Quickies

He moved to help her as the mechanical swirl of the drill began to rise to the top, like a dark barber's pole or a terrible, twisted candy cane. It was heavy without an ice core in its center, but twice that now with its frigid contents. Mary stepped aside, letting him lift it out of her hands, pulling it free and turning it sideways, carrying it over to the makeshift work station. She'd set that up, too, in only the glow from one generator-powered work light. It was December twenty-second, the eve of the winter solstice, and they had officially moved into twenty-four hour darkness at the North Pole.

"We're at almost four thousand meters." The steam of her breath joined his as they bent over the thick length of ice, together sweeping chips from its surface with small brushes. The tubular metal cradle it rested in measured the core down to the millimeter.

Finn sat back on his haunches and gave a low whistle. "Christ, Mare. That's deeper than anyone's ever gone. Ever. And this is firn."

The excitement in her belly burned almost as hot as her cheeks and she nodded, noting the measurement in a notebook she pulled from her pocket. The pens they had were the same ones astronauts used in space. Regular ink froze quickly out here. She'd finally grown used to handling pens and other small instruments with thick gloves on instead of the thin latex she was used to.

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.