Dream Thing

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.”