“What’s that on the screen?” Linfrey asked. “Steam?”
“I can’t even figure out the malfunction,” Yurman admitted. “I think the damn laser’s still going.”
Gerhny made a face. “You’d see the glow on the screen. I don’t see anything except the drill light.”
“The drill light didn’t raise the shaft temp high enough to make steam.”
“Neither did the laser,” Gerhny snapped. “This ain’t a malfunction.”
Linfrey guffawed shortly.
“I’m serious.”
Yurman was glad somebody else had suggested what he suspected. “What else could it be? A hot spring? We mapped this ice for miles around and never saw a hot spring.”
“The laser’s gonna crack—look at the temp!” Linfrey shouted. “It’s gotta be something in the drill head overheating, Gerhn.”
“Explain the steam,” Gerhny snapped. “The whole thing couldn’t make that much heat under any circumstances.”
“Hey, shit. Come see this!” It was Charlie Cho, an optical-engineering doctoral candidate from Columbia University. His promising drill head innovations had earned him a place on the team and a free, six-month-long vacation in beautiful Antarctica.
Yurman ducked out of the control room. Cho was dragging on his thermal gear as the others crowded around the porthole windows, where the drill shed was leaking wisps of vapor.
“She’s coming up,” Yurman reported. “That’s steam from below.”
“Gonna cook my laser,” Charlie reported.
“Leave it,” Linfrey called from the control room. “The temp’s going way up. It might cook you, too.”
Cho ducked into the control room and shook his head at what he saw on the monitors. “Whatever it is, it’s not that hot yet. I’m getting my drill.”
Charlie ducked into the vestibule, dragged the door shut behind him, then opened the door to the outside. The draft that leaked through the cold-lock was subzero.
“This is nuts,” Gerhny complained from the control room. “It’s gotta be a hot spring.”
“In the ice?” Yurman asked.
“Why’s the drill coming up so damn fast?” Linfrey asked.
“Cho’s not stupid. He’ll stay clear until the winch stops.”
“But why’s it going so fast?”
It came to Karl Yurman why it was going so fast. “Call Cho! Tell him to get back. It’s gonna burn him!” At the porthole he saw Charlie Cho tromp through knee-deep snow and drag open the door to the drill shed. Clouds of steam came from the vestibule. He was in such a hurry he didn’t drag it closed behind him.
“Why?” Linfrey asked.
“Call him!” Yurman insisted.
“Didn’t take his radio,” Leek growled.
Karl Yurman yanked both doors and battled through the frigid wind without his coat. “Cho, get out of there,” he shouted.
Through the open doors of the drill shed, Yurman saw Cho amid the gentle puffs of steam trickling from the umbilical shaft. The man was looking at him quizzically. The big drill spindle was rotating fast, as if the long drill umbilical weighed almost nothing.
“Get out before it blows!”
Cho shouted back, “It can’t blow, Yur. It’s electric.”
“Steam pressure building under the drill,” Yurman shouted. Now was not the time for an explanation. “When the drill pops out, the steam’s gonna fry everything in the shed.”
Cho’s stricken expression told Yurman that he understood what the danger was, but it turned out to be too late. There was a clank from below. That was the clank of the drill head entering the steel-reinforced opening channel of the drill shaft. Yurman dove face first into the snow.
Charlie Cho tried to run, but the battered drill head ejected from the drill shaft like a champagne cork, and then the high-pressure steam surge filled the shed. Cho yelled when the exposed skin of his face became scalded. His goggles weren’t on and he couldn’t open his eyes, so he missed the door and ran into the wall. The steam vent was roaring. Scalding steam entered his lungs when he gasped for breath. He slammed into the wall a few more times, unable to find the way out, but then his rational mind kicked in just long enough to instruct him to follow the escape route of the steam blast. He somehow managed to feel the current and staggered along with it.
Then there was a fresh burst behind him and the steam pressure increased dramatically. Cho was slammed from behind, knocked onto his face, and the urgent fingers of steam slipped through the tiniest gaps in his thermal suit. Trickles of fire burned his skin.
Cho couldn’t help it. He screamed, and when his body forced him to inhale, it brought in white-hot vapor that scalded his windpipe and boiled his lungs. His thermal suit became a burning blanket.
Karl Yurman crawled through the snow that was melting into slush under his body while the steam blast heated up his back. The back of his sweatshirt was soaked with sweat. He felt arms grabbing him and dragging him inside the lab building, but he didn’t stand up until he heard the doors closed behind him.
“Talk to me, Yur,” Gerhny demanded as they dragged the wet clothing off of him.
Yurman swayed on his feet. “I think I’m okay.”
“Cho’s cooked,” Leek was moaning. “He’s cooked!”’
Yurman allowed the dripping sweatshirt to be removed from his body, then he shouldered Leek out of the porthole window.
Cho was cooked, all right. The young man who would never get his doctorate had managed to strip off the thermal suit from the waist up, and he got his shirt half off. Then he succumbed. The blast of steam jetting out of the drill shed was as strong as the discharge of a jet engine, and the heat parboiled Cho’s front. His face and chest were pink and puffy.
His chest was shaking.
“He’s still alive,” Yurman said.
“Not for long,” Gerhny replied dully. “We can’t help him.”
“We have to.”
“How we gonna get to him?” Gerhny demanded. “We almost got killed dragging you back.” Gerhny nodded across the room. Polo, the Argentine scientist with the unpronounceable name, was bandaging Linfrey’s bright red forearms.
Yurman couldn’t believe that they were helpless. He turned back to the porthole, just in time to witness Cho’s swelling eyeballs burst behind their lids, one after another. Sizzling goop spattered out.
Cho’s tremulous breathing stopped a few seconds later.
“Yur, if you’re okay I want you on the phone with the seismic boys at Aslab,” Linfrey said. “I want to know what the fuck this is.”
Yurman nodded and returned to the control room. He wondered how everything could have gone to hell so fast. Fifteen minutes ago he’d been sitting there alone, bored and happy while everybody else slept—including Cho.
He slumped in his seat and dialed up the permanent U.S. Amundsen-Scott scientific base at the South Pole.
“What the hell is going on up there, Yurman?” demanded the base commander, a man named Walken. “You guys trying to blast open that damn lake?”
“We broke through into some sort of a steam vent.” He gave a brief account of the tragedy, but Walken wasn’t in the mood to listen to details.
“Yurman, you guys are in trouble. That’s not a steam vent. It’s something big.”
“Big?”
“We’re getting readings on seismic.”
“Seismic?” Yurman wasn’t following.
“Listen, it’s triangulating weird but it’s less than a hundred miles from where you’re sitting.”
Yurman considered that. “We didn’t feel any earthquake.”
“Earthquakes don’t give off a lot of heat. We’re thinking volcano.”
“Volcano?” Yurman repeated stupidly. He wasn’t the only one. The others were standing around, listening on the speaker, and every single one of them said, “Volcano?”
“That’s our best guess,” Walken said. “We’re coming to get you.”