Chapters (23)
- Praise
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- ONE - BULL PASS (77°30’ S, 161°80’ E) MCMURDO DRY VALLEYS, ANTARCTICA FEBRUARY ...
- TWO - SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA MARCH 1, 2002
- THREE - NORTH HIGHLANDS, SCOTLAND MARCH 2, 2002
- FOUR - PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 2, 2002
- FIVE - ROSS ICE SHELF, ANTARCTICA (70°00’ S, 30°42’ W) MARCH 4, 2002
- SIX - INVERNESS, SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS MARCH 6, 2002
- SEVEN - ABOVE MCMURDO SOUND, ANTARCTICA (77°88’ S, 166°73’ E) MARCH 12, 2002
- EIGHT - SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS
- NINE - 93,000,000 MILES FROM EARTH MARCH 12, 2002
- TEN - MOUNT EREBUS (77°53’ S, 167°17’ E) BULL PASS, ANTARCTICA MARCH 12, 2002
- ELEVEN - PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 12, 2002
- TWELVE - ROSS DEPENDENCY, SOUTHERN OCEAN (66°25’ S, 162°50’ E) MARCH 13, 2002
- THIRTEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 13, 2002
- FOURTEEN - NEAR COLD CORNERS BASE VICTORIA LAND, ANTARCTICA MARCH 13, 2002
- FIFTEEN - ASOTNA, SWITZERLAND MARCH 12, 2002
- SIXTEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 13, 2002
- SEVENTEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 15, 2002
- EIGHTEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 16, 2002
- NINETEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 17, 2002
- EPILOGUE
“To help plan for another shipment of spent waste, if he was. Would you mind terribly, Inspector, if I went back to work?”
Gorrie nodded, but the secretary hesitated. “I heard—the woman Ed . . .”
“Aye, Cardha Duff. I wouldn’t call it suicide,” he added. “Probably an accident due to medication.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head, then turned away quickly to her desk to have a cry.
Gorrie went back to the documents. Except for the dates and some slight variation in the waste amounts, they could have been identical. The pickups were always made around the same time, late at night, moved by the same route, and were presented at the dock loading area roughly sixty minutes later.
Gorrie took out his notebook. Cameron’s pad had mentioned Lin Firth Bridge. The bridge wasn’t noted here— it wasn’t much of a landmark—but the truck would have crossed over it.
So that’s what Mackay had found.
Gorrie took down the dates of the transport, knowing even before he checked that one would include the few days the bridge was closed.
NINE - 93,000,000 MILES FROM EARTH MARCH 12, 2002
NINE
93,000,000 MILES FROM EARTH MARCH 12, 2002
MARKED AGAINST THE SUN’S 4.5 BILLION YEARS OF existence, the coming event was nothing truly anomalous, but a result of the natural interplay between its atmospheric and orbital processes.
A body of seething gas and plasma, the solar sphere does not rotate on its axis in the same coherent way as the solid globe we inhabit. Rather, its rotation is fluid, the radiative and convective zones that compose its outer layers—and 85 percent of its radius—turning faster at the equator than at its poles. This causes its lines of magnetic force, which run longitudinally from positive north to negative south, to stretch and twist.
The phenomenon is easily understood with this model:
Imagine a ball sliced into three crosswise sections. Now imagine rubber bands attached to it, top to bottom, with pins inserted into each section. Give the middle slice of the ball a faster spin than the others, and the rubber bands are stretched along with its movement. Continue spinning it faster and the rubber bands coil tightly around the ball, eventually tangling and kinking up in places . . . assuming they have sufficient elasticity not to snap first.