Sharkey tensed a bit because she knew what Hayes was going to say.
“Maybe he didn’t realize what he was doing,” Hayes said, true to form. “Maybe he wasn’t in his right mind anymore than Meiner was in his when he decided to keep those things company in the dark. Yeah, maybe, like Meiner, Gates didn’t have a choice. Maybe he was doing what those things wanted him to do . . . letting them thaw, letting their minds wake up all the way.”
Cutchen just sat there. He grinned at first thinking it was a gag, but the grin disappeared quickly enough. He looked over at Sharkey, his eyes seeming to say, what in the hell is this guy talking about?
18
“What we’re doing here,” Dr. Gundry was saying to Hayes inside the drilling tower the next morning, “is to drill down nearly a mile to Lake Vordog. We’ll stop drilling about a hundred feet above it and let the cryobot melt its way down the rest of the way. Why? Why not just drill all the way through? Simple. We don’t want to contaminate that lake in any way, shape, or form. Remember, Mr. Hayes -”
“Jimmy’s fine, just Jimmy.”
“Right. Anyway, Jimmy, Vordog is a pristine body of water, un-contaminated by microorganisms from above and has been for nearly forty-million years. Last thing we want is for some of our bugs to get into that water. The ecosystem down there may be radically different from any other on earth and we can’t take the chance of contaminating something like that.”
Gundry was pretty excited about the entire thing and particularly since he and his team had high hopes of getting down to the lake by the end of the day. They were damn close now. Hayes was trying to share the enthusiasm, but he was getting that bad feeling in his gut again that was telling him maybe that lake should be left alone.
But there would be no leaving it alone.
These guys would not stop until the lid was kicked off Pandora’s Box and all the badness had seeped out. Because it was more than the biology, geology, and chemistry of Lake Vordog these guys were interested in. There was something else, something inexplicable and therefore intriguing: a magnetic anomaly. Using magnetic imaging, the anomaly was discovered by a SOAR (Support Office for Aerogeophysical Research) fly-over the year before. Although at the South Geomagnetic pole, of course, there was a manifested flux in the earth’s electromagnetic field and from time to time small, temporary magnetic anomalies were detected, none of it explained what they were seeing roughly dead center of the lake: a self-perpetuating source of intense magnetic energy.
And there simply was no explanation for it.
At least, none that the scientists were ready to share.
Gundry, a CalTech glaciologist, was the project manager. He had six people working under him and the lot of them barely left the drilling tower. Usually sleeping and taking their meals there as well. Gundry had laid it all out for Hayes, best he could. The project was underwritten by NASA as part of the groundwork for the Europa Ice Clipper and Mars cryobot missions. Known as the ATP, the Active Thermal Probe, the cryobot would melt down through the northern ice cap of Mars . . . and eventually, through the frozen crust of Europa. The cryobot being used for the Lake Vordog probe, Project Deep Drill, would be similar to the ones they’d use on Mars and Jupiter’s frozen moons. Basically, it was something of a robotic submersible, a cylindrical probe about ten feet long and six inches in diameter with a heated nose cone designed to melt frozen ground and drill hyperthermally.
“It’s, essentially, like a high-tech . . . very high-tech . . . self-propelled drill, Jimmy,” Gundry explained. “Melting its way through the ice and passing down through the resulting liquid takes a lot less power than conventional augering. The nose cone melts the ice to liquid and the cryobot is drawn downward via gravity.”
Hayes nodded. “But on Mars or Europa, you’re not going to have a big drill like you have here to get the cryobot started.”
“No, good point. But the cryobot doesn’t need any pre-drilling, we’ve just done that to speed things along, you see. In our latest test — and trust me, Jimmy, there have been lots of tests — the cryobot melted its way though two-hundred feet of ice without any problem.”
Gundry explained that from the back of the probe there was a self-unspooling umbilical connecting it to the surface carrying power and fibre-optic video and data cables. What would happen was, after the cryobot began melting its way through the cap above Vordog, the hole would freeze up behind it and that would be perfectly fine in that it would seal Vordog from the outside world.
“So, the probe will melt through the cap and then drop down to the lake itself. It’s not solid ice above the lake. There’s an arched dome up to half a mile high above it,” Gundry said. “So the cryobot will have a splash-down of sorts and then go under where it then will split in two. The mother portion will stay just under the surface, analyzing the water and searching for signs of life. The other portion will descend to the bottom on a cable where it, too, will search for life and examine currents and temperatures, which will then give us a good idea what’s keeping that lake warm . . . we’re guessing hydrothermal vents, smoker vents.”
Hayes just shook his head. “The level of technology you guys come up with is amazing.”
“Oh, but we’re not done yet,” Campbell, the microbiologist, said, looking up from his monitor. “Once the lower portion hits the sediment, it will release the hydrobot . . . a tiny submarine of sorts equipped with sonar and a camera. It’ll bounce around down there like a soap bubble, showing us what’s above and below.”
Jesus, it was incredible.
No wonder these guys never came up for air. Project Deep Drill had begun the summer before, bringing in the equipment and setting it up, getting everything on-line and ready for the drilling. It hadn’t been until winter that everything was a go.
Hayes had wintered at other stations and usually the drilling towers were involved in core sampling for the NSF’s Antarctic Core Repository project. They drilled down, brought up cores for geochemical anaylsis and paleoclimatology studies. The cores could tell them the history of the world’s climate, the chemical composition of its water and air, things like that.
But, this year, it was a little more exciting.
Hayes stepped out of the control booth and stood there in the main room of the drilling tower which was cavernous and loud. The massive EHWD (Enhanced Hot-Water Drill) was channeling deep into the ice beneath the tower, making the floor vibrate. Compressors were thrumming and pumps hissing, hoses snaking every which way. The drill, he knew, pumped jets of ultra-hot water from a heating plant down a hose at high pressure to the drill head far below. The melted water was sucked up from the borehole, reheated up in the tower, and pumped back down in a cyclical process.
Hayes walked around, staying out of the way of the three technicians who were actually running the drill, monitoring its progress and keeping an eye on all that expensive machinery. The cryobot itself was over near the wall, looking like a missile suspended from an immense iron tripod and connected to huge spools of cable. The probe itself was sealed in a sterile vinyl bag that it would melt through once it reached its destination nearly a mile below.
Hayes was just staring at it, that feeling in his guts again like somebody had dug a pit in his belly. He couldn’t get beyond it now. It wasn’t a momentary thing he could laugh off, accost himself for being silly. No, this feeling was deep and ancient and intense. Staring up at the suspended cryobot he figured he was feeling roughly what Rabi, Oppenheimer, and the boys must have been feeling when they tested the atomic bomb for the first time: that the door had been thrown open and there was no going back.