Quickies

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.

But she wasn't interested in any of that. The millions of tiny air bubbles in the ice had revealed something to her even more amazing than greenhouse gases or evidence of climate change.