When Alex reestablished the link, Mary wasn't at the comm anymore. It was a woman he did not know. Well, Mary had to crash sooner or later. Lonny might have suggested that she was spending too much time downlinking.

Talk was cheap. The delta vee might cost too much for a rescue trip; but the solar power for the comm links was practically free. He and Mary could talk until Hell froze over; which, judging by his surroundings, would be real soon now.

He let Gordo handle the comm. Not that he was sulking over Mary's absence, but he felt it was about time that the kid took a hand in his own rescue. Alex listened in.

"Skazhitye, Big Momma," he heard him say. "Team Leader 'Robert' points out that, uh, Fargo Gap is uzkiy--is a choke point, and sure to be roadblocked by now. He requests that you contact their driver, code-named 'Pins,' by secure channel and tell him to 'meet us at the gas station.' Tell 'The Ghost' that 'Pins' can be reached at 'FemmeFan's Gramp.' Katya, did any of that make sense to you?"

"Obkhodimiy, Gordon. As long as makes sense to you and to contact. We are letting you know transponder frequency soon."

Mike told Alex that "Pins" was Bob Needleton. "Pins and Needles get it? just like 'Robert is 'the Bruce.' "

Alex wondered what the point was of having code names if Mike kept explaining what they meant. Don't mean anything. It's a game to Mike. High stakes, but stilljust a game.

The decision to head for Brandon obviously pleased no one, but there was little choice in the matter. As Bruce explained it, they could not return to Mapleton; they could not risk running the road block at Fargo Gap; and they could not easily set up a rendezvous with Bob Needleton short of a landmark they all knew about. From the glum expressions, they must know they'd still be on the Ice after sunset. Alex wondered if they were having second thoughts about the rescue.

Alex knew that rivers were free-flowing streams of water propelled by gravity rather than pressure. He had seen pictures. He could even close his eyes and remember them. He had swum in one once, a majestically slow stream with banks choked by trees, as close to weightlessness as he had come in those days. But memory did not prepare him for the sight of the Red River from atop the Dakota Glacier.

Sherrine stopped the sledge at the head of a vast ramp of ice while Thor and Steve probed ahead for crevasses. Mike pointed downward. "There she is," he said. "The Red River of the North. It carries warmer water from the south into New Lake Aggaziz. If it weren't for the river and the rectenna farm, Winnipeg would be under the Ice by now."

Alex looked where he pointed. The valley was partially filled in, with ice and snow forming a broad shallow U. The river itself gleamed a perfect silver, the sunlight dancing on it where it showed between the choking ice floes. At first the river seemed merely large; but the nearby hills and ice banks gradually brought it into scale in his mind. The largest free-flowing stream he had seen in recent years was when the laundry basin in the daycare center had plugged up and the rinse water overflowed. He'd gotten three kinds of hell over it and spent a day and a half sponging loose globules out of the air. What he saw now was vast beyond belief. Hundreds of liters of water, at the very least!

He shivered, and not from the cold. Even the trip across the glacier had not prepared him for this sight. The white sky and white land had blended together, destroying all sense of distance. He had halfway convinced himself that he was in a small, sterile room. Now an immense vista opened below him, and--oddly--he felt more dwarfed than during an EVA.

Sherrine must have seen him studying the river because she asked him what he thought.

Alex shook his head. "I've never seen anything so big." He laughed nervously. "In fact, I'm feeling a touch of agoraphobia."

"You're kidding," said Mike. "You live in orbit. You should be used to wide open spaces."

"Well, yes and no," Alex answered him. He kept his gaze fixed on the panorama below him, forcing his mind to accept it. "Inside the habitats, everything is cramped; outside, everything is so vast you can't even relate to it. Life consists of things you can reach out and touch and things you could never touch in a lifetime of reaching. Somehow this intermediate scale seems much bigger.

Sherrine laughed. "You should see the Mississippi."

"He may," said Mike. "When the Great Ice builds up enough weight, it'll tip the North American Plate and the Mississippi'll start running north. I'd hate to be in California when that happens. The whole tectonic boundary'll go at once." He dismounted from the sledge and trudged across the Ice to where Bruce Hyde stood watching the skiers through a pair of binoculars.

Alex turned to Sherrine. "Is he always like that?" he asked.

"Mike? Sure. We call him the 'Round Mound of Profound.' " She was perched tailor-fashion atop the snowmobile engine housing, taking advantage of the break to warm herself from the engine heat. "He'll talk about anything and everything. Sometimes he even knows what he's talking about."

Alex shook his head. "Why do you put up with it?"

She gave him a look of surprise. "Fen are a tolerant bunch. You'd be shocked at some of what we put up with. Besides, every now and then he comes up with something useful."

"So, were to now?" he asked. It was irritating to sit bundled in the sledge while others took charge. He knew he should be used to that. MacLeod do this. MacLeod do that. Don't forget to clean up. Help the kids put their toys away. Try to be useful for a change. But piloting Piranha had wakened something. For a short time he had been making the decisions. Poor ones maybe; but his decisions.

Sherrine twisted and faced the river valley. Directly east was the sheer wall of another glacier, higher than the one they were on. "Over there," she said, pointing. "The Minnesota Glacier." For a time she stared silently into the valley. Then, "When I was a little girl, the Red was a 'mean and cantankerous river.' It was either too high or too low. Mostly too low. Filled with sandbars and driftwood. And, oh God, the mosquitoes! They were this big!" She held her hands out an improbable length. "The riverbanks were lined with thick strands of chokeberry and pussywillow, some box elder and elm, even a little cottonwood here and there." She sighed. "It's all gone now. Living in the Minneapolis heat sink, it's easy to forget how much has already been swallowed up under tons of ice. The trees, the fish, even the damn mosquitoes. Whole environments. Soon, the river will be gone, too. It'll freeze and become just another tongue of the glacier."

"So fast," she said. "It came on so fast. Positive feedback. Once it gets started, it runs away before you know it's begun." She turned and looked at him over her shoulder; gave a little shrug. "Sometimes it gets me down, you know what I mean?"

Bruce and Mike were walking back to the sledges, waving their arms. Sherrine and Doc resumed their seats in the snowmobiles. "It's ironic, don't you think," she asked him before starting the engine, "that the biggest environmental disaster in history was caused by environmentalism?"

The Valley was as quiet as a Christmas postcard scene. Everything was shrouded in a blanket of light powdery snow. There were ghostly hummocks from which protruded the odd chimney or tree branch. Steve spotted an automobile embedded in the side wall of the glacier itself, its tail end protruding several meters past ground level.

Alex remembered reading about the mammoths found frozen in the Siberian glaciers of an earlier ice age and wondered what future generations would make of this relic when and if the Ice released its grip.