Earth

  There are limits, Stan reassured himself. Mankind may be able to mess with the climate, but we can’t change the seasons or shift Earth’s axial tilt.

  Almost at once, however, he reconsidered. Is even that beyond our reach now? He pondered some implications of Alex Lustig’s equations and found himself weighing notions unimaginable only weeks ago. I wonder if it might be possible to …

  Stan shook his head firmly. Such meddling had already brought about nothing but calamity.

  “Kalâtdlit-Nunât.”

  Stan turned to his traveling companion. “I beg your pardon?”

  Teresa Tikhana lifted a small reading plaque. “Kalâtdlit-Nunât. It’s what the Inuit people—the Eskimos—call Greenland.”

  “The Inuit? I thought their second language was Danish.”

  Teresa shrugged. “Who says two languages are enough? How does the saying go? ‘A man with only one ethnicity stands on just one leg.’ … Come on, Stan. How many languages do you speak?”

  He shrugged. “You mean besides International English and Physics? … And the Maori and Simglish and Han they taught us in school?” He paused. “Well, I can get along in General Nihon and French, but …”

  He laughed, seeing her point. “All right. Let’s hear it again.”

  Teresa coached him till he could pronounce a few indigenous politenesses. Not that there’d be much time for idle chitchat where they were going—a rough outpost in the middle of a wasteland. He’d always wanted to see this tremendous frozen island, but this mission wasn’t for tourism.

  Stan glanced across the aisle. The other members of their expedition had gathered near a forward window, whispering and pointing as the cargo ships and vacuum-packed icebergs fell behind. Stan listened now and then, to make sure the technicians kept their voices low and stayed away from taboo subjects.

  “You’re sure we can’t use the old NATO base at Godhavn?” Teresa asked. “It’s got every facility. And the science commune using it now is pretty free and open, I hear.”

  “They’re mostly atmosphere researchers, right?” Stan asked.

  “Yeah. First set up to monitor radioactive fallout from the Alps. Now they’re part of the Ozone Restoration Project, such as it is.”

  “Reason enough to avoid the place, then. You’d surely be recognized.”

  The woman astronaut blinked. “Oh, yeah.” Self-consciously Teresa brushed back strands of newly blonde hair, dyed just for this journey. “I—guess I’m just not used to this way of thinking, Stan.”

  In other words, she hadn’t the advantage of growing up as he had, during the paranoid twentieth, when people routinely maintained poses for the sake of anything from ideology to profit to love—sometimes for whole lifetimes.

  “Try to remember,” he urged, dropping his voice. “We’re breaking Danish territorial law, bringing you in under a false passport. You’re supposed to be on vacation in Australia, right? Not halfway around the world, smuggling undocumented gear into … Kalâtdlit-Nunât.”

  She tried to look serious, but couldn’t suppress a smile. “All right, Stan. I’ll remember.”

  He sighed. If their conspiracy hadn’t been critically shorthanded, he’d never have agreed to bringing Teresa along. Her competence, charm and fascinating mind would be welcome of course. But the risk was awfully great.

  “Come on,” she said, nudging his elbow. “Now you’re starting to look like Alex Lustig.”

  Nervously, he laughed. “That bad?”

  She nodded. “I thought we ’nauts were a sober-pussed bunch. But Lustig makes Glenn Spivey look like a yuk artist. Even when he smiles, I feel like I’m attending a wake.”

  Maybe, Stan thought. But how would you look if you had that poor boy’s burdens on your back?

  Stan withheld comment though. He knew Teresa, too, was suffering from a coping reaction. Her way of dealing with this awful crisis was to go into denial. Certainly she’d never let it interfere with her work, but Stan imagined she simply let the reason for their desperate venture slip her mind, any chance she got.

  “It’s poor Alex’s upbringing at fault,” Stan answered in his best Old Boy accent. “English public schools do that to a lad, don’t’cha know.”

  Teresa laughed, and Stan was glad to hear the pure, untroubled sound. She has enough reason for denial. Of all the members of their cabal, she had been the first struck personally by the lashing tail of the taniwha—the monster in the Earth’s core.

