Dean R. Koontz - Icebound

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ICEBOUND
By Dean Koontz
BEFORE…
From The New York Times:
[1]
POLAR ICE PUREST WATER
IN THE WORLD
MOSCOW, Feb. 10--According to Russian scientists, the water constituting the Arctic icecap has a
far lower bacteria count than any water we now drink or with which we irrigate crops, a discovery
that might make this vast frozen reservoir a valuable resource of the future. Because tapping the
polar icecap might be cheaper than any current or foreseeable desalinization process, especially
since the water would not have to be purified, some Russian researchers speculate that millions of
acres of farmland might be irrigated with melted icebergs in the next decade.
[2]
SCIENTISTS BELIEVE ICEBERGS
COULD PROVIDE FRESH WATER
BOSTON, Sept. 5--Speaking before the annual convention of the American Society of Environmental
Engineers, Dr. Harold Carpenter said today that chronic shortages of water in California, Europe,
and other regions could be alleviated by a controlled melting of icebergs towed south from the
Arctic Circle. Dr. Carpenter’s wife and research partner, Dr. Rita Carpenter, said the concerned
nations should consider pooling the capital for the necessary research and development--an
investment that would, she said, “be repaid a hundredfold within 10 years.”
According to the Carpenters, co-recipients of last year’s National Science Foundation
Prize, the basic concept is simple. A large iceberg would be “blown loose” from the edge of the
icefield and allowed to drift south in natural currents. Later, enormous steel towing cables would
be affixed to the berg. A trawler would then tow the ice to a conversion facility at the shore
near thirsty farmland. “Because the North Atlantic and North Pacific are cold oceans, perhaps less
than 15 percent of the ice would melt before it could be converted to water at the shore and piped
to drought-stricken farms,” Dr. Harold Carpenter said.
The Carpenters both cautioned that no one could be certain the idea was workable. “There
are still a great many problems to overcome,” Dr. Rita Carpenter said. “Extensive research on the
polar icecap…”
[3]
DROUGHT AFFECTS
CALIFORNIA CROPS
SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 20--State Department of Agriculture officials estimate that California’s
water shortages may have been responsible for as much as a $50 million loss in second-season crops
as diverse as oranges, lemons, cantaloupes, lettuce…
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[4]
SUFFICIENT RELIEF SUPPLIES
UNAVAILABLE FOR THOUSANDS
STARVING IN DROUGHT
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 5--The director of the United Nations Disaster Relief Office announced that
poor harvests in the United States, Canada, and Europe have made it impossible for drought-
stricken Africans and Asians to purchase grain and produce from the usually food-rich Western
nations. Already, more than 200,000 people have died in…
[5]
SPECIAL U.N. FUND TO SEND
SCIENTISTS TO POLAR ICECAP
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 6--Eleven members of the United Nations today contributed to a unique fund
that will pay for a series of scientific experiments on the Arctic icecap. The primary intent of
the project will be to study the feasibility of towing huge icebergs south, where they can be
tapped for the irrigation of crops.
“It might sound like science fiction,” said one British official, “but since the 1960’s,
most environmental specialists have come to see the very real potential.” If such a scheme should
prove workable, the major food-producing nations might never suffer bad harvests again. Although
the icebergs could not be towed into the warm seas of southern Asia and Africa, the entire world
would profit by the insured good harvests of the few countries that the project would directly
benefit…
[6]
TEAM OF U.N. SCIENTISTS
ESTABLISHES RESEARCH STATION
ON ARCTIC ICEFIELD
THULE, Greenland, Sept. 28--This morning, scientists under the direction of Drs. Harold and Rita
Carpenter, co-recipients of this year’s Rothschild Prize in earth science, landed on the Arctic
icecap between Greenland and Spitsbergen, Norway. They began construction of a research station
two miles from the edge of the icefield where they will conduct United Nations-funded studies for
at least nine months…
[7]
ARCTIC EXPEDITION TO BLOW LOOSE
PIECE OF POLAR ICECAP TOMORROW
THULE, Greenland, Jan. 14--At midnight tomorrow, scientists at the United Nations-funded Edgeway
Station will detonate a series of explosive devices to separate a half-mile-square iceberg from
the edge of the winter icecap, just 350 miles off the northeast coast of Greenland. Two United
Nations trawlers, equipped with electronic tracking gear are waiting 230 miles to the south, where
they will monitor the progress of the “bugged” iceberg.
