garza, Glinn, and himself, and it was three o’clock in the morning. Glinn, having apparently dispensed with the need for sleep, seemed to expect his employees to do so as well.

Gideon had begun to wonder if Glinn really had changed. He had never seen the man quite so driven, in his own quietly intense way. The meeting with Lloyd in the gigantic, one-man mental hospital had evidently shaken him badly.

The man serving them all coffee silently retreated, shutting the door behind him. The room was dim, the lights low. Glinn, seated at the head of the table, his hands clasped in front of him, allowed the silence to gather before speaking. He turned his two gray eyes on Gideon.

“Well, what did you think of our visit to Palmer Lloyd?”

“He freaked me out,” said Gideon.

“Do you know now why I wanted you to meet him?”

“As you said. To seek his approval, get his blessing. After all, that thing down there cost him a lot of money—not to mention his sanity.”

“That’s part of it. I also wanted to—as you put it—freak you out. To impress on you the gravity of our undertaking. You need to walk into this with your eyes open: because without you, we cannot succeed.”

“You really caused the deaths of a hundred and eight people?”

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t there an investigation? No charges were filed?”

“There were certain, ah, unusual circumstances touching on the relationship between Chile and the United States that encouraged both state departments to make sure the investigation was not overly thorough.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

Glinn turned to Garza. “Manuel, will you please give Gideon the necessary background?”

Garza nodded, taking a large folder from his briefcase and laying it on the table. “You already know some of this. I’m going to start from the beginning anyway. If you have any questions, feel free to interrupt. Six years ago, EES was approached by Palmer Lloyd for a peculiar assignment.”

“The same Palmer Lloyd I just saw in Dearborne Park.”

“Yes. The billionaire was planning to build a natural history museum in the Hudson River Valley. He was collecting the rarest, finest, and biggest of everything—money was no object. He had already snagged the biggest diamond, the largest T. rex, a real Egyptian pyramid. Then he got a report that the largest meteorite in the world had been found. It lay on Isla Desolación, an uninhabited island in the Cape Horn Islands at the very tip of South America. The islands belong to Chile. Lloyd knew that Chile would never allow the meteorite to leave. He therefore hired EES, and a meteorite hunter named Sam McFarlane, to steal it.”

“Excuse me,” said Glinn, “steal isn’t quite the right word. We did nothing illegal. We leased mineral rights to Isla Desolación, which allowed us to remove iron in any form.”

“Steal may not be the most apt description,” said Garza, “but it was a deception.”

At this rebuke, Glinn fell silent. Garza continued. “The meteorite was extremely heavy—twenty-five thousand tons. It was a deep-red color, very dense, and it had other, ah, peculiar properties. So under the cover of this iron-ore-mining operation, we outfitted a ship, the Rolvaag; sailed to the island; excavated the rock; and loaded it on board. Suffice to say, this was a challenging engineering project. But we succeeded—quite brilliantly, in fact. And then we were caught. A rogue Chilean destroyer captain figured out what we were up to. He commanded the Almirante Ramirez, the ship Lloyd mentioned. Instead of informing his superiors, he decided to play the hero and chased us southward to the Ice Limit.”

“Ice Limit. You’ve used that term before. What is it, exactly?”

“It’s the frontier where the southern oceans meet the Antarctic pack ice. We played hide-and-seek among the bergs. The Rolvaag was shot up in the confrontation, but ultimately we managed to sink the destroyer.”

“You sank a destroyer? How?”

“It’s a complicated story, best left to your briefing book. In any case, the Rolvaag, carrying the twenty-five-thousand-ton meteorite in its hold, had been badly damaged by the destroyer. The weather worsened. A point came where we had a choice: either jettison the rock—or sink.”

“How do you jettison a twenty-five-thousand-ton rock?”

“We’d installed a dead man’s switch for that purpose, just in case. Throw the switch, and the meteorite would be dropped through a door in the hull.”

“Wouldn’t that founder the ship?”

“No. A large amount of water would come in before the door could slide shut, but the ship was fitted with pumps and self-sealing bulkheads that would have handled it. The crew and captain wanted to dump the rock…” Garza seemed to hesitate, glancing at Glinn.

