I could see for kilometers. Scarps and crags stuck out in such sharp outline that I had trouble judging their distance; they all seemed too close. Though the entire atmosphere was rushing past at gale force, I could detect no motion on the ice. Nothing was left for the wind to move. Loose snow would sublime in less than a kilometer; any that hadn’t drifted solid in the last storm was gone by now. Occasionally the wind would wear away a chunk of ice and sent it flying, but that was rare.
I made my way to the crawler, only a few meters away on the right. It was designed for Glacia: low and wide and heavy. Not particularly fast, but it wouldn’t blow over in the wind. I’d learned to park it beside the dome instead of in the lee of it; the first time I’d done that I’d had to dig a tunnel through the drift that had formed between them. I held onto the guide rope while I chipped the door free with my hand axe, then pulled myself inside. The power plant took a few minutes to warm up, so I busied myself with a thorough inspection of the controls and gauges.
They were simple enough. Throttle and steering were both in one T-bar beside the driver’s seat, and the gauges and radar and gyrocompass and stuff were scattered across the dash in front. A thick jesus bar looped out of the dash as well, and the door held another. The roof was thickly padded, but that was overkill; if the ride got bumpy I had a full chest and lap harness I could wear.
When the idiot light told me the power plant was ready, I nudged the T-handle forward a notch. I could hear ice cracking over the roar of the wind as the crawler strained for a moment, then it lurched ahead with a shudder that made me grab for the jesus bar. I steadied myself and tried a gradual curve to the right.
It took me a few minutes to gain enough confidence to drive it back next to the station. The crawler had more than enough power to level the dome if I steered wrong, but I finally got it parked in the lee of the bubble and opened the door. Mistake. The crawler had upset the airflow; a gust of wind ripped the door out of my hand and plastered it against the side of the cab, nearly pulling me out with it. I crept carefully down and took one step to the station door, fighting to stay upright. How was I going to get all my food and equipment across there?
I settled for throwing it. The wind was in my favor going that way, and nothing was fragile.
Back inside the station I downloaded the maps the Nereid had sent me from the main computer into my pocket comp, then printed out hard copies just in case. It looked like they’d found a low pass where the ice from the polar plateau had broken through the mountains and joined smoothly with the lower basin. What looked smooth from orbit could be anything on the ground, but it was probably the best chance I had of finding a driveable route.
Despite my misgivings about the trip, I felt a shiver of excitement as I closed the station’s door from the outside. Even an hour of activity with a purpose had pumped some of my normal liveliness back into me. Was this all I needed? A little excitement?
No. I shivered with an entirely different emotion at the thought of another six months here, even if I were to get out and take a drive every day. I’d do this one last job, but then I was out of here.
I laughed when I realized I was looking for a way to lock the door. There wasn’t a single lock on all of Glacia. Who would you lock out? No one came knocking but the wind and the dreams, and neither of them used the door.
I dumped the maps into the navigation computer, then turned on the radar and set it to scanning for obstacles and fractures in the ice while I found north on the compass and fed power to the tracks. The crawler surged ahead, accelerating quickly up to cruising speed. The ice pack was pretty smooth here; I felt only the vibration of the treads and the occasional shift from side to side as I steered around bumps and depressions.
As soon as I settled in to the rhythm of driving, I called the Nereid. I could barely hear the radio through the shriek of the wind, until I plugged my helmet set into the crawler’s. Then radio and wind were about the same volume.
Captain Duvall was busy. A junior officer answered my call, and when I asked about the shuttle he said, “No more activity. It still radiates in the infrared, so we can assume the lifesys-tem still works. Beyond that we can only hope.”
“Yeah.” Spaceship crashes don’t leave much behind, and though an orbit-to-ground shuttle isn’t exactly a spaceship it still must have been moving at a hell of a clip when it hit the ice. Not hard enough to trigger the beacon, though, I reminded myself. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.
“Any changes to my route yet?” I asked. Presumably they were still examining the terrain from orbit for the best path.
“Nothing yet,” he said. “We’ll call you if we come up with any.”
“Right.”
It became obvious pretty quick that we didn’t have a whole lot more to say to each other, and I was afraid if I stayed on the radio I’d wind up talking with the shrink, so I signed off, settled back in my seat and readied myself for a long stretch of driving.
After a while I found myself thinking about Earth. I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems that I hadn’t even asked for news. I wondered if the glaciers had covered Canada yet, or if any of our work here had helped slow their advance.
But the Nereid’s crew wouldn’t know that any more than I did. They had left only six months later than me, after all. The only news of any value they could carry would be personal messages, now long out of date, but evidently no one had sent me any. That alone told me plenty.
I allowed myself to wonder what Roxanne would be doing now. She’d be forty years older than me, less the year difference in our birth dates. She had probably moved in with that jerk Holland or Hammond or whatever his name was. But would she have stayed with him? I doubted it. Up until I caught her in the sack with him I thought she was the most faithful companion a person could ask for, but now? What would keep her from doing it again in a few years?
I realized I was getting hot about it all over again, and got mad about that. It was old news, let it go. Roxanne had stepped out on me, and I had stepped out in return. End of marriage, end of subject.
Most of my friends misunderstood my reaction to finding her in bed with another man. They assumed I was living under second millennium moral standards, that I was jealous, and the fact that we’d married in the first place was proof enough to them. Marriage was an old custom, outdated in a modem society. They didn’t seem to remember that she’d married me, too. In their eyes she had done nothing wrong; it was me and my overreaction that bore the fault. They couldn’t understand that I was reacting to the lie, to the sudden realization that my whole life had been built around the false assumption that she loved me.
I still didn’t understand why she did it. She had given me no warning, no indication she was even thinking about another man. Things were going well. We’d just moved up to the Moon, where I’d taken a job with a new computer manufacturing company. Roxanne hadn’t found work yet, but she wasn’t really looking. I made more than enough to support us, and I told her to relax, to enjoy life for a while.
She claimed boredom after I caught them. Waiting in the apartment for me to come home, waiting for me when I had to go to Earth for sales meetings, always waiting but never doing anything on her own anymore.
I didn’t care why she’d done it. Just knowing she had was sufficient. She didn’t love me; she couldn’t have. And suddenly I didn’t love her either. I filed for divorce, and within a week of the decree I’d left for Glacia.