Free Vostok by Steve Alten

Antarctic missions were especially hard on marriages, and mine was already strained. Though we had reconciled, it was painfully obvious that Brandy felt threatened by Ming’s combination of looks and intelligence. Not that my wife wasn’t smart or pretty—she was both. But she lacked a formal education and never had the opportunity to go to college, something Ming and I shared. As spring bled into summer, Brandy grew increasingly more temperamental, actually believing that my father and I had conspired to get her to accept my excursion to Antarctica by using the “infamous Wallace cunning.”
    In her own way, Brandy eased my burden. By the time September rolled around I couldn’t wait to get out of earshot of her accusations—not a good way to part.
    Was I interested in the exotic Dr. Liao? I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an attraction, but Brandy was still my girl.
    Then again, six months was a long time
.
    Back to my list.
    Claustrophobic Fears: This was the dark cloud that had hung over my existence since I’d drowned and been revived in the Sargasso Sea. Despite Hintzmann’s assurances, the reality was that our three-man submersible would be smaller than the
Massett-6
, the sub that had cracked open at a depth of 4,230 feet.
    Imagine taking a twenty-hour road trip without being allowed to stop and stretch. To prepare myself, I created a mini-sub cockpit out of cardboard and sat in it for three- to five-hour stretches. Willy would climb in my lap with his favorite book,
Goodnight Moon
, and we’d read together and fall asleep.
    What can’t be simulated are the effects of a trillion-ton frozen ceiling of ice more than two miles thick. To reach Vostok’s frigid waters would require us to plunge down a laser-melted hole that would reseal behind us. The pressure capping our 13,100-foot-deep entry point would generate 4,000 to 5,000 pounds per square inch of pressure on our sub—a pound of pressure for every dollar Angus had been advanced out of
my
paycheck.
    Thanks again, Pop
.
    Adding to my fear of enclosed spaces was the fact that, save for the sub’s internal displays and external lights, we’d be operating in complete blackness. If the power went out, or if we hit something,
or if something hit us…
    That last thought led to my final category of fear: Irrational Fear of the Unexpected. It included encounters with hydrothermal vents that spewed water hot enough to melt the seals on our sub and regressed into alien algae blooms that could clog our engines.And, of course, there were lake monsters.
    Two years had passed since I’d nearly died in the jowls of one monster. Though I seriously doubted anything larger than a slug occupied Vostok’s waters, we would be entering an unexplored subglacial lake one hundred and forty miles
longer
and thirty miles
wider
than Loch Ness, energized by the same geothermal vents that had induced life on our planet 3.8 billion years ago.
    Who knew what was down there?
    A sane person would have walked away from this potential train wreck. Yet as much as I dreaded the trip, the scientist in me couldn’t wait to explore Vostok.
    The more I researched it, the more I realized the lake was a gift to science and scientists throughout the world. To be among the first three humans to venture into its untarnished waters would cement my reputation forever.
    Named after the Russian outpost established in East Antarctica in December of 1957, Lake Vostok was first theorized by a Soviet scientist named Peter Kropotkin, who made an aerial observation of an island of flat ice sandwiched around mountainous drifts. Two years later another Russian, Andrey Kapitsa, used seismic soundings to measure the thickness of the ice sheet around Vostok Station and hypothesized the existence of a subglacial lake. Still, few believed the lake could be liquid until the 1970s, when British scientists performing airborne ice-penetrating radar surveys of the plateau declared the unusual readings indicated