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gases.
    What made Wilkes Ice Station something special was that two days
     before Abby Sinclair's distress signal had gone out
     another high-priority signal had been sent out from the
     station: This earlier signal, sent to McMurdo, had been a formal
     request seeking the dispatch to Wilkes of a squad of military police.
    Although the details had been sketchy, it appeared that one of the
     scientists at Wilkes had killed one of his colleagues.
    Schofleld stared at the barred door at the end of the ice tunnel and
     shook his head. He really didn't have time for this. His orders
     had been very specific:
    Secure the station. Investigate the spacecraft. Verify its existence.
     And then guard it against all parties until reinforcements arrived.
    Schofield remembered sitting in the closed briefing room on board the
     Shreveport, listening to the voice of the Undersecretary of
     Defense on the speakerphone. “Other parties have almost certainly
     picked up that distress signal, Lieutenant. If there really is an
     extraterrestrial vehicle down there, there's a good chance one of
     those parties might make a play for it. The United States Government
     would like to avoid that situation, Lieutenant. Your objective is the
     protection of the spacecraft, nothing else. I repeat. Your objective
     is the protection of the spacecraft. All other considerations are
     secondary. We want that ship.”
    Not once had the safety of the American scientists at the station been
     mentioned, a fact that hadn't gone unnoticed by Schofield. It
     obviously hadn't slipped past Sarah Hensleigh either.
    All other considerations are secondary.
    In any case, Schofield thought, he couldn't afford to send any
     divers down to investigate the spacecraft while there existed the
     possibility that one of the residents of Wilkes might be a source of
     trouble.
    “All right,” he said, looking at the door but addressing
     Hensleigh. “Twenty-five words or less. What's his
     story?”
    Sarah Hensleigh said, “Renshaw is a geophysicist from Stanford,
     studying ice cores for his Ph.D. Bernie Olson is—
     was—his supervisor. Renshaw's work with ice cores
     was groundbreaking. He was digging core holes deeper than anybody had
     ever dug before, at times going nearly a kilometer below the
     surface.”
    Schofield vaguely knew about ice core research. It involved drilling a
     circular hole about thirty centimeters wide down into the ice shelf
     and pulling out a cylinder of ice known as a core. Held captive within
     the core were pockets of gases that had existed in the air thousands
     of years before.
    “Anyway,” Sarah said, “a couple of weeks ago, Renshaw
     hit the big time. His drill must have hit a layer of upsurged
     ice—prehistoric ice that has been dislodged by an earthquake
     sometime in the past and pushed up toward the surface. Suddenly
     Renshaw was studying pockets of air that were as much as three hundred
     million years old. It was the discovery of a lifetime. Here
     was a chance to study an atmosphere that no one has ever known. To see
     what the earth's atmosphere was like before the
     dinosaurs.” Sarah Hensleigh shrugged. "For an academic,
     something tike that is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
     It's worth a fortune on the lecture circuit alone.
    "Only then it got better.
    “A few days ago, Renshaw adjusted his drilling vector
     slightly—that's the angle at which you drill down into the
     ice—and at 1500 feet, in the middle of a
     four-hundred-million-year-old section of ice, he hit
     metal.”
    Sarah paused, allowing what she had just said to sink in. Schofield
     said nothing.
    Sarah said, “We sent the diving bell down, did some
     sonic-resonance tests of the ice shelf, and discovered that there was
     a cavern of some sort right where this piece of prehistoric
     metal was supposed to be. Further tests showed that there was a tunnel
     leading up to this cavern from a depth of 3,000 feet. That
     was when we sent