In an experiment designed to determine if Atlantic currents change substantially in
northern regions during the severe Arctic winter…
CHAPTER ONE: SNARE
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NOON
DETONATION IN TWELVE HOURS
With a crystal-shattering shriek, the bit of the power drill bored deep into the Arctic
ice. Gray-white slush churned out of the hole, sluiced across the crusted snow, and refroze in
seconds. The flared auger was out of sight, and most of the long steel shank also had disappeared
into the four-inch-diameter shaft.
Watching the drill, Harold Carpenter had a curious premonition of imminent disaster. A
faint flicker of alarm. Like a bird shadow fluttering across a bright landscape. Even inside his
heavy insulated clothing, he shivered.
As a scientist, Harry respected the tools of logic, method, and reason, but he had learned
never to discount a hunch--especially on the ice, where strange things could happen. He was unable
to identify the source of his sudden uneasiness, though occasional dark forebodings were to be
expected on a job involving high explosives. The change of one of the charges detonating
prematurely, killing them all, was slim to nil. Nevertheless…
Peter Johnson, the electronics engineer who doubled as the team’s demolitions expert,
switched off the drill and stepped back from it. In his white Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit, fur-
lined parka, and fur-lined hood, Pete resembled a polar bear--except for his dark brown face.
Claude Jobert shut down the portable generator that supplied power to the drill. The
resultant hush had an eerie quality of expectancy so intense that Harry glanced behind himself and
then up into the sky, half-convinced that something was rushing or falling toward him.
If Death kissed anyone today, it was more likely to rise up from below than to descend upon them.
As the bleak afternoon began, the three men were preparing to lower the last hundred-pound
explosive charge deep into the ice. It was the sixtieth demolitions package that they had handled
since the previous morning, and they were all uneasily conscious of standing upon enough high-
yield plastic explosives to destroy them in a apocalyptic flash.
No fertile imagination was required to picture themselves dying in these hostile climes:
The icecap was a perfect graveyard, utterly lifeless, and it encouraged thoughts of mortality.
Ghostly bluish-white plains led off in all directions, somber and moody during that long season of
nearly constant darkness, brief twilight, and perpetual overcast. At the moment, visibility was
fair because the day had drawn down to that time when a vague, cloud-filtered crescent of sunlight
painted the horizon. However, the sun had little to illuminate in the stark landscape. The only
points of elevation were the jagged pressure ridges and hundreds of slabs of ice--some only as
large as a man, others bigger than houses--that had popped from the field and stood on end like
gigantic tombstones.
Pete Johnson, joining Harry and Claude at a pair of snowmobiles that had been specially
rebuilt for the rigors of the pole, told them, “The shaft’s twenty-eight yards deep. One more
extension for the bit, and the job’s done.”
“Thank God!” Claude Jobert shivered as if his thermal suit provided no protection
whatsoever. In spite of the transparent film of petroleum jelly that protected the exposed
portions of his face from frostbite, he was pale and drawn. “We’ll make it back to base camp
tonight. Think of that! I haven’t been warm one minute since we left.”
Ordinarily, Claude didn’t complain. He was a jovial, energetic little man. At a glance, he
seemed fragile, but that was not the case. At five seven and a hundred thirty pounds, he was lean,
wiry, hard. He had a mane of white hair now tucked under his hood, a face weathered and made
leathery by a lifetime in extreme climates, and bright blue eyes as clear as those of a child.
Harry had never seen hatred or anger in those eyes. Until yesterday, he had never seen self-pity
in them, either, not even three years ago, when Claude lost his wife, Colette, in a sudden,
senseless act of violence; he had been consumed by grief but had never wallowed in self-pity.
Since they had left the comfort of Edgeway Station, however, Claude had been neither
jovial nor energetic, and he had complained frequently about the cold. At fifty-nine, he was the
oldest member of the expedition, eighteen years older than Harry Carpenter, which was the outer
limit for anyone working in those brutal latitudes.
Although he was a fine arctic geologist specializing in the dynamics of ice formation and
movement, the current expedition would be his last trip to either pole. Henceforth, his research
would be done in laboratories and at computers, far from the severe conditions of the icecap.
