Black Ice

by Matt Dickinson

  A few minutes passed before Sean confirmed the unit was in position.

  ‘Turning on the heater core now.’ Sean activated the switch which sent power down to the tip of the cutting head.

  Lauren and Frank focused on the neon-green screen of the radio echo monitor, watching intently as the fuzzy edges converged centre screen, minute by minute, into a well-defined line which was unmistakably a harder barrier.

  ‘That’s the roof of the cavity.’ Frank pointed to a lozenge-shaped mass. ‘We’re about thirty centimetres off.’

  ‘Stop the burner, Sean.’

  ‘Heater off.’

  Seven hundred and ninety-four metres beneath them, the fragile heated tip of the probe began to cool.

  ‘Give it three minutes to let it freeze,’ Lauren instructed Sean. ‘When the needle goes in, I don’t want any meltwater going in with it.’

  They waited, Lauren watching the seconds tick past on her wristwatch, knowing that if the next stage failed they would be going home empty-handed. And, if they had contaminated the lake, things would be even worse. Lauren knew there were plenty of environmental pressure groups waiting to analyse Capricorn’s results. News that the team had inadvertently tainted a hitherto pristine reservoir of life would make future fundraising virtually impossible and could blacken Lauren’s reputation for good.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I think the honour’s yours,’ Sean told her.

  Lauren held her breath and pressed the button which would release the final stage of the probe. There was a hiss of compressed air as the hydraulic ram was activated. Seconds later a green light came on on the instrument panel.

  ‘Second-stage probe successfully deployed,’ Frank said, unable to disguise the slight tremble in his voice, ‘and back in its sleeve.’

  ‘Acquisition?’ Lauren asked him.

  Frank checked the gauge which monitored the contents of the probe’s sterile internal tank. ‘Acquisition confirmed,’ he told her. ‘The tank is full.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Sean shouted in joy. ‘We reached the lake!’

  Lauren stared at the instrument panel in delight.

  ‘It worked!’ she cried. ‘It really worked! Now get that thing back up here quickly before the whole unit freezes in.’

  Sean powered up the wireline and Big Boy began its three-quarter-kilometre ascent back up the bore. These were still anxious moments: if the core collapsed, or the wireline broke, they could still lose the sample.

  Four minutes later the unit was swinging free from the gantry, the inspection hatch on the side opened to reveal the titanium container in which the lake sample was stored. Lauren unscrewed the specimen container from its position and held it reverently in her hands. She found herself lost for words, all the tension of the past hours spilling from her as she savoured the moment.

  ‘That’s it.’ Sean smiled as he took a rag to wipe away her tears. ‘Hell of a lot of effort to get your hands on a litre of water!’

  Sean disengaged the drive unit for the bore and waited for the revolutions to stop. Then he hit the kill switch for the Perkins. The huge engine shuddered to a halt with surprising suddenness, leaving them in silence bar the rumble of the wind rushing around the exterior of the shed.

  ‘How long will it take you to work out the results?’

  ‘Forty-eight hours to see if we have a success or not, two or three weeks before I’ll be ready to announce anything to the world.’

  Lauren hurried away, the precious sample tucked into her windsuit.

  45

  Julian Fitzgerald lay back on the bench and wrapped his hands round the rubber grips of the weight bar which was suspended above him. He flexed his arms, clicked the bones in his fingers and took a deep breath, pushing the forty-kilo load to the mechanical limit of the machine and then letting it slowly down to his chin before exhaling and repeating the movement. The weight felt good, the muscles in his arms warming quickly as he got into the rhythm of push-rest-push, a light sheen of sweat breaking out on his brow as he stared into the ceiling lights above him.

  The weight room was a good place to be, the explorer had found, such a good place that he devoted anything up to six hours of his day to the process of honing his body back into shape. It was a familiar business, this test of pain, a way of blocking the frustrations which seemed to be growing daily inside him.