  More of them would share that honor before long. Stan thought of Ellen and the grandkids and his daughter back in England. Faces of students and friends kept popping up at odd moments, especially during sleep. Sometimes it felt like going through a photo album of treasures already lost.

  Stop. It’s useless to maunder this way.

  He sought distraction outside. The Northwest Passage lay behind them, now. To the left, fleets of smaller boats could be seen threading craggy offshore islets, bound for a bustling seaport just ahead.

  “Godhavn,” Teresa said, reading her guidebook again. She gestured at the piers and factories lining the bay. “And what does the Net say is this city’s principal industry?” She inhaled deeply through her nose. “I’ll give you three guesses.”

  Stan didn’t have to sniff the cannery aroma. Those trawlers were returning from the rich banks offshore—where arctic upwellings nourished clouds of silvery fish. So far UNEPA safeguards had managed to save that vital resource for mankind’s ravenous billions, so all wasn’t lost up here. Not yet at least.

  The canneries had created a boomtown, and no lack of eager immigrants seeking their fortunes on a new frontier. Others came simply for elbow room, to escape the close press of neighbors back home.

  It probably wasn’t all that different a thousand years ago, Stan figured. Back then, too, men chased wealth and breathing space. And Red Erik knew just how to lure them to this faraway shore. Even its name—Greenland—was an early, inspired example of sneaky advertising.

  Viking settlements had sprouted along the rocky coast. And the Scandinavians were lucky at first, arriving during a warm spell brought on by sunspots and Earth’s subtly variable orbit.

  But what astronomy gave, astronomy could take away. By the fifteenth century, cycles had turned again. The “little ice age”—a time of scanty summers and scarcer sunspots—froze the rivers Seine and Thames at Christmastime, and icebergs were seen off Spain. Ironically, Irish sailors reported news from the struggling Greenland colony only decades before another dawning—when Christopher Columbus and John Cabot drew the world’s attention back to strange lands rimming the ocean sea. But by the time voyagers next set foot on the great island, all sign of living Europeans had vanished.

  Stan found it hard to imagine history repeating itself here. The wharves and factories all shared a thick-walled look of determined permanence, as if defying nature to do her worst.

  And yet, Stan pondered. Other eras had their certainties, and look at them now.

  Soon the cannery town fell away as their pilot steered up one of the broad valleys, carved over ages by endless tons of ancient, compressed snow. Now the vales below flowed with newborn streams. Reindeer clattered over algae-stained rocks, spooked by the airship’s shadow into skittish flight.

  Up ahead lay the grand glacier itself. Here, and in Antarctica, the ice ranges grew three kilometers thick, storing half the fresh water on Earth. Only the fringes of that stockpile had melted so far, but when it thawed in earnest, the world’s coastlines would really start to rise.

  The removal of so much weighty ice couldn’t help but affect the crust underneath. Rebound-reverberations were already being felt far away. In Iceland, two fierce new volcanoes sputtered. There would be more as time went on.

  Especially if we don’t solve the problem of gazer beams coupling with surface matter, Stan thought. It still puzzled him that resonant gravity waves sometimes set off tremors in the outer crust. He hoped there’d be an answer soon, or just trying to get rid of the taniwha mi
ght cause massive harm.

  Two days to get set up … another three to grow our thumper and test Manella’s data-links to the other stations … got to figure ways to work in tandem with Alex’s group—and George’s and Kenda’s …

  He’d gone over it all so many times, and still it seemed a wild-eyed plan—trying to shove a superheavy, microscopic bit of folded space into a higher orbit by poking at it repeatedly with invisible rays … yep, it sounded pretty farfetched, all right.

  Stan caught a metallic glint up ahead, just short of the fast-approaching ice sheet. That must be their goal, where the glacier’s retreat had recently revealed clues to an enigma. Where some believed an awful killing had taken place a long time ago.

  They say every spot on Earth has a story, a library of stories to tell. If that is so, then this island specializes in mysteries.

  With rising impatience Stan watched Greenland’s second coast, its inner shore, where a new, encroaching fringe of land lapped against a continent of ancient whiteness.