Harry wondered if Jobert was bothered less by the bitter cold than by the knowledge that
the work he loved had grown too demanding for him. Once day Harry would have to face the same
truth, and he wasn’t sure that he would be able to exit with grace. The great chaste spaces of the
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Arctic and Antarctic enthralled him: the power of the extreme weather, the mystery that cloaked
the white geometric landscapes and pooled in the purple shadows of every seemingly unplumbable
crevasse, the spectacle on clear nights when the aurora borealis splashed the sky with shimmering
streamers of light in jewel-like colors, and the vast fields of stars when the curtains of the
aurora drew back to reveal them.
In some ways he was still the kid who had grown up on a quiet farm in Indiana, without
brothers or sisters or playmates: the lonely boy who’d felt stifled by the life into which he’s
been born, who’d daydreamed of traveling to far places and seeing all the exotic marvels of the
world, who’d wanted never to be tied down to one plot of earth, and who’d yearned for adventure.
He was a grown man now, and he knew that adventure was hard work. Yet, from time to time, the boy
within him was abruptly overcome by wonder, stopped whatever he was doing, slowly turned in a
circle to look at the dazzlingly white world around him, and thought: Holy jumping catfish, I’m
really here, all the way from Indiana to the end of the earth, the top of the world!
Pete Johnson said, “It’s snowing.”
Even as Pete spoke, Harry saw the lazily spiraling flakes descending in a silent ballet.
The day was windless, though the calm might not endure much longer.
Claude Jobert frowned. “We weren’t due for this storm until this evening.”
The trip out from Edgeway Station--which lay four air miles to the northeast of their
temporary camp, six miles by snowmobile past ridges and deep chasms--had not been difficult.
Nevertheless, a bad storm might make the return journey impossible. Visibility could quickly
deteriorate to zero, and they could easily get lost because of compass distortion. And if their
snowmobiles ran out of fuel, they would freeze to death, for even their thermal suits would be
insufficient protection against prolonged exposure to the more murderous cold that would ride in
on the back of a blizzard.
Deep snows were not as common on the Greenland cap as might have been expected, in part
because of the extreme lows to which the air temperature could sink. At some point in virtually
every blizzard, the snowflakes metamorphosed into spicules of ice, but even then visibility was
poor.
Studying the sky, Harry said, “Maybe it’s a local squall.”
“Yes, that’s just what Online Weather said last week about that storm,” Claude reminded
him. “We were to have only local squalls on the periphery of the main event. Then we had so much
snow and ice it would’ve kept Père Noël home on Christmas Eve.”
“So we’d better finish this job quickly.”
“Yesterday would be good.”
As if to confirm the need for haste, a wind sprang up from the west, as crisp and odorless
as a wind could be only if it was coming off hundreds of miles of barren ice. The snowflakes
shrank and began to descend at an angle, no longer spiraling prettily like flakes in a crystal
bibelot.
Pete freed the drill from the shank of the buried bit and lifted it out of its supportive
frame, handling it as if it weighed a tenth of its actual eighty-five pounds.
A decade ago he had been a football star at Penn State, turning down offers from several
NFL teams. He hadn’t wanted to play out the role that society dictated for every six-foot-four-
inch, two-hundred-pound black football hero. Instead, he had won scholarships, earned two degrees,
and taken a well-paid position with a computer-industry think tank.
Now he was vital to Harry’s expedition. He maintained the electronic data-gathering
equipment at Edgeway, and having designed the explosive devices, he was the only one who could
deal with them in full confidence if something went wrong. Furthermore, his tremendous strength
was an asset out there on the inhospitable top of the world.
As Pete swung the drill out of the way. Harry and Claude lifted a three-foot bit extension
from one of the cargo trailers that were coupled to the snowmobiles. They screwed it onto the
threaded shank, which was still buried in the ice.
Claude started the generator again.
Pete slammed the drill in place, turned the keyless chuck to clamp the jaws tight around
the shank, and finished boring the twenty-nine-yard-deep shaft, at the bottom of which they would
plant a tubular charge of explosives.
