Icebound Read Online Free PDF

daunted him. A book—whether or not he had the talent and maturity to write well at such length—was a major commitment, which was precisely what he had been avoiding for years.
    His family thought that he had been attracted to the Edgeway Project because of its humanitarian potential, that he was getting serious about his future. He hadn’t wanted to disillusion them, but they were wrong. Initially he’d been drawn to the expedition merely because it was another adventure, more exciting than those upon which he’d embarked before but no more meaningful.
    And it still
was
only an adventure, he assured himself, as he watched Lin and Breskin checking out the transmitter. It was a way to avoid, for a while longer, thinking about the past and the future. But then…why this compulsion to write a book? He couldn’t convince himself that he had anything to say that would be worth anyone’s reading time.
    The other two men got to their feet and wiped snow from their goggles.
    Brian approached them, shouting over the wind, “Are you done?”
    “At last!” Breskin said.
    The two-foot-square transmitter would be sheathed in snow and ice within hours, but that wouldn’t affect its signal. It was designed to operate in arctic conditions, with a multiple-battery power supply inside layers of insulation originally developed for NASA. It would put out a strong signal—two seconds in duration, ten times every minute—for eight to twelve days.
    When that segment of ice was blasted loose from the winter field with almost surgical precision, the transmitter would drift with it into those channels known as Iceberg Alley and from there into the North Atlantic. Two trawlers, part of the United Nations Geophysical Year Fleet, were standing at the ready two hundred thirty miles to the south to monitor the continual radio signal. With the aid of geosynchronous polar satellites, they would fix the position of the berg by triangulation and home in on it until it could be identified visually by the waterproof, self-expanding red dye that had been spread across wide areas of its surface.
    The purpose of the experiment was to gain a basic understanding of how the winter sea currents affected drift ice. Before any plans could be made to tow ice south to drought-stricken coastal areas, scientists must learn how the sea would work against the ships and how it might be made to work for them.
    It wasn’t practical to send trawlers to the very edge of the polar cap to grapple with the giant berg. The Arctic Ocean and the Greenland Sea were choked with ice floes and difficult to navigate at that time of year. Depending on what the project experiments revealed, however, they might find that it was not necessary for the tow ships to connect with the ice even immediately south of Iceberg Alley. Instead, the bergs might be allowed to ride the natural currents for a hundred or two hundred miles before effort was expended to haul them farther south and coastward.
    “Could I get a few pictures?” Brian asked.
    “No time for that,” George Lin said shortly. He brushed his hands together, briskly knocking thin plates of ice from his heavy gloves.
    “Take just a minute.”
    “Got to get back to Edgeway,” Lin said. “Storm could cut us off. By morning we’d be part of the landscape, frozen solid.”
    “We can spare a minute,” Roger Breskin said. He wasn’t half shouting as they were, but his bass voice carried over the wind, which had escalated from an unearthly groan to a soft ululant howl.
    Brian smiled thankfully.
    “You crazy?” Lin asked. “See this snow? If we delay—”
    “George, you’ve already wasted a minute carping.” Breskin’s tone was not accusatory, merely that of a scientist stating an observable fact.
    Although Roger Breskin had emigrated to Canada from the United States only eight years ago, he was every bit as quiet and calm as the stereotypical Canadian. Self-contained, reclusive, he did not easily make