Paradeisia: Origin of Paradise (21 page)

Antarctica

The drilling station had a tower that was almost ninety feet tall.  It was at the center of the giant dome, 250 feet in diameter and a hundred feet high.  Nearby were giant storage tanks and a huge piles of ice.  A power station near the rim of the dome generated the electricity which powered the thermal drill (and everything else).

With this drill they had bored a tunnel twenty-six inches wide—a mere nine inches wider than the average man, and two miles long.  They had sealed the water at the bottom with a pressurizing chamber.  And, long before the drilling was done, they had built five titanium submersibles that, at least in theory, met all the qualifications of the mission.

Now, Doctor Ming-Zhen was trapped in one, and he was descending down the shaft whether he wanted to or not.

“Four thousand feet,” the voice of a controller came over the speakers in the submersible.

When he tilted his head, which he could only do by straining because of the brace, Doctor Ming-Zhen could just barely see the shaft going all the way up to the dark opening where camera flashes were still erupting.  In a few minutes, this last glimpse of civilization would vanish.  The light from the surface that glowed through the white snow wall was diminishing quickly the lower he went, but there was also a change in its composition.  It was becoming more opaque and had a bluish hue that grew deeper with the descent.

“Six thousand feet.”

Doctor Ming-Zhen knew that the lake far below him had fifty times the amount of oxygen in today's waters, something which would be consistent with what was known about prehistoric earth's atmosphere.  This seemed to be yet another indicator of the lake's ancient age.

“Eight thousand feet.”

DNA, though not prehistoric, was already proven to be abundant in the lake, and that's what Doctor Ming-Zhen was really after.  One of the reasons he had chosen the Antarctic as opposed to the Arctic was that no nation had any effectual claim on the place.  Finder’s keepers.

“Ten thousand feet.”

As he reached a depth at which there was no light, he switched on the exterior lights.  The height of the tunnel was shockingly dramatic now that it was illuminated from the inside.

“Twelve thousand feet.”

Finally, the submersible came to a stop with a slight bounce as the steel cable vacillated taut.  From below he heard the grinding sound of what he knew to be the pressurizing chamber opening.  When that stopped, the submarine gradually lowered into the chamber and outside the bubble he could see only metal.  There was a clamping sound as the hooks at the ends of the Y-split on the cable were released.

“I am in the chamber.  Prepare for radio silence,” he said.

“See you on the other side,” Doctor Toskovic's voice came over the speakers.

He watched as the cable spun around on its way out the pressurizing chamber and up the tunnel.  He felt very much alone as the concave hatch twisted shut above him.

He hit a button to begin the sanitizing process.  To ensure no contaminants made it into the lake from the submarines, they were self-cleaning.  First, jets of boiling hot water were released to soak the outer skin, followed by a chemical bath.  This process took only five minutes.

At the last minute, he remembered the stick of gum he had brought and slipped it into his mouth.  Chewing rapidly, he waited for the five thousand pounds per square inch of water pressure.

With a loud grating noise and a blast, the water shot in from below, blasting his round viewport with a violent spray.  He could hear very tiny creaks as the vessel was gradually fully subjected to the force of the lake water.  A sudden sharp pain jolted his inner ears: he chewed harder until they popped.

Finally, the pressure was equalized and the door on the side
slowly opened.  He engaged the propulsion and the craft slowly slid to the side and out of the chamber.  Once fully in the water, he allowed the top of the sub to lower so he was laying horizontal.

The water was black.  The circumferential exterior lights illuminated a slowly swirling cloud of white specs that stretched out for about twenty or thirty feet in a cloud, but beyond that was total and overpowering blackness.

He pushed a button to capture a water sample in one of the twenty small storage compartments.  As he peered at the white dots as they brushed up against the bubble, he could see with his naked eye what they were: near-microscopic shrimp, and they were moving.  With tiny arms and tails, they were sifting through the water, though their movement was certainly more at the mercy of the currents than of their own volition.

He could scarcely breathe, he was so mystified. 
There is a living biology here
.  Before he came to Antarctica, he assumed that if there had been anything alive down here, it would have been some single-celled bacteria.  Certainly not crustaceans.

He knew that, on the earth above, brine shrimp like these were at the bottom of a very long and very large food chain.  But, doubtless, there could be nothing larger than these tiny shrimp in these conditions....

Almost with a sense of foreboding, he gazed farther out into the darkness, as far as the lights shone. 
What else might be beyond in the black unknown?
  He desperately wished he could communicate to the surface, but of course that was impossible.

He knew Doctor Toskovic's submersible would be coming, so he decided to pilot his farther away from the chamber to avoid any collision.  The whir of the electric motors was somehow comforting as he maneuvered down and out into the deep.  On a screen underneath the glass, a pinging dot showed the location of the pressurizing chamber moving off from the center.

In this darkness he would certainly have no way of knowing where the exit was if the beacon failed.

He grew alarmed as he noticed the beacon moving faster than it should have been.  Looking out the bubble, he could see that he was not really moving independently of the shrimp, but that they were all heading in the same direction in the same current.  He quickly reversed the propulsion.  This slowed
his vessel somewhat, with the shrimp rushing on past—but it only worked momentarily.  Before he could even think, the craft swung around and he could sense that he was traveling at a great rate of speed.  Extremely anxious, he fumbled with the joysticks to try to escape the current, but this only succeeded in causing the submarine to spiral wildly.  The beacon drifted away from center ever more swiftly and his heart began to pound in his chest as he felt both a panic overcoming him as well as an onslaught of claustrophobia.

In desperation, he cried out, “Command!  Can you hear me?”  But of course his suppressed logical mind
knew that they could not.  He was in the grip of total terror, and he was hurling into the abyss.

PART TWO

8.1.2014

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