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Cuvier?”
    “Never met him.”
    Schofield moved on. “And how many did they take back to
     d'Urville?”
    “They could only fit six people in their hovercraft, so one of
     their guys took five of our people back there.”
    “Leaving the other four back here.”
    “That's right.”
    Schofield nodded to himself. Then he looked at Hensleigh. “There
     are a couple of other things we need to talk about. Like what you
     found down in the ice. And the Renshaw ... incident.”
    Sarah understood what he was saying. Such matters were best discussed
     in the absence of a twelve-year-old.
    She nodded. “No problem.”
    Schofield looked at the ice station around him: at the pool down at
     the bottom, at the catwalks set into the walls of the cylinder, at the
     tunnels that disappeared into the ice. There was something about it
     all that wasn't quite right, something that he couldn't quite
     put his finger on.
    And then he realized, and he turned to face Sarah. “Stop me if
     this is a stupid question, but if this whole station is carved into
     the ice shelf and all the walls are made of ice, why don't they
     melt? Surely you must generate a lot of heat in here with your
     machinery and all. Shouldn't the walls be dripping
     constantly?”
    Sarah said, “It's not a stupid question. In fact, it's a
     very good question. When we first arrived here, we found that the heat
     from the exhaust of the core-drilling machine was causing some of the
     ice walls to melt. So we had a cooling system installed on C-deck. It
     works off a thermostat that keeps the temperature steady at
     —1° Celsius no matter what heat we produce. The funny thing
     is, since the surface temperature outside is almost thirty below, the
     cooling system actually warms the air in here. We
     love it.”
    “Very clever,” Schofield said as he looked around the ice
     station.
    His gaze came to rest on the dining room. Luc Champion and the other
     three French scientists were in there, sitting at the table with the
     residents of Wilkes. Schofield watched them, deep in thought.
    “Are you going to take us home?” Kirsty said suddenly from
     behind him.
    For a long moment Schofield continued to watch the four French
     scientists in the dining room. Then he turned to face the little girl.
    “Not just yet,” he said. “Some other people will be
     here soon to take you home. I'm just here to take care of you
     until they do.”
    Schofield and Hensleigh walked quickly down the
     wide ice tunnel. Montana and Hollywood kept pace behind them.
    They were on B-deck, the main living area. The ice tunnel curved
     around a wide bend. Doors were sunk into it on either side: bedrooms,
     a common room, and various labs and studies. Schofield couldn't
     help noticing one particular door that had a distinctive three-ringed
     biohazard sign on it. A rectangular plate beneath the sign read:
     biotoxin laboratory.
    Schofield said, “They said something about it when we got to
     McMurdo. That Renshaw claimed he did it because the other guy was
     stealing his research. Something like that.”
    “That's right,” Hensleigh said, walking fast. She looked
     at Schofield. “It's just crazy.”
    They came to the end of the tunnel, to a door set into the ice. It was
     closed and it had a heavy wooden beam locked in place across it.
    “James Renshaw,” Schofield mused. “Isn't he the one
     who found the spaceship?”
    “That's right. But there's a whole lot more to it than
     that.”
    Upon arriving at McMurdo Station, Schofield had been given a short
     briefing on Wilkes Ice Station. On the face of it, the station seemed
     like nothing special. It contained the usual assortment of academics:
     marine biologists studying the ocean fauna; paleontologists studying
     fossils frozen in the ice; geologists looking for mineral deposits;
     and geophysicists like James Renshaw who drilled deep down into the
     ice looking for thousand-year-old traces of carbon monoxide and other