Icebound Read Free Page B

low-frequency grumble: the ominous sound of growing elastic stress in the crust of the earth.
    A slow-motion domino reaction might have begun. And the dominoes might be falling toward Edgeway Station.
    During the past sixteen hours, Gunvald had spent less time smoking his pipe than chewing nervously on the stem of it.
             
    At nine-thirty the previous night, when the radio confirmed the location and force of the second shock, Gunvald had put through a call to the temporary camp six miles to the southwest. He told Harry about the quakes and explained the risks that they were taking by remaining on the perimeter of the polar ice.
    “We’ve got a job to do,” Harry had said. “Forty-six packages are in place, armed, and ticking. Getting them out of the ice again before they all detonate would be harder than getting a politician’s hand out of your pocket. And if we don’t place the other fourteen tomorrow, without all sixty synchronized charges, we likely won’t break off the size berg we need. In effect, we’ll be aborting the mission, which is out of the question.”
    “I think we should consider it.”
    “No, no. The project’s too damned expensive to chuck it all just because there
might
be a seismic risk. Money’s tight. We might not get another chance if we screw up this one.”
    “I suppose you’re right,” Gunvald acknowledged, “but I don’t like it.”
    The open frequency crackled with static as Harry said, “Can’t say I’m doing cartwheels, either. Do you have any projection about how long it might take major slippage to pass through an entire fault chain like this one?”
    “You know that’s anybody’s guess, Harry. Days, maybe weeks, even months.”
    “You see? We have more than enough time. Hell, it can even take longer.”
    “Or it can happen much faster. In hours.”
    “Not this time. The second tremor was less violent than the first, wasn’t it?” Harry asked.
    “And you know perfectly well that doesn’t mean the reaction will just play itself out. The third might be smaller or larger than the first two.”
    “At any rate,” Harry said, “the ice is seven hundred feet thick where we are. It won’t just splinter apart like the first coat on a winter pond.”
    “Nevertheless, I strongly suggest you wrap things up quickly tomorrow.”
    “No need to worry about that. Living out here in these damned inflatable igloos makes any lousy shack at Edgeway seem like a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.”
    After that conversation, Gunvald Larsson had gone to bed. He hadn’t slept well. In his nightmares, the world crumbled apart, dropped away from him in enormous chunks, and he fell into a cold, bottomless void.
    At seven-thirty in the morning, while Gunvald had been shaving, with the bad dreams still fresh in his mind, the seismograph had recorded a third tremor: Richter 5.2.
    His breakfast had consisted of a single cup of black coffee. No appetite.
    At eleven o’clock the fourth quake had struck only two hundred miles due south: 4.4 on the Richter scale.
    He had not been cheered to see that each event was less powerful than the one that preceded it. Perhaps the earth was conserving its energy for a single gigantic blow.
    The fifth tremor had hit at 11:50. The epicenter was approximately one hundred ten miles due south. Much closer than any previous tremor, essentially on their doorstep. Richter 4.2.
    He’d called the temporary camp, and Rita Carpenter had assured him that the expedition would leave the edge of the icecap by two o’clock.
    “The weather will be a problem,” Gunvald worried.
    “It’s snowing here, but we thought is was a local squall.”
    “I’m afraid not. The storm is shifting course and picking up speed. We’ll have heavy snow this afternoon.”
    “We’ll surely be back at Edgeway by four o’clock,” she’d said. “Maybe sooner.”
    At twelve minutes past noon another slippage had occurred in the subsea crust, one hundred miles south: 4.5 on the