“Tell the full story, Manuel. Spare nothing.”

“In the end, everyone wanted to dump the rock. Even Lloyd came around. But Eli alone had the code to the dead man’s switch. He insisted the ship could ride it out. They begged, pleaded, threatened—and he refused. But Eli was wrong. The Rolvaag sank.”

Garza glanced at Glinn again.

“Let me tell the rest,” said Glinn quietly. “Yes, I refused to pull the switch. I was wrong. The captain ordered an evacuation. Some got off, but many did not. The captain…” He hesitated, temporarily losing his voice. “The captain, a woman of great courage, went down with the ship. Many others died in the lifeboats or froze to death on a nearby ice island before help arrived.”

“And Lloyd? What happened to him?”

“He was evacuated in the first lifeboat—against his will, I might add.”

“How did you survive?”

“I was in the hold, trying to secure the meteorite. But it finally broke out of its cradle and split the ship in half. There was an explosion. It seemed as if the meteorite, when it came into contact with salt water, reacted in an unusual way, generating a shock wave. I was thrown clear of the ship. I remember coming to on a raft of floating debris. I was badly injured. They found me a day later, close to death.”

Glinn lapsed into silence, toying with his cup of coffee.

“So now the thing’s just lying on the seabed. Why all the worry, the talk of danger? And…of aliens?”

Glinn pushed the coffee cup away. “It was McFarlane, the meteorite hunter, who figured out what it really was.”

This was followed by a long silence.

“There’s a respected theory in astronomy called Panspermia,” Glinn finally continued. “It holds that life may have spread through the galaxy in bacteria or spores carried on meteorites or in clouds of dust. But that theory assumed microscopic life. Everyone missed the obvious idea that life might be spread by seeds. A gigantic seed would better survive the cold and intense radiation of outer space by its sheer size and resistance. It’s the same reason why coconuts are so large: to survive long ocean voyages. The galaxy has many water-covered planets and moons in which such a seed might fall and then sprout.”

“You’re saying this meteorite was actually just such a seed? And when the Rolvaag sank, it went to the bottom and was…planted?”

“Yes. Two miles beneath the surface. And then it sprouted.”

Gideon shook his head. “Incredible. If true.”

“Oh, it’s true. It sank roots and grew upward like a giant tree—rapidly. Seismic stations around the world noted a number of shallow quakes on the seafloor at the site. Several small tsunamis raked the coasts of South Georgia and the Falkland Islands. But it was all happening two miles deep, and the seismic signature of the quakes looked like the product of undersea volcanic eruptions. So did the mini tsunamis. Since it was in an area far outside of any shipping lanes and posed no risk to anyone, the ‘undersea volcano’ was generally disregarded. Even volcanologists ignored it, as it was simply too deep and too dangerous to study. And then it went quiescent. All of which explains why nobody figured out what was really going on—except me, of course. And Sam McFarlane. And Palmer Lloyd.” He shifted in his chair. “But over the past five years, we’ve developed a plan to deal with this problem. Manuel will summarize it for you.”

Garza looked at Gideon. “We’re going to kill it.”

“But you said it had gone quiescent. Why go to the trouble and the expense—not to mention the danger?”

“Because it’s alien. It’s huge. It’s dangerous. Just because it’s quiescent doesn’t mean it will remain so—in fact, our models predict exactly the opposite. Think about it for a moment. What will happen if it blooms, or produces more seeds? What if these plants spread to cover the bottom of the oceans? What if they can also grow on land? No matter which way you look at it, this thing’s a threat. It could destroy the earth.”

“So how are you going to kill it?”

“We have in our possession a plutonium core of about thirty kilograms, a neutron trigger device, fast and slow shaped HE, high-speed transistors—everything needed to assemble a nuke.”

“Where in hell did you get that stuff?”

“Everything’s for sale in certain former satellite states these days.”

Gideon shook his head. “Jesus.”

“We also have a nuclear weapons expert on staff.”

“Who?”

“You, of course.”

Gideon stared.

“That’s right,” said Glinn quietly. “Now you know the real reason I hired you in the first place. Because we always knew this day was coming.”