Eighteen months to reach liquid water was a pipe dream, if you asked Yurman. It might be double that, or more.
Something beeped again. Nights like this were all Karl had to look forward to for a long time …
What the hell had beeped at him? The drill seemed okay. No lens to replace. Vent motor was okay. Or was it?
It was stopped. The entire drill was in standby mode. Autoshutdown activated. Why was autoshutdown activated?
Oh. It had stopped because it had reached water.
“Say again?” Karl Yurman asked the monochrome display. Something was really screwed up. Sure enough, the front-end sensor had picked up moisture traces in the bottom of the drill shaft. Hell, the laser must have gone haywire. When it melted way too much ice the fan couldn’t ventilate the steam fast enough and it condensed into liquid and shut down the drill for hours.
Yurman would have to run a diagnostic on the drill and hope he could figure out the problem, because if he couldn’t, then he’d have to extract it and that would put them out of commission for days.
Something else beeped. Since when did their displays have all these audible alerts? A temperature gauge? Yurman sneered at the screen. Ninety-two degrees Celsius? Yeah, right. Something was truly F.U. He hit the retract button and the large drum began to reverse, rewinding the mile-long umbilical cable to the ice drill.
Another beep said the temperature was now above boiling. Karl Yurman switched on the remote camera and tried to figure out what he was looking at.
The harsh white light on the drill showed him—boiling water.
That couldn’t be right. The laser was powerful, sure, but it was pulsed and aimed in a way to melt one penny-sized circle of ice at a time. It would take a total system failure, and the breakdown of various protective fail-safes, to make the laser stay on long enough to melt and boil water in the drill shaft. In fact, why was it boiling if the autoshutdown had been triggered? There wouldn’t be that much residual heat.
The internal temperature gauge began sounding an alarm, and Karl was astounded to find the external temperature was still rising. But the laser was off.
There had to be another heat source. A mile under the Antarctic ice, which had been frozen solid since way before man first jumped out of the trees, and now there was a new heat source. Ridiculous.
“What’s going on? You woke me up.” It was Gerhny, the head engineer, coming in bleary eyed from the dormitory, where others were now stirring. “What’s all the racket?”
“I can’t figure it out,” Karl said. “You won’t believe what the temp gauges are trying to tell me.”
Linfrey was next to come investigating, in his uniform of paisley-printed boxer-shorts. He was the computer whiz. There wasn’t anything Gerhny and Linfrey didn’t know about the equipment.
“It’s really messed up. I’m pulling it in,” Yurman reported.
“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?”
