There was a large noise outside. Linfrey left and offered an assessment. “The drill shed’s gone. The steam shaft’s widening itself to two meters already. The collar’s disappeared.”
Gerhny did some instant calculations. “If it stays constant it’ll swallow the lab in two hours.”
“It’s not staying constant,” Linfrey snapped. “Everybody get suited.”
Yurman was dragging on dry thermal suit pants as he relayed the information to Walken and gave him the coordinates of their escape—the overland route that would give them the least resistance to quick travel. He pocketed a satellite phone, which might or might not work.
The front entrance was blocked by sizzling steam, which hadn’t dissipated after the drill shed was blown off and was no longer directing the steam flow at the building. The front dorm and cooking areas of their Antarctic home had grown hotter than they had ever been. Sauna temperatures. The steam outside blocked their view of the shaft opening, but the sound had become the thunder of Niagara Falls.
They were ready in minutes, and every one of them took an emergency pack with a GPS beacon.
When they opened the door, water flooded in around their ankles.
“Walken, it’s Yurman and we’re in deep shit!”
The South Pole commander took the phone. “Go ahead.”
“The steam’s melting everything. Our damn field building is sinking in the ice—we almost didn’t get out in time. Both our Sno-Cats are sunk up to the windshield. We’re on foot and we’re up to our knees in slush.”
Walken and his base were prepared for a hundred varieties of South Pole emergencies, but this wasn’t one of them. “Our boys are on their way. They’ll find you, even without the Cats.”
“How long?” Yurman demanded.
Walken scanned the progress of the rescue aircraft. “ETA eighty-seven minutes.”
“We’ll be dead by then.”
Walken pursed his lips, then said, “No. You listen, boy. Get onto solid ground as soon as possible. Don’t get wet above the knees. You can do that.”
“We’re freezing already!”
“Yeah, you’re gonna freeze. And you boys can forget about having feet. But you can stay alive. Keep walking. Keep making energy. Keep your bodies working. You keep going until we pick you boys up. You hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“You keep moving!”
“We’ll keep moving.”
“There it goes!” shouted Polo, the Argentine scientist. Yurman and the others turned to watch.
Their corrugated metal home had never looked more spotlessly clean—free of ice and snow and drenched by the heavy fall of water droplets from the geyser. The metallic roof glinted in the sun as it slid into the deepening slush.
The geyser was five meters in diameter.
Gerhny turned away abruptly. “It’s impossible. Walken must have been wrong about the volcano. We’re right on top of it. That’s the only way there could be so much heat.”
Leek mumbled in reply through his face coverings. “No, man. No, man. Volcanoes are big.”
“Not that big,” Gerhny said morosely. “No volcano generates so much heat it’s going to melt a four-mile-thick ice layer for a hundred miles in every direction.”
“It’s a frigging volcano,” Leek insisted. “They’re big.”
“It’s a matter of calories, Leek. The amount of energy used for that much heat is bigger than a volcano a hundred miles away. It’s got to be right under our damn feet.”
“No,” Leek said to himself.
“We’ll get out of here,” Linfrey insisted. “Even if there’s a volcano down there, it’s not gonna erupt in the next two hours.”
Yurman wondered what expertise Linfrey was basing his assessment on. “That’s not our problem,” he said. “Our problem is the lake. Do you people realize that we’re now standing on an iceberg? The ice layer was less than a mile thick when everything went to hell, and now it’s melting fast.”
“A mile of ice is still a lot of ice,” Leek shot back. “It can’t melt in the next two hours.”
Yurman could hear the terror in Leek’s voice. He didn’t bother pointing out that everything today fit into the “can’t happen” category.
He was so damn cold. His feet were numb already, but his legs still burned with the cold. What was worse was the trickling of the cold blood coming up from his legs and sucking the warmth from his whole body.
He couldn’t dwell on the cold. He couldn’t let it get the better of him. He had to think about something else.
“Wonder what it will be like without legs,” he suggested. “Walken’s right that we’ll probably lose them.”
Linfrey got the idea at once. “Not so bad considering the alternative.”
“Yeah,” Leek said. “That ain’t so bad.”
“The prosthetics they have now are sophisticated,” Polo forced himself to say through chattering teeth.
“Right,” Linfrey said. “You can race marathons and shit.”
“You can run a shrimp boat, like in Forrest Gump,” Gerhny added, trying to sound unconcerned.
“Yeah. Let’s all pool our cash and buy a shrimp boat,” Leek said. “In Louisiana. Where it never freezes. You’re invited, too. Doc Polo. We’ll get you a work visa.”
“What worries me is not the losing of my legs but the other parts,” the Argentine said. “Do they have prosthetics for those? I do not know.”
“You mean the little shrimp? Now, that could be really serious,” Gerhny added, so gravely that the others chuckled. “Hey, legs you can do without. But if that freezes off, then what?”
Leek was sniggering and shaking from cold, almost uncontrollably. Yurman grasped the man by the arm. If Leek fell—if any of them fell and got wet above the crotch—their body heat would be sucked out of them long before the rescue chopper showed up.
The wet slush was getting shallow, he noted. They had waded almost two miles from the base camp, and the current of warm steam was reduced and the slush went only to their ankles.
They just might make it, Yurman thought. In another hour and fifteen, they’d be on the rescue aircraft getting warmed up.
The ground shook.
Gerhny toppled. He was big and sturdy, and it was like watching a beer-barrel tip. The man landed on his chest in the slush and his suit soaked up the water. Their high-tech outerwear was made for extreme cold, but not for water. In the Antarctic, landlocked a thousand miles in, exposure to standing water was not a factor, so the suits weren’t designed for it.
Gerhny got up sputtering on his hands and knees, and Karl Yurman knew he was looking at a dead man.
Gerhny was looking at something else, and his mouth hung open.
Yurman turned to see.
The valley was bulging. A magnificent upheaval occurred and the ground shook more as a slab of ice rose ten, fifteen, twenty feet high before it stopped, and furious plumes of steam hissed from the mile-long seam.
Five miles farther, the ice burst open like a popped pimple, sending a new steam column soaring into the air.
“It’s erupting,” Gerhny shouted. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the fact that he was soaked with freezing water, and plodded off as fast as he could move. The others ran after him.
The ground shook repeatedly, and Yurman glanced back to witness the eruption of more steam geysers, some of them miles away. How was this happening? Where did all this heat come from?
There was a tremor that started and would not stop. Gerhny fell down again, and Polo lost his footing. Leek slipped. Yurman tried to hold on to Leek, but the man slipped through his fingers and splashed into the slush.
A thought skipped through Yurman’s head. Slush is getting deeper again.
“It must be close!” he shouted, but then he saw he was wrong. The newest eruption was a hundred miles away, beyond the horizon of soggy snow and buckling ice. It burst out of the Antarctic valley like a submarine-fired missile erupting out of the sea, and it went up and up into the clear blue sky.