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was embedded in the ice beside the hole.
    Pete Johnson was hunkered beside Harry. He looked over his shoulder at the Frenchman and called out above the keening wind: “Ready here, Claude.”
    A barrel, which they had filled with snow, stood on electric heating coils in one of the cargo trailers. It brimmed with boiling water. Steam roiled off the surface of the water, froze instantly into clouds of glittering crystals, and was dispersed into the whirling snow, so it seemed as if an endless procession of ghosts was arising from a magical cauldron and fleeing to the far reaches of the earth.
    Claude Jobert fixed a metal-ring hose to a valve on the barrel. He opened the valve and handed the nozzle to Carpenter.
    Loosening the petcock, Harry let hot water pour out of the hose into the deep shaft. In three minutes the hole was sealed: The bomb was suspended in new ice.
    If he left the shaft open, the explosion would vent upward to no purpose. The charge had been shaped to blow downward and expend its energy to all sides, and the hole must be tightly sealed to achieve the desired effect. At midnight, when that charge detonated with all the others, the new ice in the shaft might pop out like a cork from a bottle, but the greater force of the blast would not be dissipated.
    Pete Johnson rapped his gloved knuckles against the newly formed plug. “Now we can get back to Edge—”
    The icecap jolted up, lurched forward, tilted sharply in front of them, squealed like a great monster, and then groaned before collapsing back into its original plane.
    Harry was thrown on his face. His goggles jammed hard against his cheeks and eyebrows. Tears streamed as pain swelled across his cheekbones. He felt warm blood trickling from his nostrils, and the taste of blood was in his mouth.
    Pete and Claude had fallen and were holding each other. Harry caught a brief glimpse of them, grotesquely locked in each other’s embrace as though they were a pair of wrestlers.
    The ice shook again.
    Harry rolled against one of the snowmobiles. The machine was bouncing up and down. He clung to it with both hands and hoped that it would not roll over on him.
    His first thought had been that the plastic explosives had blown up in his face and that he was dead or dying. But as the ice swelled once more, he realized that tidal waves must be surging beneath the polar cap, no doubt spawned by a seabed quake.
    As the third wave struck, the white world around Harry cracked and canted, as if a prehistoric creature were rising from a long sleep beneath him, and he found himself suspended at the top of an ice ramp. Only inertia kept him high in the air, at the top of the incline. At any moment he might slide to the bottom along with the snowmobile, and perhaps be crushed beneath the machine.
    In the distance, the sound of shattering, grinding ice pierced the night and the wind: the ominous protests of a brittle world cracking asunder. The roar grew nearer by the second, and Harry steeled himself for the worst.
    Then, as suddenly as the terror had begun—no more than a minute ago—it ended. The ice plain dropped, became a level floor, and was still.

    Having sprinted far enough to be safely out of any icefall from the looming pressure ridge, Rita stopped running and spun around to look back at the temporary camp. She was alone. Franz had not emerged from the igloo.
    A truck-size piece of the ridge wall cracked off and fell with eerie grace, smashing into the uninhabited igloo at the east end of the crescent-shaped encampment. The inflatable dome popped as if it were a child’s balloon.
    “Franz!”
    A much larger section of the ridge collapsed. Sheets, spires, boulders, slabs of ice crashed into the camp, fragmenting into cold shrapnel, flattening the center igloo, overturning a snowmobile, ripping open the igloo at the west end of the camp, from which Franz had still not escaped, casting up thousands of splinters of ice that glinted like showers of sparks.
    She was six