  Capricorn. This prison. Fitzgerald hated every moment of this winter endurance, wanted with every fibre of his body this dark, testing nightmare to end. He was missing opportunities, losing money hand over fist; back in Europe, long-arranged lecturing commitments had had to be cancelled, lucrative new sponsorship deals put on hold. By the time Fitzgerald got back, he knew that interest in his Antarctic story would be waning … that some other explorer would be capturing the public interest with a fresher, perhaps more successful tale.

  And how the days dragged. He had tried to write, spent interminable hours in front of his laptop screen, only to encounter a writer’s block as stubborn as any he had ever known. Normally, he was a fast and efficient author, turning his expeditions into gripping factual accounts which rarely failed to make the best-seller lists.

  But this time it was different. Despite the fact that this unasked-for winter layover had given him a seemingly ideal situation to put his story into words, Fitzgerald found himself sitting listlessly at his desk, cup after cup of coffee drunk with no progress on the manuscript. Part of it was his own frustration, the knowledge deep down that, no matter how he tried to dress up the achievements of his trans-Antarctic trek, he could never shake off the stigma that it had ultimately failed.

  That Carl had made him fail.

  Now the weight was really telling, the mechanical swish-swish of the machine pounding up and down as ligaments and tiny internal sinews in Fitzgerald’s arms began to ripple and stretch. He checked the clock on the wall, seeing with satisfaction that he had already been bench-pressing for twenty minutes, more than most men his age could manage. He wouldn’t give up, not till every last vestige of strength had been tested and probed to its limit.

  Carl. His expedition partner was still an unresolved problem. As was the question of the rival book which Lauren had clumsily revealed to him. Carl was writing like crazy, the explorer knew; he spent most of his waking hours tapping away in the medical bay and was rarely seen anywhere else in the base.

  What were Carl’s plans? Had he e-mailed a publisher already? Perhaps he already had a contract. Fitzgerald felt the sweat running into his eyes as he pushed the pace yet harder. How many words a day could Carl produce? Was he one of those people who could churn out two, three thousand words every day without fail? If so, he might already have the best part of a manuscript complete, a block of digital information which could be sent via the satellite in a matter of seconds to any publisher he chose.

  With a final long exhalation of breath, Fitzgerald let the weight bar down. He swung himself back into a sitting position and rubbed the sweat from his face and neck with a towel, waiting for his heart rate to return to its normal resting pace.

  It was time for a confrontation, he knew, time to find out from Carl what the hell he thought he was up to.

  Fitzgerald made his way to the medical bay, where he found his fellow expeditioner sitting up in his bed, the laptop positioned on his knees.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Fitzgerald asked him.

  Carl stopped typing and looked at the explorer suspiciously. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing. Just checking you’re doing all right. Hadn’t seen you out and about around the base, that’s all.’

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Carl told him. ‘I don’t need your sympathy.’

  Fitzgerald sat on the bed and tapped the back of the laptop with his hand. ‘Working on anything in particular?’ he asked.

  Carl resumed his typing. ‘Just some correspondence.’

  ‘Eight hours a day?’

  ‘I write long letters.’

  Fitzgerald sto
od, crossing to the sink, where he ran some water into his hands. He splashed some on his face, drying himself off with the towel as he looked out of the window at the black winter night.

  ‘You’re not writing a book about our expedition?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t have to answer that question, Julian, so I’m not going to.’

  ‘Because you know you can’t. By law. You signed a contract with me before we set out, remember?’

  ‘What’s wrong, Julian? What are you scared of?’

  ‘I’m not scared of anything. I just wouldn’t want there to be any … misunderstanding between us.’

  ‘Misunderstanding?’ Carl managed a bitter laugh. ‘Oh, you needn’t worry about that.’

  ‘You are, aren’t you? That’s what you’re doing in here, all day, every day. That’s why you never come out for your meals, why you lie in here like some goddamn invalid. You’re writing a bloody book!’

  Carl said nothing, but resumed his typing.

