Tom Grace: Polar Quest

Nedra looked over her husband’s shoulder. ‘Where’s the bottom?’

‘Fathometer reads about seventy-five feet of water beneath the fish. This is deeper than the surrounding area. May be a rift in the bottom. The haze looks a lot heavier than before. I think we found a smoker.’ Collins slowed the hydrobot’s descent as it reached the haze. ‘Temperature is rising, pushing into the fifties.’

‘Let’s hold here and take another water sample.’

A clear rigid pipette extended out from the bow of the hydrobot into the water, the submersible’s camera relaying the action to the station above. Inside the hydrobot, a pump drew some water into a sterile sample capsule. After the capsule was filled and sealed, the sampling system purged its lines and withdrew the pipette.

‘Damn, I wish we had that lab kit on board. It’d be nice to know if we found anything alive down there.’

‘You’ll just have to wait. We’ll know within a couple of weeks after we get home.’

When the sampling was complete, Collins resumed the descent. Sixteen feet down, the water in front of the camera cleared considerably. The hydrobot’s lights grazed the underside of the thick silty cloud suspended over the lake bottom. Particles glinted as they fell through the powerful beam of white light.

‘I’m going to maintain about thirty feet off the bottom while we take a look around,’ Collins said. ‘Water temp is now in the mid-seventies.’

‘It looks like we’re inside a snow globe.’

‘Only that’s volcanic ash, not white glitter.’

Collins moved the hydrobot forward slowly as they scanned the image of the silty bottom for any sign that life existed inside this remote, alien realm.

‘Water temp is moving up,’ Collins said. ‘There just has to be a vent close by.’

‘If you do find one, just make sure you don’t get too close or you’ll fry the electronics,’ Nedra cautioned.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ Collins snapped.

He brought the hydrobot to a stop and began turning it in a slow horizontal sweep to the right. Forty-three degrees right of his previous heading, he spotted a plume of particles billowing out of a lumpy black mass of rock that jutted up from the lake bottom like a broken fang. The ash gray landscape surrounding the smoker was mottled with patches of white.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ Nedra asked.

Collins swallowed hard, his throat suddenly feeling very tight and dry. He pushed the hydrobot forward, gliding cautiously toward the nearest field of iridescent white. As he closed the distance, details began to emerge from the indistinct mass – long, thin strands of filaments. Collins brought the hydrobot to a stop just a foot above the edge of the spaghetti-like mass. The gentle turning of the hydrobot’s maneuvering thrusters disturbed the water, rippling through the filaments like a breeze through a wheat field. Small, transparent creatures similar to jellyfish darted out of the hydrobot’s light.

‘I don’t think you need that lab kit now,’ Nedra said.

Collins’s eyes were transfixed on the digital image. ‘Send a message to the Jet Propulsion Lab: Lake Vostok is alive .’

‘Is the coffee in there any good?’ Nolan Kilkenny asked as he approached the main conference room.

Loretta Quinn, executive assistant to the chairman of the Michigan Applied Research Consortium, looked up from the letter she was preparing and gave Kilkenny an annoyed look. ‘Does this look like the counter at Starbucks?’

‘No, but you’d be making a killing if it was. Maybe I should talk to the boss about leasing them some space, might be a good way to generate some extra revenue.’

‘Don’t you dare, Nolan. Knowing your father, he’d probably think it was a marvelous idea and I’d end up with a cappuccino maker next to the fax machine. There’s a fresh pot of coffee on the table, and – ’ Quinn glanced down at her notes, ‘your satellite window opens at four-forty-five, and you only have about ten minutes of air-time.’

‘Thanks, Loretta.’

Inside the conference room, Kilkenny set his files and a legal pad on the granite table and poured coffee into one of the dark blue mugs that bore the consortium’s logo. Outside the snow was steadily falling on the wooded grounds surrounding the building.

One of the files he brought with him contained the current financial projections for the biotech firm UGene. The Michigan Applied Research Consortium, known as MARC, had provided UGene with several million dollars of venture capital in exchange for a significant piece of the company. That investment paid its first dividends when Kilkenny orchestrated UGene’s initial public offering on Wall Street, a feat which turned him into a paper millionaire.

It still amazed Kilkenny how much his life had changed. Three years earlier, he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, commanding a squad of SEALs and existing on a military paycheck. Now he was crunching numbers and helping promising young companies develop their potential – and getting rich in the process.

‘It’s called snow,’ a basso profundo announced from the doorway, cutting through Kilkenny’s drifting thoughts.

‘I’m familiar with it, Oz,’ Kilkenny replied without looking. ‘I grew up here.’

‘Then you have my condolences.’

At six-foot-six and 220 pounds, Oswald Eames had the physical presence to justify a voice that broadcast in the Barry White-James Earl Jones spectrum. Kilkenny turned his chair around as Eames entered the conference room, followed by his partner, Lloyd Sutton.

‘Thanks for coming, gentlemen,’ Kilkenny said. ‘Have a seat.’

Sutton shot a nervous glance at Eames as he shed his overcoat. ‘What’s this all about, Nolan? The fourth-quarter numbers?’

‘Partly, though the numbers are fine,’ Killkenny said reassuringly. ‘I’ve got the preliminaries from our accounants and there are no surprises.’

Kilkenny handed out copies of the financial statements and quickly ran through the highlights: Bottom line, UGene was generating a modest profit – which was no small feat for a newcomer in the notoriously capital-intensive world of biotechnology. What kept UGene from burning through its IPO cash horde like one of the many over-hyped dot-coms was the total focus of Eames and Sutton on ‘bioinformatics’ – the company’s main product line, biological information. UGene specialized in parsing the genomes encoded in lengthy strands of DNA, identifying genes and proteins, and determining how they function inside living organisms.

‘Any updates on the most recent batch of patent applications?’ Kilkenny asked.

‘It’s the Wild West all over again.’ Eames’s reply masked little of his frustration. Like the work of early cartographers in the American West, what the scientists from the Human Genome Project and Celera produced was little more than the first decent map of a previously uncharted territory. The real work came in exploring this vast frontier, and biotech companies were staking claims – in the form of patents – over potentially valuable sections of genetic real estate.

The genetic gold rush was on, complete with prospectors in lab coats and outlaw claim-jumpers in dark suits armed with lawsuits and patent applications instead of six-shooters. ‘Most of our work is clear and uncontested,’ Eames continued, ‘but there are a few sequences we’re going to have to fight for.’

‘That’s why I prefer my side of the business,’ Sutton offered. ‘The patents on my work are based on inventions and processes – they’re totally unambiguous. Gene patents are a claim of ownership over a naturally occurring molecule.’