"How did you find us?" Austin said.
"We talked to the captain of the icebreaker. He said you were striking off to explore the volcano in some sort of aircraft."
"We had a paraglider."
"I remember now. The two large bags you brought with you."
Austin nodded. "You missed all the fun."
"On the contrary," Petrov said in a cheerful tone. "We have had a great deal of fun. We encountered a group of armed men coming in on a boat. They gave us a warm welcome, but our thank-you was even warmer. The survivor said they had been sent in to help some men who were already here." He looked over Austin's shoulder as if he expected to see someone following him.
"Those men are no longer with us," Schroeder said.
"Yes," Austin said. "They were trampled by a herd of woolly mammoths."
"Dwarf mammoths," Zavala corrected.
Petrov shook his head. "I studied American culture for years, but I'll never understand your strange humor."
"That's all right," Austin said. "Even we don't understand it. Do you think you can give us a hand the rest of the way down the mountain?"
"Of course," Petrov said with a grin. He reached into his backpack and produced a bottle of vodka. "But first we will have our drink together."
32
Austin was having a weird dream in which a procession of pygmy mammoths paraded along the streets of a crystal city to the tune of "St. Louis Blues." His eyes snapped open. The mammoths and the city had vanished, but the blues were still playing. The music came from his phone.
Vowing to stay away from crazy Russians who drank vodka like water, he dug the phone out of his pack and managed a fuzzy, "Austin."
Trout's voice said, "We've been trying to get you and Joe for days. Have you been down in a mine?"
"More like a cave," Austin said. "We found Karla Janos, and were on a Russian icebreaker headed for the Siberian mainland."
"Glad to hear she's okay. She may be our only hope."
Austin was struck by the seriousness in Trout's voice. He sat up on the edge of the bunk.
"Our only hope for what, Paul?"
"Gamay and I found a copy of the Kovacs Theorems in Los Alamos. I did a computer simulation based on the Kovacs stuff and existing material on polar reversal. The situation doesn't look good."
"I'm listening." Au
stin was fully awake now.
Trout paused. "The simulation showed that the magnetic polar reversal is not as elastic as some people think. A shock that's strong enough to cause a magnetic polar reversal will trigger a geologic shift of the earth's crust."
"Are you saying that a polar shift, once begun, is irreversible?"
"That's the way it looks."
"Is there any margin for error in the simulation?"
"It's so slim as to be negligible."
Austin felt as if a wall had fallen on him. "We're talking about a catastrophe."
"Worse," Trout said. "This is a doomsday scenario. The worldwide destruction if this thing is unleashed is beyond anything that can be imagined or previously experienced."