The nurses left Peter Evans alone to get dressed. He put on his clothes slowly, taking stock of himself. He was all right, he decided, though his ribs hurt when he breathed. He had a big bruise on the left side of his chest, another big bruise on his thigh, and an ugly purple welt on his shoulder. A line of stitches on his scalp. His whole body was stiff and aching. It was excruciating to put on his socks and shoes.

But he was all right. In fact, better than that—he felt new somehow, almost reborn. Out there on the ice, he had been certain he was going to die. How he found the strength to get to his feet, he did not know. He had felt Sarah kicking him, but he did not respond to her. Then he’d heard the beeping sound. And when he looked up, he saw the letters “NASA.”

He’d realized vaguely that it was some kind of vehicle. So there must be a driver. The front tires had stopped just inches from his body. He managed to get to his knees, and haul himself up over the tires, grabbing onto the struts. He hadn’t understood why the driver hadn’t climbed out and helped him. Finally, he managed to get to his knees in the howling wind. He realized that the vehicle was low and bulbous, barely four feet off the ground. It was too small for any human operator—it was some kind of robot. He scraped snow away from the dome-like shell. The lettering read, “NASA Remote Vehicle Meteorite Survey.”

The vehicle was talking, repeating a taped voice over and over. Evans couldn’t understand what it was saying because of the wind. He brushed away the snow, thinking there must be some method of communication, some antenna, some—

Then his fingers had touched a panel with a finger hole. He pulled it open. Inside he saw a telephone—a regular telephone handset, bright red. He held it to his frozen mask. He could not hear anything from it, but he said, “Hello? Hello?”

Nothing more.

He collapsed again.

But the nurses told him what he had done was enough to send a signal to the NASA station at Patriot Hills. NASA had notified Weddell, who sent out a search party, and found them in ten minutes. They were both still alive, barely.

That had been more than twenty-four hours ago.

It had taken the medical team twelve hours to bring their body temperatures back to normal, because, the nurse said, it had to be done slowly. They told Evans he was going to be fine, but he might lose a couple of his toes. They would have to wait and see. It would be a few days.

His feet were bandaged with some kind of protective splints around the toes. He couldn’t fit into his regular shoes, but they had found him an oversized pair of sneakers. They looked like they belonged to a basketball player. On Evans, they made huge clown feet. But he could wear them, and there wasn’t much pain.

Tentatively, he stood. He was tremulous, but he was all right.

The nurse came back. “Hungry?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Pain?”

He shook his head. “Just, you know, everywhere.”

“That’ll get worse,” she said. She gave him a small bottle of pills. “Take one of these every four hours if you need it. And you’ll probably need it to sleep, for the next few days.”

“And Sarah?”

“Sarah will be another half hour or so.”

“Where’s Kenner?”

“I think he’s in the computer room.”

“Which way is that?”

She said, “Maybe you better lean on my shoulder…”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just tell me the way.”

She pointed, and he started walking. But he was more unsteady than he realized. His muscles weren’t working right; he felt shaky all over. He started to fall. The nurse quickly ducked, sliding her shoulder under his arm.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll just show you the way.”

This time he did not object.

Kenner sat in the computer room with the bearded station chief, MacGregor, and Sanjong Thapa. Everybody was looking grim.

“We found him,” Kenner said, pointing to a computer monitor. “Recognize your friend?”

Evans looked at the screen. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the bastard.”

On the screen was a photo of the man Evans knew as Bolden. But the ID form onscreen gave his name as David R. Kane. Twenty-six years old. Born Minneapolis. BA, Notre Dame; MA, University of Michigan. Current Status: PhD candidate in oceanography, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Research Project: Dynamics of Ross Shelf Flow as measured by GPS sensors. Thesis Advisor/Project Supervisor: James Brewster, University of Michigan.

“His name’s Kane,” the Weddell chief said. “He’s been here for a week, along with Brewster.”

“Where is he now?” Evans said darkly.

“No idea. He didn’t come back to the Station today. Neither did Brewster. We think they may have gone to McMurdo and hopped the morning transport out. We have a call in to McMurdo to do a vehicle count, but they haven’t gotten back to us yet.”

“You’re sure he’s not still here?” Evans said.

“Quite sure. You need an ID tag to open the exterior doors here, so we always know who’s where. Neither Kane nor Brewster opened any doors in the last twelve hours. They aren’t here.”

“So you think they may be on the plane?”

“McMurdo Tower wasn’t sure. They’re pretty casual about the daily transport—if somebody wants to go, they just hop on and leave. It’s a C-130, so there’s always plenty of room. You see, a lot of the research grants don’t permit you to leave during the period of your research, but people have birthdays and family events back on the mainland. So they just go, and come back. It’s unrecorded.”

“If I recall,” Kenner said, “Brewster came here with two graduate students. Where’s the other one?”

“Interesting. He left from McMurdo yesterday, the day you arrived.”

“So they all got out,” Kenner said. “Got to give them credit: They’re smart.” He looked at his watch. “Now let’s see what, if anything, they left behind.”

The name on the door said “Dave Kane, U. Mich.” Evans pushed it open, and saw a small room, an unmade bed, a small desk with a messy stack of papers, and four cans of Diet Coke. There was a suitcase lying open in the corner.

“Let’s get started,” Kenner said. “I’ll take the bed and the suitcase. You check the desk.”

Evans began to go through the papers on the desk. They all seemed to be reprints of research articles. Some were stampe u mich geo lib followed by a number.

“Window dressing,” Kenner said, when he was shown the papers. “He brought those papers with him. Anything else? Anything personal?”

Evans didn’t see anything of interest. Some of the papers were highlighted in yellow marker. There was a stack of 3-by-5 notecards, with some notes written on them, but they seemed to be genuine, and related to the stack of papers.