  The tiny scientific outpost perched beside an icy rivulet, near enough towering cliffs to wear their shadow each long arctic morning. A greeting party waited by the mooring towers as automatic snaring devices seized the zep and gently drew it down.

  Every other dirigible landing in Teresa’s experience had been at commercial aerodromes, so she found this rough-and-ready process fascinating, and oddly similar to the no-frills approach used in space.

  The pilot certainly would have let her sit in the cockpit, if only she identified herself. But of course that wasn’t possible. So she made do instead by leaning out the window like a gawking tourist, bursting with questions she wasn’t allowed to ask and suggestions she dared not offer. After the gondola settled with a bump and scrape, Teresa was the last to get off, lingering by the control cabin listening to the crew go through their shutdown checklist.

  The Tangoparu techs had already begun offloading their supplies when she finally debarked. Teresa started over to lend a hand, but Stan Goldman called her to meet some people wearing knit caps and Pendleton shirts. It was hard to pay attention to introductions, though. She felt distracted by the ice plateau, towering so near it set her senses quivering.

  Then there was the smell—cool, invigorating, and inexplicably drawing. She helped her colleagues haul the gear and inflate their solitary dome. But all the while Teresa kept glancing toward the glacier, feeling its presence. At last, when all the heavy labor was done, she could bear it no longer. “Stan, I’ve got to go to the ice.”

  He nodded. “I understand. We’ll erect the toilet next. I’m sorry …”

  Teresa laughed. “No, I mean really. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. It’s just something I have to do.”

  The elderly physicist blinked twice and then smiled. “Of course. You worked hard studying gravitonics all the way out here. Go ahead. We’ll just be setting up the vats anyway. You won’t be needed until tomorrow morning.”

  She touched his sleeve. “Thanks, Stan.” Then, impulsively, Teresa leaned over and kissed his grizzled cheek.

  The Tangoparu team had set up some distance from the rest of the settlement, so she shunned the main path and set off cross-country, over the gravelly moraine. Having never approached a primary glacier before, she had no way of judging distances. There were no trees or familiar objects for comparison; by eye alone, it might be anywhere from one to ten kilometers away. But her inner sensoria told Teresa she could make it there and back before supper. Anyway, nothing out here could harm her even if she miscalculated. In her thermal suit she could even wait out the brief summer night if she had to.

  No, this wasn’t a dangerous place—certainly not compared to space.

  Nevertheless, her heart leaped in her chest when a shadow swept the pebbly surface, looming from behind her with startling speed. Teresa felt its sudden presence and whirled in a crouch, squinting at a blurry form like a huge ball cupped in an open fist.

  She sighed, straightening and trying to pretend the abrupt appearance hadn’t scared the wits out of her. Even against the afternoon sun, she recognized one of those Magnus effect minicranes, used all over the world for utility lifting and hauling. They were to helicopters what a zep was to a stratojet. In other words, cheap, durable, and easy to run on minimal fuel. Like zeps, minicranes maintained buoyancy with inflated hydrogen. But this smaller machine moved by rotating the bag itself between vertical prongs. A queer, counterintuitive effect of physics let it maneuver agilely.

  Shading her eyes, Teresa watched the operator lean out of his tiny cabin. He shouted something in Danish. She called back. “Jeg tale ikke dansk! Vil De tale engelsk?”

  “Ah,” he answered quickly. “Sorry! You must be one of Stanley Goldman’s people. I’m on my way to the dig now and could use some ballast. Do you want a ride?”

  Actually, she didn’t. But Teresa found it hard to say no. After all, it would be selfish to stay away from camp any longer than she had to.

  “How do I board?”

  As the machine drew close, the whir of the spinning bag was no longer swept away by the wind. The small control assembly hung suspended beneath by two forks from the central axis, and its engine gave off a hissing whine. In answer to her question, the pilot simply leaned down and offered his hand.

  Well she who hesitates is lost …

  Teresa ran to meet the little airship. At the last moment, she leaped, his grip seized her wrist and she was hauled, gently but swiftly, inside.

  “Lars Stürup,” he said as the bouncing settled down. There was a hiss of released gas and they began rising.