  ‘You won’t find a publisher,’ Fitzgerald told him. ‘My lawyer will see to that.’

  ‘You’re talking about your precious gagging clause? That pathetic so-called contract you forced me to sign? Well, I no longer agree to it. It’s a fundamental breach of my right of freedom of speech.’

  ‘It’s enforceable by law.’

  ‘There is no law here, Julian, or hadn’t you noticed that? I can write what I want, when I like, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.’

  There was a pause in the conversation while Carl continued to type. Fitzgerald sat on the bed, itching to rip the laptop from his hands and only restraining himself with some difficulty.

  ‘Is it a question of money?’ Fitzgerald asked him after a while. ‘Because, if it is, I think I can propose a compromise.’

  Carl said nothing.

  ‘I’ll cut you in for thirty per cent of the profit from my book of the expedition,’ Fitzgerald went on, ‘but only on the condition that you abandon any thought of writing a book of your own. How does that sound?’

  ‘No deal,’ Carl told him. ‘This isn’t about the money, Julian, and you know it … although I dare say my account—that is, if I was writing one—might even attract a bigger advance than your own.’

  The two men stared at each other for a while. Fitzgerald broke the silence.

  ‘The law is on my side, Carl. I’ll take out an injunction if I need to.’ With that, he stood to go. As he reached the door, the tap-tap of Carl’s fingers on the laptop keyboard had already begun.

  Fitzgerald went back to the weights room, where Mel was midway through her daily session on the rowing machine.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, brightly.

  Fitzgerald ignored her, lying once more on the bench-press machine and this time selecting sixty kilos on the bar. He let the weight press down, his already overexercised muscles cracking a little with the stress. Push-rest-push. Fitzgerald focused on the ceiling lights and let his body take the pain, the hot flare of anger burning inside him, brighter than he had known before.

  46

  Lauren called Mel into the laboratory, where she had been analysing the samples. When she spoke, her voice was unsteady.

  ‘Mel. Can you take a look at this, please? I want to be sure I’m not imagining these.’

  Mel put her eye to the viewer on the compound microscope, her reaction immediate. ‘What the hell are they?’

  ‘Well, they don’t exist in any textbook I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure.’

  Mel watched the circular organisms twist and turn. ‘They’re beautiful.’

  ‘They’re more than beautiful,’ Lauren laughed. ‘They’re exquisite; they’re gorgeous. We did it, Mel: we found life!’

  The two women embraced in their excitement.

  ‘We have to tell the others,’ Mel said. ‘Do you want me to go and fetch them?’

  ‘Keep it secret for a while. I need to do a further test,’ Lauren told her. ‘There’s something about these organisms that doesn’t add up, and I want to be sure of my facts.’

  An hour later Mel returned to find Lauren ashen-faced.

  ‘Can you call the team in now, please? I’ve got an announcement to make.’

  Within minutes the team had assembled in the laboratory.

  ‘Put us out of our misery, Lauren. Do we have life down there or not?’ Frank asked her impatiently.

  ‘Oh, we have life, Frank … we have life in abundance.’ Lauren could not keep the huge smile from her face. ‘But not as we know it, so to speak.’

  ‘You mean new species?’

  ‘New species, but with a twist. In fact with the ultimate twist.’

  Lauren paused, enjoying the hushed expectation of her assembled team.

  ‘The sample we pulled out of the rig last night is teeming with diatoms. Our theory about the lake was correct. But these creatures are not following the normal rules of life as we understand them.’

  ‘How so?’ Sean took a look into the compound microscope. ‘What’s the big deal?’

  ‘The big deal is that one of the fundamentals of science has been to try and discover what the basic requirements for life actually are. Until the late seventies, we thought that solar power was the deal breaker as it were, that without the energy of the sun there would be no life on the planet. Then, in the late seventies, scientists from the NSF began to investigate hydrothermal vents on the sea bed off Hawaii. We’re talking really deep on the ocean floor, so deep there’s no light at all. By rights there shouldn’t be anything living there, but there was … tardigrades and crustaceans, big complex creatures that were harvesting geothermal energy. That discovery changed the textbooks; it meant that life could exist without solar energy by utilising a supply of carbon … and energy.’