“You don’t suppose this guy is really a graduate student?”

“Could be, though I doubt it. Eco-terrorists aren’t usually well educated.”

There were pictures of glacier flows, and satellite images of various sorts. Evans shuffled through them quickly. Then he paused at one:

ISS006.ESC1.03003375 SCORPION B

What caught his eye was the caption. “Listen,” he said, “on that list of four locations, wasn’t one of them called ‘Scorpion’?”

“Yes…”

“It’s right here, in Antarctica,” Evans said. “Look at this.”

Kenner started to say, “But it can’t be—” and abruptly broke off. “This is extremely interesting, Peter. Well done. It was in that stack? Good. Anything else?”

Despite himself, Evans felt pleased by Kenner’s approval. He searched quickly. A moment later he said, “Yes. There’s another one.”

ISS006.ESC1.03003375 SCORPION B

“It’s the same basic pattern of rock outcrops in the snow,” Evans said, excitedly. “And, I don’t know about these faint lines…roads? Rocks covered in snow?”

“Yes,” Kenner said. “I think that’s almost certainly correct.”

“And if they’re aerial photographs, there must be a way to trace them. Do you think these numbers are references of some kind?”

“There’s no question.” Kenner pulled out a small pocket magnifying glass, and scanned the image, peering closely. “Yes, Peter. Very well done.”

Evans beamed.

From the doorway, MacGregor said, “You found something? Can I help?”

“I don’t think so,” Kenner said. “We’ll deal with this ourselves.”

Evans said, “But maybe he will recognize—”

“No,” Kenner said. “We’ll get the ID off the NASA image files. Let’s continue.”

They searched in silence for several minutes more. Kenner took out a pocketknife and began cutting the lining of the suitcase lying open in the corner of Brewster’s office. “Ah.” He straightened. In his fingers, he held two curved arcs of pale rubber.

“What are those?” Evans said. “Silicon?”

“Or something very similar. A kind of soft plastic, at any rate.” Kenner seemed very pleased.

“What’re they for?” Evans said.

“I have no idea,” Kenner said. He resumed his search of the suitcase. Privately, Evans wondered why Kenner was so pleased. Probably he was not saying what he knew in front of MacGregor. But what could two bits of rubber mean, anyway? What could they be used for?

Evans went through the documents on the desk a second time, but found nothing more. He lifted the desk lamp and looked under the base. He crouched down and looked under the desk, in case something was taped there. He found nothing.

Kenner closed the suitcase. “As I thought, nothing more. We were very lucky to find what we did.” He turned to MacGregor. “Where’s Sanjong?”

“In the server room, doing what you requested—cutting Brewster and his team out of the system.”

The “server room” was hardly larger than a closet. There were twin racks of processors running floor to ceiling, and the usual mesh ceiling for cabling. There was a master terminal in the room, on a small steel table. Sanjong was crowded in there with a Weddell technician at his side, looking frustrated.

Kenner and Evans stood outside, in the hallway. Evans was pleased that he felt steady enough to stand. His strength was coming back quickly.

“It hasn’t been easy,” Sanjong said to Kenner. “The procedure here is to give each Weddell researcher private storage space and also direct radio and Internet connections. And these three guys knew how to take advantage of it. Apparently the third man with Brewster was the computer guy. Within a day of his arrival, he got into the system as root, and installed back doors and trojans all over the place. We’re not sure how many. We’re trying to get them out.”

“He also added a few dummy user accounts,” the technician said.

“Like about twenty,” Sanjong said. “But I’m not worried about those. They’re probably just that—dummies. If this guy was smart—and he was—he’d have given himself access to the system through an existing user, so he’d go undetected. We’re looking now for any users who have added a new secondary password in the last week. But this system doesn’t have a lot of maintenance utilities. It’s slow going.

“What about the trojans?” Kenner said. “How are they timed?” In computer slang, a trojan was an innocent-looking program installed in the system. It was designed to wake up at a later time and carry out some action. It derived its name from the way the Greeks won the Trojan war—by making a huge horse and presenting it to the Trojans as a gift. Once the horse was within the walls of Troy, the Greek soliders who had been hiding inside it came out and attacked the city.

The classic trojan was one installed by a disgruntled employee. It erased all the hard drives in a business three months after the employee was fired. But there were many variations.

“Timing on all of the ones I found here is short,” Sanjong said. “One day, two days from now. We found one that is three days from now. Nothing after that.”

“So. Just as we suspected,” Kenner said.

“Exactly,” Sanjong said, nodding. “They intended it to happen soon.”

“Intended what?” Evans said.

“The calving of the big iceberg,” Kenner said.

“Why soon? They would still have been here.”

“I’m not sure they would have. But in any case the timing was determined by something else.”

“Yes? What?” Evans said.

Kenner gave him a look. “We can go into it later.” He turned back to Sanjong. “And what about the radio connects?”

“We disabled all the direct connects right away,” he said. “And I assume you did work on the ground at the location itself.”

“I did,” Kenner said.

“What did you do on the ground?” Evans said.

“Random disconnects.”

“Of what?”

“Tell you later.”

“So we’re redundant,” Sanjong said.

“No. Because we can’t be sure there’s not someone else embedded in this place who will undo our work.”

“I wish,” Evans said, “I knew what the hell you guys were talking about…”

“Later,” Kenner said. This time the look was sharp.

Evans was silent. He felt a little wounded.

MacGregor said, “Ms. Jones is awake, and getting dressed.”

“All right,” Kenner said. “I believe our work here is done. Wheels up in an hour.”

“To go where?” Evans said.

“I thought that was obvious,” Kenner said. “Helsinki, Finland.”