Dream Thing

“If I turn you back on will you promise to leave me alone?” Remo growled to the flight attendant.

She blinked her acquiescence. He adjusted her spinal cord and cured her of total paralysis. She looked a little afraid of him and a little aroused. When another attendant joined her in business class, she apparently relayed the story, but it only succeeded in intriguing the second attendant. Remo was shooing them away for the next six hours.

Six hours during which the world began to see its end in sight.

Chapter 27

The South Pole was remote enough. But when you reached Lake in the Valley, you were really out in the middle of nowhere.

People came and went all the time at the geographic South Pole on the Polar Plateau. There was a permanent base there; always somebody was there with the front light on and the coffee hot—like a twenty-four-hour truck stop.

The Ross Sea and the Ross Ice Shelf were hubs of activity compared to this place. The Weddell Sea? Comparatively crowded. Casey was busy with Australians. Leningradskaya bustled with Russians. Showa was inhabited by Japanese. South Africans hung around Sanae. In addition, just about everywhere you went, there were Americans acting as if they owned the entire place.

But in the Lake in the Valley you could truly call yourself alone, like Antarctica ought to be. Eight hundred miles from the South Geomagnetic Pole, six hundred miles from the Russian base called Vostok, and one thousand frigid impassable miles from any other outpost of humanity.

A thousand miles was a hell of a lot of territory. That’s what people didn’t understand about the South Pole. It wasn’t a bunch of ice chunks floating around. It wasn’t a large island. Antarctica was a continent. If it were temperate and paved with asphalt, it would take days to drive across.

It offered the kind of extreme loneliness unavailable anywhere else in the world. Stuck in Lake in the Valley with nothing to see in either direction, knowing with utter certainty that you and your companions and your little metal shack were the only people and the only building in a swathe of land the size of Texas.

Karl Yurman got through it okay by not thinking about it. If you think about the solitude too much you go nuts—or you get tired of thinking about it and you worry about something else. You think about the cold until the cold gets old. You just keep going.

Someday Karl and the others would get their payoff and this would all be worthwhile. They’d be famous, even if they discovered nothing except germs. If they discovered something photogenic, they’d be really famous.

The Lake in the Valley had been identified a few years earlier by seismic mapping of the Antarctic ice layer. Here, in the then-unnamed valley, the instruments discovered a pocket of water under the three-mile layer of solid ice.

The concept was almost too much to comprehend. A lake of liquid water inside the Antarctic ice. Trapped there for millions of years. Salty enough to remain liquid at extremely low temperatures.

Now Yurman and his team were determined to get at the water, open her up, see what was in there. Subglacial lakes had yielded some amazing and unique life-forms, specially adapted to perpetual darkness and a hypersaline environment, but none accessed so far was nearly as old as the Lake in the Valley. It had been encased in ice for more than fifteen million years. It was known to be supersaturated with oxygen and nitrogen levels fifty times that of a freshwater lake on the surface.

On long nights like this, when Yurman stayed up alone watching the drill grind through the ice, hour after hour, he daydreamed a little about what might be down there. He let his fancy run away. He knew what kinds of creatures might have lived in the lake when it became ice covered; which of those would have survived in the microcosm? What challenges would the environment have presented and how would those creatures have evolved?

His knowledge and experience told him they would find nothing more amazing than a few superhardy bacteria strains. But wouldn’t it be cool if they found some sort of animal, something hideous and aggressive?

Yurman thought it entertaining to draw out monstrous creatures that would be biologically suited for the environment of the lake. The other guys loved his drawings of implausible primates that sifted microscopic particles from the water for food and pooped rock salt.

It was going to take another eighteen months minimum before they knew for sure what was in the lake. Drilling was slow going. They were on their third drill in a year—this one was an improved laser unit that was only slightly more reliable than its predecessors. It superheated the ice with a narrow beam, melting it into vapor and ventilating the steam to the surface in tiny puffs. They were lucky to get through a hundred feet a week, and the deeper they went the slower they went.

Something beeped.