While the machine roared, Harry gazed at the heavens. Within the past few minutes, the
weather had deteriorated alarmingly. Most of the ashen light had faded from behind the oppressive
overcast. So much snow was falling that the sky no longer was mottled with grays and black;
nothing whatsoever of the actual cloud cover could be seen through the crystalline torrents. Above
them was only a deep, whirling whiteness. Already shrinking and becoming grainlike, the flakes
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lightly pricked his greased face. The wind escalated to perhaps twenty miles an hour, and its song
was a mournful drone.
Harry still sensed oncoming disaster. The feeling was formless, vague, but unshakable.
As a boy on the farm, he had never realized that adventure was hard work, although he had
understood that it was dangerous. To a kid, danger had been part of the appeal. In the process of
growing up, however, as he’d lost both parents to illness and learned the violent ways of the
world, he had ceased to be able to see anything romantic about death. Nevertheless, he admitted to
a certain perverse nostalgia for the innocence that had once made it possible to find a
pleasurable thrill in the taking of mortal risks.
Claude Jobert leaned close and shouted above the noise from the wind and the grinding
auger: “Don’t worry, Harry. We’ll be back at Edgeway soon. Good brandy, a game of chess, Benny
Goodman on the CD player, all the comforts.”
Harry Carpenter nodded. He continued to study the sky.
12:20
In the telecommunications shack at Edgeway Station, Gunvald Larsson stood at the single
small window, chewing nervously on the stem of his unlit pipe and peering out at the rapidly
escalating storm. Relentless tides of snow churned through the camp, like ghost waves from an
ancient sea that had evaporated millennia ago. Half an hour earlier, he’d scraped the ice off the
outside of the triple-pane window, but already feathery new patterns of crystals were regrowing
along the perimeter of the glass. In an hour, another blinding cataract would have formed.
From Gunvald’s slightly elevated viewpoint, Edgeway Station looked so isolated--and
contrasted so boldly with the environment in which it stood--that it might have been humanity’s
only outpost on an alien planet. It was the only splash of color on the white, silver, and
alabaster fields.
The six canary-yellow Nissen huts had been airlifted onto the icecap in prefabricated
sections at tremendous effort and expense. Each one-story structure measured twenty by fifteen
feet. The walls--layers of sheet metal and lightweight foam insulation--were riveted to hoped
girders, and the floor of each hut was countersunk into the ice. As unattractive as slum buildings
and hardly less cramped than packing crates, the huts were nonetheless dependable and secure
against the wind.
A hundred yards north of the camp, a smaller structure stood by itself. It housed the fuel
tanks that fed the generators. Because the tanks held diesel fuel, which could burn but couldn’t
explode, the danger of fire was minimal. Nevertheless, the thought of being trapped in a flash
fire fanned by an arctic gale was so terrifying--especially when there was no water, just useless
ice, with which to fight it--that excessive precautions had to be taken for everyone’s peace of
mind.
Gunvald Larsson’s peace of mind had been shattered hours ago, but he was not worried about
fire. Earthquakes were that troubled him now. Specifically, suboceanic earthquakes.
The son of a Swedish father and a Danish mother, he had been on the Swedish ski team at
two winter Olympics, had earned one silver medal, and was proud of his heritage; he cultivated the
image of an imperturbable Scandinavian and usually possessed an inner calm that matched his cool
exterior. His wife said that, like precision calipers, his quick blue eyes continuously measured
the world. When he wasn’t working outdoors, he usually wore slacks and colorful ski sweaters; at
the moment, in fact, he was dressed as though lolling in a mountain lodge after a pleasant day on
the slopes rather than sitting in an isolated hut on the winter icecap, waiting for calamity to
strike.
During the past several hours, however, he had lost a large measure of his characteristic
composure. Chewing on the pipestem, he turned away from the frost-fringed windowpane and scowled
at the computers and the data-gathering equipment that lined three walls of the telecommunications
shack.
Early the previous afternoon, when Harry and the others had gone south toward the edge of
the ice, Gunvald had stayed behind to monitor incoming calls on the radio and to keep watch over
the station. This was not the first time that all but one of the expedition members had left
Edgeway to conduct an experiment in the field, but on previous occasions, someone other than
Gunvald had remained behind. After weeks of living in a tiny community with eight too-close
neighbors, he had been eager for his session of solitude.