  “I’m Ter …”

  She stopped and covered her gaffe by coughing, as if from exertion. “… terribly glad to meet you, Lars. I’m … Emma Neale.” It was the name on her borrowed passport, lent by a Tangoparu scientist whose skills were less needed here than Teresa’s.

  Blond and fair, Lars looked more Swedish than Danish. He wore his sleeves rolled up, displaying well-developed forearms. “Pleased to meet you, Emma, I’m sure. We don’t get many new people up here. What’s your line? Paleontology? Paleogeochemistry?”

  “None of the above. I’m just here to help Stan do some seismic scans.”

  “Ah.” Lars nodded. “Those will be useful. Or so Dr. Rasmussen says. She hopes they’ll help us find remnants of the meteorite.”

  Looking across the crushed moraine, Teresa thought that rather optimistic. “How can anything be left, after what this land has been through since then?”

  The pilot grinned. “The thing hit pretty dumpit hard. Buried lots of stuff good. Of course the ice scraped off hundreds of meters. But by using radar from space you can find plenty of buried features that are invisible up close.”

  Tell me about it. Teresa had assisted in many such orbital surveys, using microwaves to trace lost tombs in Egypt, Mayan ruins in Mexico, and the tracks of ancient watercourses that had last flowed back when the Sahara bloomed and prehistoric humans hunted hippos in the lush fens of Libya.

  She was tempted to demonstrate her own knowledge, but then, what would Emma Neale know of such things? “That’s very interesting,” she said. “Please go on.”

  “Ah! Where to begin? To start off, it’s on Greenland we find some of the oldest rocks ever discovered—formed less than half a billion years after the planet itself!”

  Lars gestured broadly as he spoke, frequently taking his hands from the controls to point out features of the terrain below. Teresa found his cavalier piloting both disturbing and somehow exciting. Of course, one could take liberties with a slow, forgiving vehicle like this. Still, the young man’s proud confidence permeated the tiny cabin. A streak of oil stained the calloused edge of his right hand, where in hurried washing he mightn’t notice it among the curling hairs. He probably did all his own maintenance, something Teresa envied since guild rules only let astronauts watch and kibitz when their craft were serviced.

  “… so underneath we find remnants of a huge crater. One of seve
ral that asteroids made when they struck the Earth about sixty-five million years ago …”

  He kept glancing sideways at her, pointing here and there across the tumbled terrain. Teresa suddenly realized, He’s preening for me! Naturally, she was used to men trying to impress her. But this time, her reaction came out more pleased than irritated. It was a dormant, unaccustomed feeling that made her suddenly nervous and oddly exhilarated. I should consider remaining a blonde, she thought idly.

  The glacier loomed now—a chill mass that set her internal compass quivering. She could sense it stretching on and on toward the deep heart of this minicontinent, where it lay in layers so dense the rocky crust sagged beneath it. Layers that had been put down, snowflake by snowflake, over inconceivable time.

  Now coming into view below the white cliff was the site where machines could be seen biting into the frozen ground, scientifically sifting a deep excavation for ancient clues. Still talking and pointing things out like a tour guide, Lars steered his craft toward the activity.

  “Um … could I ask a favor?” Teresa interrupted the young pilot’s monologue.

  “Of course. What may I do for you?”

  Teresa pointed nearby. “Could you drop me off there? Near the ice?”

  Lars clearly wasn’t one to let schedules interfere with gallantry. “Anything you wish, Emma.” With a sure hand on the controls he turned his machine into the wind spilling off the glacier, increasing spin and plowing through the stiff, cold current. As the buffeting grew, Teresa began regretting her request. After all, she could have walked. It would be silly to survive so many orbital missions only to meet her end in a wrecked utility craft, just because a young man wanted to impress her.

  “Lars …,” she began, then stopped herself, recalling how bravely and silently Jason used to watch whenever she let him sit behind her pilot’s seat during a launch.

  Jason … A flux of images and feelings rose like steamy bubbles. Diverting them, Teresa inexplicably found herself instead picturing Alex Lustig! And especially the gray worry forever coloring that strange man’s eyes. Almost, she let herself recall the terrible thing he hunted.