Earthfire North

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Dr. Lydia Coalsworth strode into her small office in the geology lab at the University of Iceland carrying a large pile of photographs. She cleared the coffee cups, files, and other paraphernalia from the desk top and arranged the glossy prints in rows, starting in the upper left-hand corner and working her way down.

The photos were bizarre: the same shot over and over of a craggy finger of rock protruding from what looked to be the mouth of the River Styx, a roiling section of seawater from which mist and vapor poured like steam from a kettle. Occasionally, as she dealt them out, she'd squint down at one of them under the light, tap her finger making note of it, then go on. The experiment was almost completed, she told herself, the last piece of evidence about to fall into place. The conclusion inevitable but impossible, not to be believed.

When she finished, she had six rows of photos, sixty to a row, two complete time-lapse sequences taken one-a-second for three minutes, each sequence twenty-four hours apart. She took a set of calipers from the drawer and, with the deliberate slowness of an experienced scientist, began to take measurements of images in each photo, noting her results in a thick notebook.

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