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By four o’clock the previous day, however, when Edgeway’s seismographs registered the
first quake, Gunvald had begun to wish that the other members of the team had not ventured so near
to the edge of the ice, where the polar cap me the sea. At 4:14, the jolt was confirmed by radio
reports from Reykjavik, Iceland, and from Hammerfest, Norway. Severe slippage had occurred in the
seabed sixty miles northeast of Raufarhöfn, Iceland. The shock was on the same chain of
interlinked faults that had triggered destructive volcanic eruptions on Iceland more than three
decades ago. This time there had been no damage on any land bordering the Greenland Sea, although
the tremor had registered a solid 6.5 on the Richter scale.
Gunvald’s concern arose from the suspicion that the quake had been neither an isolated
incident nor the main event. He had good reason to believe that it was a foreshock, precursor to
an event of far greater magnitude.
From the outset the team had intended to study, among other things, ocean-bed temblors in
the Greenland Sea to learn more about local suboceanic fault lines. They were working in a
geologically active part of the earth that could never be trusted until it was better known. If
dozens of ships were to be towing colossal icebergs in those waters, they would need to know how
often the sea was disturbed by major submarine quakes and by resultant high waves. A tsunami--a
titanic wave radiating from the epicenter of a powerful quake--could endanger even a fairly large
ship, although less in the open sea than if the vessel was near a shoreline.
He should have been pleased with the opportunity to observe, at such close quarters, the
characteristics and patterns of major temblors on the Greenland Sea fault network. But he wasn’t
pleased at all.
Using a microwave uplink to orbiting communications satellites, Gunvald was able to on-
line and access any computers tied into the worldwide Infonet. Though he was geographically
isolated, he had at his disposal virtually all the research databases and software that would have
been available in any city.
Yesterday, he had tapped those impressive resources to analyze the seismographic data on
the recent quake. What he discovered had made him uneasy.
The enormous energy of the temblor had been released less by lateral seabed movement than
by violent upward thrust. That was precisely the type of ground movement that would put the
greatest amount of strain on the interlinked faults lying to the east of the one on which the
first event had transpired.
Edgeway Station itself was in no imminent danger. If major seabed slippage occurred
nearby, a tsunami might roll beneath the icecap and precipitate some changes: Primarily, new
chasms and pressure ridges would form. If the quake were related to submarine volcanic activity,
in which millions of cubic tons of molten lava gushed out of the ocean floor, perhaps even
temporary holes of warm water would open in the icecap. But most of the polar terrain would be
unchanged, and the likelihood was slim that the base camp would be either damaged or destroyed.
The other expedition members, however, couldn’t be as certain of their safety as Gunvald
was of his own. In addition to creating pressure ridges and chasms, a hot tsunami was likely to
snap off sections of the ice at the edge of the winter field. Harry and the others might find the
cap falling out from under them while the sea rushed up dark, cold, and deadly.
At nine o’clock last night, five hours after the first tremor, the second quake--5.8 on
the Richter scale--had hit the fault chain. The seabed had shifted violently one hundred five
miles north-northeast of Raufarhöfn. The epicenter had been thirty-five miles nearer Edgeway than
that of the initial shaker.
Gunvald took no comfort from the fact that the second quake had been less powerful than
the first. The diminution in force was not absolute proof that the more recent temblor had been an
aftershock to the first. Both might have been foreshocks, with the main event still to come.
During the Cold War, the United States had planted a series of extremely sensitive sonic
monitors on the floor of the Greenland Sea, as well as in many other strategic areas of the
world’s oceans, to detect the nearly silent passage of nuclear-armed enemy submarines. Subsequent
to the collapse of the Soviet Union, some of those sophisticated devices had begun doing double
duty both monitoring submarines and providing data for scientific purposes. Since the second
quake, most of the deep-ocean listening stations in the Greenland Sea had been transmitting a
faint but almost continuous 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.
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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 the 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 it 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 said. “Maybe sooner.”
At twelve minutes past noon another slippage had occurred in the subsea crust, one hundred
miles south: 4.5 on the Richter scale.
Now, at twelve-thirty, when Harry and the others were probably planting the final package
of explosives, Gunvald Larsson was biting so hard on his pipe that, with only the slightest
additional pressure, he could have snapped the stem in two.
