“You don’t have to tell me,” the foreman said.

“What’s the depth?” Mark asked.

“Not much change from yesterday,” the foreman said. “We’ve got out thirteen hundred thirty-three feet of pipe. Since the bottom is just shy of a thousand feet and there’s no sediment, we’re down into the rock about three hundred and forty feet, give or take a few inches.”

“This is what I was explaining to you last night,” Mark said to Perry. “We were doing fine until four days ago. Since then we’ve gone nowhere, maybe two or three feet tops, despite using up four drill bits.”

“So you think you’ve hit up against a hard layer?” Perry said, thinking he had to say something.

Mark laughed sarcastically. “Hard ain’t the word. We’re using diamond-studded bits with the straightest flutes made! Worse yet is we got another hundred feet of the same stuff, whatever it is, before we get to the magma chamber, at least according to our ground-penetrating radar. At this rate we’ll be here for ten years.”

“Did the lab analyze the rock caught in the last broken bit?” the foreman asked.

“Yeah, they did,” Mark said. “It’s a type of rock they’d never seen before. At least according to Tad Messenger. It’s composed of a type of crystalline olivine that he thinks might have a microscopic matrix of diamond. I wish we could get a bigger sample. One of the biggest problems of drilling in open sea is not getting a return of circulated drilling fluids. It’s like drilling in the dark.”

“Could we get a corer down there?” Perry asked.

“A lot of good that would do if we can’t make any headway with a diamond-studded bit.”

“How about piggybacking it with the diamond bit. If we could get a real sample of this stuff we’re trying to drill through, maybe we could figure out a reasonable game plan. We got too much invested in this operation to give up without a real fight.”

Mark looked at the foreman, who shrugged. Then he looked back at Perry. “Hey, you’re the boss.”