Today Frye had made it his godly mission to get to the EOF well ahead of the polyglot horde, and was probably at his workstation hours before they had begun to yawn, blink, and stretch through their morning wake-up routines. He himself had been unable to catch any sleep after bringing home printouts of the previous evening’s final MDI/ SOI data logs, and using them as the basis for an intricate series of equations prepared with what remained his three favorite computational tools — a #3 pencil, a legal pad, and his own scrupulously logical brain. All the observables told him that the sun’s helioseismologic agitation had increased by tremendous — in fact, nearly exponential — leaps and bounds in the last twenty-four hour period, and he’d been eager to do two things: check the overnight logs for further changes, and see how his data and math jibed with the latest information from SWAN, whose nonresident Auslander monitoring area just happened to be on the other side of a glass partition from his own true-blue resident project scientist area… and, well, well, wouldn’t you know, it also just happened to be unoccupied at that early hour.
Now he sat at a bank of display terminals, pondering SWAN’s most recent full-sky maps of the sun… or more accurately, the sun’s hydrogen envelope. Each spectroscopic image had been composed over a regular three-day interval, and was color-graded to profile the radiation intensities—“hot” and “cool” spots — of different coordinates on the envelope. Because the probe was in an almost stationary position relative to earth, following its elliptical revolutions around the sun, the equatorial solar plane showed up as elongated, and each map resembled an Easter egg splashed with various shades of purple, orange, green, and yellow.
Soon Frye’s heart was pounding. He got out his cellular phone and rang his complementary half at home.
“Hello?”
“Ketch, what’re you doing?”
“Dripping shower water on my bedroom carpet at the moment,” Ketchum said. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Time for you to get your ass over here to the center.”
“What’ve you turned up?” Ketchum’s tone had abruptly swung from mild annoyance to sharpest curiosity.
“Look, you remember that bullet we dodged last April… the solar flare that would’ve been all hell if it hadn’t missed Earth?”
“Of course,” Ketchum said. “The X-17…”
“Well, I think we’re about to find ourselves downstream from a roarer that’ll make our X-17 look like a cap gun popping off.”
“Are you certain you’re not overestimating—”
“This one looks like the beast, Ketch. I mean it. The fucking beast. And it’ll be charging right at us once it’s hatched.”
Ketchum took an audible breath at the other end of the line.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
“Hey, Russ, you’re back in right the nick. Got an e-mail inside from that unbelievable redhead over at Cold Corners.”
Russ Granger jumped from the Bell’s cockpit onto the helipad, his boots mashing down on thumbnail ripples of white powdery snow, a coat he figured had to be close to a foot deep. When he’d left two hours earlier to fly a sling-load of food rations out to the Lake Hoare camp in Taylor Valley, the landing area was clear, its markings visible from a good altitude. But that was how it was in this place. Sastrugi, as the wavy drifts of snow were called, formed quickly parallel to a rising wind, and it had picked up a great deal since his departure.
He looked at the parka-clad station manager. Though the sky was still showing a lot of blue, snowflakes were blowing through the air from some widely spaced cloud scuds that had come in over the ice shelf.
“Megan Breen?” Granger said.
The station manager’s hooded head bobbed up and down. “You heard me say ‘unbelievable,’ right? Should I have added the word ‘hot’?”
Granger pulled up his own fleece-trimmed hood against the stinging flurries.
“That woman’s a hundred percent business, Chuck,” he said. “Take my word for it, there’s nothing in that message to make either of us sweaty.”
Chuck Trewillen motioned to his rear. Beyond the depot’s fuel lines stood three orange Quonset huts and a couple of old dozers, their shovels heaped with snow. Beyond them was another small building that had served as Trewillen’s isolated home for the half decade he’d held his job at Marble Point. Beyond that building there was only the great sawtoothed jut of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier.
“You ought to hear the noises that glacier makes when it’s calving bergs,” Trewillen said. “It sort of pants and moans. I’m talking loud, deep moooooans.” He shrugged. “Sometimes they’re enough to get me worked up.”
Granger smiled, clapped Trewillen on the shoulder. “You’ve been out here alone way too long, man,” he said, and started toward the computer hut.
Granger paused in the entrance to the air-heated Quonset, stamped caked snow off his boots, and unzipped his jacket. Then he sat at the desktop and tapped a key to erase its screen-saver — flamingos on a tropical beach, lush palms and turquoise water in the background.
The beach scene gave way to an e-mail application’s opening window. Granger dragged and clicked to the In-box, and saw Megan Breen’s message at the top of its queue — the single new one. Its title was simply his first name in caps followed by a string of exclamation marks.
Typical Megan, he thought.
The message itself was also characteristically brief and straight to the point:
Russ,
A colleague from San Jose has come down to find our missing people and he needs your assist ASAP. Hopes to borrow you from Mac for a flyby of B. Pass. Let me know when you can make it.
Best/MB
Granger fished a hard pack of Marlboros from his open jacket, put a smoke in his mouth, and fired it up with his disposable lighter. Given the extreme urgency of Megan’s request, he knew that clearing it with his bosses at McMurdo wasn’t anything to worry about.
He frowned, dragging on the cigarette.
No, it definitely wouldn’t be a problem.
The real problem was this “colleague” she’d mentioned, and the complications his arrival could bring about for the people who really padded Granger’s bankroll enough to make living in this stinking, abominable icebox worthwhile… and further down the line, the serious mess it could churn up for Granger himself.
He took another deep hit off the cig and its tip flared. It wouldn’t be much fun springing the bad news on the Consortium, but he’d have to get in touch with them, see how they wanted him to handle the situation.
Yeah, he thought. The thing was to contact Zurich directly, let the kingfish have it in front of him.
ASAP.
Nan Gorrie looked again at her watch and once more at the stove, where a fine piece of mutton sat in a soup of juice and rapidly coagulating fat. Her husband usually rang ahead the few times a year he might be late; he’d been awfully distracted this past week, and she preferred to hope that he had forgotten, rather than worrying something had happened to him. There had been a few occasions as a constable that he’d gotten into scrapes, but none that had risen to the level of what she might call actual danger. As a detective, his days ran at an even pace. His nature helped pour oil on the seas, smoothing the swells; if he felt apprehension, she had rarely known it.
But the way he’d been going lately, rising in the middle of the night, pacing and rocking, rocking and pacing… Frank Gorrie was not a pensive man — not a fool nor shallow by any means, but no brooder. Some men — James Fitz came to mind, the Irishman who lived in the next house but one — spent their time staring into space, contemplating the whys and wherefores of the universe. Frank was more a solid sort — a piece of mutton who knew what he was about, which had been a large part of their attraction.