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12:30
Almost six miles from Edgeway Station, the temporary camp stood on a flat section of ice
in the lee of a pressure ridge, sheltered from the pressing wind.
Three inflatable, quilted, rubberized nylon igloos were arranged in a semicircle
approximately five yards from that fifty-foot-high ridge of ice. Two snowmobiles were parked in
front of the structures. Each igloo was twelve feet in diameter and eight feet high at the center
point. They were firmly anchored with long-shanked, threaded pitons and had cushiony floors of
lightweight, foil-clad insulation blankets. Small space heaters powered by diesel fuel kept the
interior air at fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The accommodations weren’t either spacious or cozy, but
they were temporary, to be used only while the team planted the sixty packages of explosives.
A hundred yards to the south, on a plateau that was five or six feet above the camp, a six-
foot steel pipe rose from the ice. Fixed to it were a thermometer, a barometer, and an anemometer.
With one gloved hand, Rita Carpenter brushed snow from the goggles that protected her eyes
and then from the faces of the three instruments on the pole. Forced to use a flashlight in the
steadily deepening gloom, she read the temperature, the atmospheric pressure, and the wind
velocity. She didn’t like what she saw. The storm had not been expected to reach them until at
least six o’clock that night, but it was bearing down hard and was liable to be on them in full
force before they had finished their work and completed the return journey to Edgeway Station.
Awkwardly negotiating the forty-five-degree slope between the plateau and the lower plain,
Rita started back toward the temporary camp. She could move only awkwardly because she was wearing
full survival gear: knitted thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, felt boots, fleece-lined outer
boots, thin woolen trousers and shirt, quilted thermal nylon suit, a fur-lined coat, a knitted
mask that covered her face from chin to goggles, a fur-lined hood that laced under chin, and
gloves. In this cruel weather, body heat had to be maintained at the cost of easy mobility;
awkwardness, clumsiness, and discomfort were the burdens of survival.
Though Rita was warm enough, the bitter-cold wind and the barren landscape chilled her
emotionally. By choice, both she and Harry had spent a large portion of their professional lives
in the Arctic and Antarctic; however, she did not share Harry’s love of the vast open spaces, the
monochromatic vistas, the immense curve of sky, and the primal storms. In fact, she’d driven
herself to return repeatedly to those polar regions primarily because she was afraid of them.
Since the winter when she was six years old, Rita had stubbornly refused to surrender to
any fear, ever again, no matter how justified surrender might be…
Now, as she approached the igloo on the west end of camp, with the wind hammering her
back, she suddenly suffered a phobic reaction so intense that it nearly brought her to her knees.
Cryophobia: the fear of ice and frost. Frigophobia: the fear of cold. Chionophobia: the fear of
snow. Rita knew those terms because she suffered from mild forms of all three phobias. Frequent
confrontation with the sources of her anxieties, like inoculations against influenza, had ensured
that she usually suffered only minor discomfort, uneasiness, seldom flat-out terror. Sometimes,
however, she was overwhelmed by memories against which no number of inoculations was sufficient
protection. Like now. The tumultuous white sky seemed to descend at the speed of a falling rock,
to press relentlessly upon her as though the air and the clouds and the sheeting snow had
magically metamorphosed into a massive slab of marble that would crush her into the unyielding,
frozen plain. Her heart pounded hard and fast, then much harder and faster than before, then
faster still, until its frantic cadence drummed, drummed, drummed so loudly in her ears that it
drowned out the quarrelsome moaning of the wind.
Outside the igloo entrance, she halted and held her ground, refusing to run from that
which terrified her. She required herself to endure the isolation of that bleak and gloom-shrouded
realm, as someone who had an irrational fear of dogs might force himself to pet one until the
panic passed.
That isolation, in fact, was the aspect of the Arctic that most troubled Rita. In her
mind, since she was six years old, winter had been inextricably associated with the fearful
solitude of the dying, with the gray and distorted faces of corpses, with the frost-glazed stares
of dead and sightless eyes, with graveyards and graves and suffocating despair.
She was trembling so violently that the beam of her flashlight jittered across the snow at
her feet.
Turning away from the inflatable shelter, she faced not into the wind but crosswise to it,
studying the narrow plain that lay between the plateau and the pressure ridge. Eternal winter.
