Glancing over at Finn, watching him work as he wrote out a label and pressed it onto the surface of the polyethylene bag, she thought that only he would be crazy enough to suggest running off to the North Pole in the dead of winter. But she’d been wrong. There were plenty of others on the team at first, with the goal of providing the deepest and most comprehensive Arctic ice core data ever collected in the hopes of helping boost the research on climate change. She had jumped at the chance to work with firn-snow so cold all the time it never melted from year to year-and, too, with Finn.
Without Finn, she never would have known about this opportunity, let alone taken it, leaping with a blind faith the girl her father had once called “Miss Microscope” would never have considered without the solidity of her best friend, Finn, beside her. As one of the world’s most renowned paleoclimatologists, he’d been on hundreds of Arctic expeditions, but she’d been naively excited beyond words when they started this project, at the thought of being a part of history, and too, of spending time away from the world with Finn. And now that the rest of the crew had left, going home just in time for the holidays and leaving them to finish up the last of their project, they were truly alone.
Mary rubbed her gloved finger over the surface of the core-ice frozen for seven-hundred and fifty thousand years and pulled from a depth of almost two and a half miles. No human being had ever touched anything so deep before. If the bitter cold didn’t do it, the incredible rush of that realization should have been more than enough to give her goose bumps under her parka, but that wasn’t what caused the shiver that ran up her spine, nor was it the heat from Finn’s body next to hers.
She had discovered something even more bottomless, more infinite. And she was hungry for more, determined to prove to Finn that what she’d found wasn’t some statistical anomaly.
“I’m going deeper.” She stood, turning toward the drill, leaving him to bag and tag the latest core, but Finn caught her arm, shaking his head.
“It’s enough.” He nodded toward the sled. “Let’s pack up and get back to base.
It’s freezing, it’s midnight and you’re sick.”
“I’m not sick.” Looking longingly at the drill, she sighed and let him lead her to the snowmobile. He sat her on the seat, pulling her parka hood around her face as if she were a child. “Finn! A ninety-nine degree fever doesn’t qualify as sick!” She brushed his coat-tightening hands away. “Would you quit?”
“I’ll pack us up.” He gave her a long, steady look. “Okay?”
She relented, sitting back down to wait. It didn’t take him long to break it all down and pack it onto the sled. Her head did ache, and her face burned, but she was sure it was more from the bone-numbing chill than from her little fever. It was just a cold, but he acted like she was at death’s door. The thought of examining the cores she’d pulled
that night perked her up as Finn climbed onto his snowmobile, starting it and motioning her to follow.
They had a thick dark rope running from their drill site to the base half a mile away so they wouldn’t get stuck out in the snow in white-out conditions and could always find their way back. Their camp, now empty of the rest of the crew, consisted of an insulated trailer with a huge satellite dwarfing its dark surface mounted outside. That was where they slept and ate, but the lab was built mostly underground, and that’s where they parked to unload.
“You stay here!” Finn cradled one of the cores in two hands, turning sideways to take it down into the lab.
She’d never met a man so good at giving orders. He would have made a great drill sergeant-if he wasn’t such a brilliant scientist. Mary slid off the Arctic Cat, killing the engine before hefting a second core from the sled and heading down after him. He gave her a sour look as he passed, heading back out for the third one and the rest of the equipment. What was he going to do-fire her? It didn’t matter out here in the middle of nowhere. She’d directly defied him and returned to the site to drill tonight, and she had no intention of following any more orders, except perhaps the insistent ones in her own head. It had always been her motivation-her curiosity, that sense of discovery.
She had to know.
The lab had been built months before the crew arrived. It was a wonder of modern engineering, a simple, elegant self-supporting steel arch which could take the great load of snow without even one internal support. Their grant had paid for everything, even the heavy airlocked door that opened up to what was paradise
compared to the work environment outside. Ambient air temperature remained at a constant seventeen degrees Fahrenheit underground, quite balmy compared to the negative temperatures above. Drifting snow-the kind they had now, white-out moving toward blizzard conditions-were only a factor because they had to maintain access to the portal.
She turned on the light and the arctic fluorescents, resistant to cold, flickered and came alive. To Mary, it was heaven, and she flipped her hood back, her lungs aching with the change in temperature, sucking air not quite as sharp and bitter as before.
She’d never been so aware of her own body as she had become on this trip. The extremes of the environment had forced her to acknowledge her own corporeal nature, something the safety of a job in her lab at home back in Massachusetts had never compelled her to do. Sure, they had winter there, a change of seasons…but nothing like this, the deep, constant incomprehensible cold.
“Come on, Mare.” Finn had the third core, kicking the door shut behind him.
“Let’s go to bed.”
She looked up from where she was sliding the first core she’d drilled out of its bag. He didn’t mean together, dummy. But her heart felt as if it were beating somewhere in her throat and she was glad her cheeks were still red from the cold to cover their flush. Instead of answering him, she finished sliding the bag free and set the core into the cradle of the scale, recording the weight in another section of her notebook.
“You are so stubborn.” Finn watched as she traded her thick gloves for latex, inspecting the length of ice for a crack-free sample and, using a fine saw, separating it out.
“And you are so bossy,” she countered, cutting off a few millimeters of the sample, weighing the largest section on another scale and recording the reading. Five-hundred-and-two grams. Perfect. Selecting a smaller polyethylene bag, she placed the sample inside and then set it into their flash cooler. It would take the sample down to negative eighty degrees Celsius.
“You’re really going to do this tonight?” He sighed as she began sawing at another length of the core. This one she would put into the plasma mass spectrometer.
“Go to bed, Finn.” She waved him away as she inspected the sample, her trained eyes looking for cracks or imperfections.
He pulled his own heavy gloves off and reached for a sterile latex pair. “I’m not going without you.”
She smiled, holding up her sample like a trophy. “Then fire up Old Bessie, because I need to see this reading or I’m never going to be able to sleep.”
They worked well together-they always had-their timing in sync, anticipating one another’s next motion with a deft precision that came from years of moving together in the same space. Finn took the sample from her hand and carried it over to “Old Bessie"-their plasma mass spectrometer. Compact and light, it was the size of a small television and attached to a laptop for reading output.
Mary used an instrument they jokingly called “the tweezers” to extract the frigid sample from the freezing unit and lift it carefully out of the bag. It was a perfect record of history, an effective time capsule, storing a snapshot of the earth’s atmosphere seven-hundred-and-fifty thousand years ago. The tests would tell them the age of the ice within a few years here or there. It would also tell them all the common meteorological data from that time period-precipitation amount, solar activity, air temperature, atmospheric composition.