  Mel peered into the eyepiece of the compound microscope. ‘So that’s what these creatures are doing?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Lauren said, ‘and that’s why we’re into exciting new territory here. We already know there’s no light down in that lake, and now I find these samples show virtually no traces of carbon at all, less than one part in ten million. This microbial life is breaking all the rules … by the standards of our current science, it shouldn’t be able to live down there at all.’

  ‘So if it has no light and no carbon, what’s its secret?’ Frank asked.

  Lauren couldn’t prevent the excited smile which lit up her face. ‘Silicon,’ she said. ‘The tests I’ve just finished show these diatoms have hydrated silicon shells.’

  ‘And where do they get the silicon from?’

  ‘The volcano beneath the lake. Silicon comes from igneous rocks, and active volcanoes are a prime source. These single-celled creatures have evolved a method of harvesting it, and they’ve been successfully doing that in an environment which has been deprived of air, and sunlight, for at least twenty-five million years.’

  ‘So these are new to science?’

  ‘New to the planet, to be more accurate. There’s even the possibility that these creatures may have an extraterrestrial origin, that they came to earth on a meteorite or other space debris, got locked into the lake and never looked back.’

  ‘And where will this discovery lead?’ Mel asked.

  ‘That’s the really interesting part. The sample we’re dealing with here comes from the very top stratum of the lake, the furthest from any volcanic energy source. The next step is to come back with a more sophisticated probe, a robot submarine, and explore the sediment layers which we know lie at the bottom. Then we might be talking big drama, and possibly big creatures too. The fact that there’s more than one species of silicon-based diatom means there’s competition for resources. Where there’s competition, food chains evolve, and the closer to the energy source we can get, the more chance we have of finding significant macrofauna.’

  ‘Silicon-based macrofauna?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Hold it right there,’ Sean laughed. ‘Are we talking big scary monsters? I mean, I
don’t want to be a sceptic or anything, but just because you found a few microscopic creatures, that doesn’t mean you’re going to find anything bigger.’

  ‘Want to bet?’ Lauren responded. ‘How many links in the food chain do you think separate the single-celled diatoms that float around the oceans of the world, and a one-hundred-and-twenty-ton blue whale?’

  ‘I have no idea. Hundreds, I guess.’

  ‘The answer is one. The Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba. Krill eat diatoms, blue whales eat krill. That one-centimetre-long creature is the only link between the smallest and biggest beings on the planet. So it’s not the least bit unlikely that there could be significant macrofauna down there in that lake. All we have to do is get a robot sub in there and find it.’

  ‘How much would that cost?’ Frank asked.

  Lauren hazarded a guess. ‘It’s big, complicated science. I doubt you’d get much change from fifty million for such a project. Capricorn would have to be quadrupled in size to pull something like that off, and we’d need a far bigger team.’

  ‘Think you’d find the money?’

  Lauren held up one of the test-tube samples. ‘With these samples we can raise any amount of money we like. We’ve pulled off something amazing here, and there’ll be no shortage of money to extend the science. I think we’ve guaranteed the life of this research base for at least the next five years … and for me that is just a dream come true.’

  ‘I get the feeling this might be an excuse for a few beers,’ Murdo said, his face beaming at the prospect.

  The party began after the evening meal, the tables pushed back in the mess room to create an impromptu dance floor. Murdo pumped up the stereo as high as he dared without blowing a speaker while Mel dragged one protesting victim after another onto the floor for dancing exhibitions which had them all in stitches.

  Frank won the prize for worst dancer of the night, his enthusiastic gyrations to a fifties rock classic managing to beat even Murdo and Lauren’s hilariously uncoordinated attempt at a tango.