Without warmth, solace, or hope.
It was a land to be respected, yes, all right. But it was not a best, possessed no
awareness, had no conscious intention to do her harm.
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She breathed deeply, rhythmically, through her knitted mask.
To help quell her irrational fear of the icecap, she told herself that she had a greater
problem waiting in the igloo beside her. Franz Fischer.
She had met Fischer eleven years ago, shortly after she earned her doctorate and took her
first research position with a division of International Telephone and Telegraph. Franz, who had
also worked for ITT, was attractive and not without charm, when he chose to reveal it, and they’d
been together for nearly two years. It hadn’t been an altogether calm, relaxe, and loving
relationship. But at least she had never been bored by it. They’d separated nine years ago, as the
publication of her first book approached, when it became clear that Franz would never be entirely
comfortable with a woman who was his professional and intellectual equal. He expected to dominate,
and she would not be dominated. She had walked out on him, met Harry, gotten married a year later,
and never looked back.
Because he had come into Rita’s life after Franz, Harry felt, in his unfailingly sweet and
reasonable way, that their history was none of his concern. He was secure in his marriage and sure
of himself. Even knowing of that relationship, therefore, he had recruited Franz to be the chief
meteorologist at Edgeway Station, because the German was the best man for the job.
In this one instance, unreasonable, jealousy would have served Harry--and all of them--
better than rationality. Second best would have been preferable.
Nine years after their separation, Franz still insisted on playing the lover scorned,
complete with stiff upper lip and soulful eyes. He was neither cold nor rude; to the contrary, he
strove to create the impression that at night he nursed a badly broken heart in the lonely privacy
of his sleeping bag. He never mentioned the past, showed any improper interest in Rita, or
conducted himself in less than a gentlemanly fashion. In the confines of a polar outpost, however,
the care with which he displayed his wounded pride was as disruptive, in its way, as shouted
insults would have been.
The wind groaned, the snow churned around her, and the ice stretched out of sight as it
had since time immemorial--but gradually her racing heartbeat subsided to a normal rate. She
stopped shaking. The terror passed.
She’d won again.
When at last Rita entered the igloo, Franz was on his knees, packing instruments into a
carton. He had taken off his outer boots, coat, and gloves. He dared not work up a sweat, because
it would chill his skin, even inside his thermal suit, and leach precious heat from him when he
went outdoors. He glanced up at her, nodded, and continued packing.
He possessed a certain animal magnetism, and Rita could see why she had been drawn to him
when she was younger. Thick blond hair, deep-set dark eyes, Nordic features. He was only five
nine, just an inch taller than she, but at forty-five he was as muscular and as trim as a boy.
“Wind is up to twenty-four miles,” she said, pushing back her hood and removing her
goggles. “Air temp’s down to ten degrees Fahrenheit and falling.”
“With the wind-chill factor, it’ll be minus twenty or worse by the time we break camp.” He
didn’t look up. He seemed to be talking to himself.
“We’ll make it back all right.”
“In zero visibility?”
“It won’t get that bad so fast.”
“You don’t know polar weather like I do, no matter how much of it you’ve seen. Take
another look outside, Rita. This front’s pushing in a lot faster than predicted. We could find
ourselves in a total whiteout.”
“Honestly, Franz, your gloomy Teutonic nature?“
A thunderlike sound rolled beneath them, and a tremor passed through the icecap. The
rumble was augmented by a high-pitched, nearly inaudible squeal as dozens of ice strata moved
against one another.
Rita stumbled but kept her balance, as though lurching down the aisle of a moving train.
The rumble quickly faded away.
Blessed stillness returned.
Franz finally met her eyes. He cleared his throat. “Larsson’s much-heralded big quake?”
“No. Too small. Major movement on this fault chain would be much larger than that, much
bigger all down the line. That little shake would hardly have registered on the Richter scale.”
“A preliminary tremor?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“When can we expect the main event?”
She shrugged. “Maybe never. Maybe tonight. Maybe a minute from now.”
