Gideon already sensed that Brambell would respond well to directness. He knew when a person could not be socially engineered, and the ship’s doctor was just that person.
“Glinn says he’s given me the full story on the sinking of the Rolvaag,” said Gideon flatly. “But something tells me he left part of it out.”
“That would be like him.”
“So I’m here. To hear the story from you.”
Brambell gave a small smile, grasped the arms of what was evidently his reading chair, and eased himself down. “It’s a long story.”
“We have all the time in the world.”
“Indeed.” He made a tent of his fingers and pursed his lips. “Do you know about Palmer Lloyd?”
“I met him.”
Brambell’s eyebrows shot up. “Where?”
“At a private mental institution in California.”
“Is he insane?”
“No. But I’m not sure he’s sane, either.”
Brambell paused, considering this a moment. “Lloyd was a curious man. When he learned that the world’s largest meteorite had been found on a frozen island off Cape Horn, he became determined to have it for the museum he was building. And he hired Glinn to retrieve it. EES bought their ship, the Rolvaag, from a Norwegian shipbuilding company. It was a state-of-the-art oil tanker, but they disguised it to look like a shabby old tub.”
“Why an oil tanker? Why not an ore carrier?”
“Oil tankers have sophisticated ballast tanks and pumps, which would be necessary to stabilize the ship. Not only was the meteorite the largest ever, but it was incredibly dense—twenty-five thousand tons. So Glinn and Manuel Garza had to develop elaborate engineering plans to dig it up, transport it across the island, load it on the ship, and bring it back and up the Hudson River.” He paused again, reflecting. “When we arrived at the island, it was surely one of the most godforsaken places on earth. Isla Desolación: Desolation Island. And that was when things started to go wrong. To begin with, the meteorite was not a normal iron meteorite.”
“Manuel told me it had ‘peculiar qualities.’ I’d say being an alien seed is peculiar enough.”
Brambell smiled mirthlessly. “It was a deep red in color, made of a material so hard and dense that the best diamond drills wouldn’t even scratch it. Indeed, it seemed to be composed of a new element with a very high atomic number. Perhaps one of the hypothesized elements in the so-called island of stability. This of course made it far more interesting. It was gotten aboard ship with great difficulty—but successfully. But as we started for home, we came under fire from a rogue Chilean destroyer. Glinn, through a typically brilliant stratagem, managed to sink the destroyer. But the Rolvaag was badly damaged herself and a storm came up, with a heavy sea. The meteorite started to shift in the hold, the cradle becoming more and more damaged with each roll of the ship.” He glanced at Gideon. “You know about the dead man’s switch?”
“I know that Glinn refused to use it.”
“That was the damnedest thing. Even when Lloyd himself was begging Glinn to throw that bloody switch, he wouldn’t do it. He’s one of those men who cannot fail. For all his talk of logic and reason, underneath Glinn’s as obsessive as they come.”
Gideon nodded. “I understand the captain went down with the ship.”
“Yes. What a tragic loss.” Brambell shook his head. “She was an extraordinary woman. Sally Britton. When Glinn refused to activate the dead man’s switch, she ordered an abandon-ship, which saved dozens of lives. She insisted on remaining aboard. Then the meteorite broke free, tore a gash in the hull, and there was a huge explosion. Britton died, but Glinn was somehow blown free and survived. A true miracle. He’s a cat with nine lives.”
Gideon did not go into the story of Glinn’s previous crippled condition, or how he had been cured. “And you? How did you survive?”
Brambell went on in the same dry, jaunty voice, as if he were describing something that had happened long ago to someone else. “After the explosion, most who survived found themselves in the water, but there was a lot of floating debris and a couple of drifting lifeboats. Some of us were able to get aboard the lifeboats and make our way to an ice island. We spent the night there, rescued the next morning. But a number of people froze to death on the island in the darkness. As a doctor, I tried my best—but I was helpless against the overwhelming cold.”
“So Glinn really was responsible for all those deaths.”
“Yes. Glinn—and the meteorite itself, of course.” Brambell glanced around at the walls of books. “It was only later that McFarlane figured out what the thing really was.”
“Glinn mentioned McFarlane to me, but there wasn’t anything about him in the briefing files. What was he like?”
Brambell gave another of his half smiles. He spread his hands. “Ah yes. Sam. He was a good soul, a bit rough around the edges, sarcastic, blunt. But a fellow with a good heart. Brilliant, too, one of the world’s experts on meteorites.”
“I understand he survived.”
“Survived, yes—but scarred. Bitter, angry, haunted—or so I’ve heard.”
“And you? You’re not scarred by what happened?”
“I have my books. I don’t live in the actual world. I am imperturbable.”
Gideon looked at Brambell. “I have to ask: given all you know about Glinn and his limitations—and all the horror you went through—why did you agree to return for this expedition?”
Brambell laid a veined hand on the book. “Plain old curiosity. This is our first encounter with an alien life-form, even if it’s just a big mindless plant. I couldn’t say no to the chance to be part of that discovery. And—” he patted the book—“in the meantime, I can read to my heart’s content.”
And with that he smiled, rose, and offered his hand.
10
AS THEY APPROACHED the Ice Limit, drifting icebergs began appearing in the southern ocean, and Gideon found their deep-blue color and sculptural beauty to create one of the most amazing sights he had ever witnessed. He stood at the rail, watching the ship glide between two gorgeous bergs, one with a hole in it, a kind of ice-arch through which the morning sun shone brightly. It was November 20, which Gideon reminded himself was spring—the weather equivalent to April 20 back home—but the air was surprisingly warm and gentle, the ocean utterly calm. It looked nothing like the “Screaming Sixties” he had heard about, so named because at sixty degrees of latitude, the earth was fully girdled by ocean; the winds blew incessantly around the globe, raising enormous seas that circled the planet and—with no land to arrest their course—growing ever bigger and bigger.
But this was anything but screaming. The ocean was a mirror that reflected the stately forms of the icebergs drifting northward from the glaciers of Antarctica, shed during the spring calving season.
In an effort to orient himself, Gideon had spent some time examining the charts in his briefing book. They truly were in the middle of nowhere. The tip of South America was six hundred and fifty miles northwest, the Antarctic Peninsula two hundred and fifty miles to the southwest, and the closest land—Elephant Island—a hundred and forty miles west. No, that wasn’t quite right: the chart in his briefing book did show a speck of rock, a glacier-covered peak thrusting from the sea less than a hundred miles from their position, called Clarence Island.
He breathed deeply of the fresh, clean, salty air—and then felt a presence approach from behind.
“Calm as a millpond,” Alex Lispenard said, leaning on the rail beside him and gazing across the iceberg-dotted sea, the breeze stirring her long brown hair, her profile etched in the golden sun.