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Grimacing, he continued packing instruments into the waterproof carton. “And you were
talking about my gloomy nature…”
12:45
Pinned by cones of light from two snowmobiles, Roger Breskin and George Lin finished
anchoring the radio transmitter to the ice with four two-foot-long belaying pins, and then ran a
systems check on the equipment. Their long shadows were as strange and distorted as those of
savages hunched over an idol, and the eerie song of the wind might have been the voice of the
violent god to whom they prayed.
Even the murky glow of the winter twilight had now been frozen out of the sky. Without the
snowmobile headlamps, visibility would drop to ten yards.
The wind had been brisk and refreshing that morning, but as it gathered speed, it had
become an increasingly deadly enemy. A strong gale in those latitudes could press a chill through
layer upon layer of thermal clothing. Already the fine snow was being driven so hard that it
appeared to be sheeting past them on a course parallel to the icecap, as if falling horizontally
out of the west rather than out of the sky, destined never to touch ground. Every few minutes they
were forced to scrape their goggles and break the crust of snow off the knitted masks that covered
the lower half of their faces.
Standing behind the amber headlights, Brian Dougherty averted his face from the wind.
Flexing his fingers and toes to ward off the cold, he wondered why he had come to this godforsaken
terminus. He didn’t belong here. No one belonged here. He had never before seen a place so barren;
even great deserts were not a lifeless as the icecap. Every aspect of the landscape was a blunt
reminder that all of life was nothing but a prelude to inevitable and eternal death, and sometimes
the Arctic so sensitized him that in the faces of the other members of the expedition he could see
the skulls beneath the skin.
Of course that was precisely why he had come to the icecap: adventure, danger, the
possibility of death. He knew at least that much about himself, though he had never dwelt on it
and though he had only a shadowy notion of why he was obsessed with taking extreme risks.
He had compelling reasons for staying alive, after all. He was young. He was not wildly
handsome, but he wasn’t the Hunchback of Notre Dame, either, and he was in love with life. Not
least of all, his family was enormously wealthy, and in fourteen months, when he turned twenty-
five, he would gain control of a thirty-million-dollar trust fund. He didn’t have a clue in hell
as to what he’d do with all that money, if anything, but it surely was a comfort to know that it
would be his.
Furthermore, the family’s fame and the sympathy accorded to the whole Dougherty clan would
open any doors that couldn’t be battered down with money. Brian’s uncle, once President of the
United States, had been assassinated by a sniper. And his father, a United States Senator from
California, had been shot and crippled during a primary campaign nine years ago. The tragedies of
the Doughertys were the stuff of endless magazine covers from People to Good Housekeeping to
Playboy to Vanity Fair, a national obsession that sometimes seemed destined to evolve into a
formidable political mythology in which the Doughertys were not merely ordinary men or women but
demigods and demigoddesses, embodiments of virtue, goodwill, and sacrifice.
In time, Brian could have a political career of his own if he wished. But he was still too
young to face the responsibilities of his family name and tradition. In fact, he was fleeing from
those responsibilities, from the thought of ever meeting them. Four years ago, he’d dropped out of
Harvard after only eighteen months of law studies. Since then he had traveled the world, “bumming”
on American Express and Carte Blanche. His escapist adventures had put him on the front pages of
newspapers on every continent. He had confronted a bull in one of Madrid’s rings. He’d broken an
arm on an African photographic safari when a rhinoceros attacked the jeep in which he was riding,
and while shooting the rapids on the Colorado River, he had capsized and nearly drowned. Now he
was passing the long, merciless winter on the polar ice.
His name and the quality of several magazine articles that he had written were not
sufficient credentials to obtain a position as the official chronicler of the expedition. But the
Dougherty Family Foundation had made an $850,000 grant to the Edgeway project, which had virtually
guaranteed that Brian would be accepted as a member of the team.
For the most part, he had been made to feel welcome. The only antagonism had come from
George Lin, and even that had amounted to little more than a brief loss of temper. The Chinese
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摘要：

file:///G|/rah/Dean%20R.%20Koontz/Dean%20R.%20Koontz%20-%20Icebound.txtICEBOUNDByDeanKoontzBEFORE…FromTheNewYorkTimes:[1]POLARICEPURESTWATERINTHEWORLDMOSCOW,Feb.10--AccordingtoRussianscientists,thewaterconstituting heArcticicecaphasafarlowerbacteriacountthananywaterwenowdrinkorwithwhichweir igatec...

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