The constant vibration of the treads and whistling of the wind lulled me into a trance. I kept the throttle full ahead and the power balanced to both tracks unless the compass or the radar warning forced me to change my course. I couldn’t have guessed how long I’d been at it, but the sun had moved around behind me by the time the radio crackled to life again. I heard a few tentative squeals and crackles, then a faint voice covered by static said, “Hello… starship Nereid… is Saskia… ish. Do you… Nereid?”
It was hard to tell with the interference, but the voice sounded female. We had a couple of women on the planet already, but none named Saskia. Was that the shuttle pilot calling? Or Lawrence’s replacement? I waited for someone on the starship to reply, but after a few seconds it became apparent that they weren’t going to. Evidently her signal was too weak to trigger the communication satellites in synchronous orbit, and the starship was out of range as well. Which meant I was hearing her directly, via ionospheric skip. That might not last long.
I flipped my two-way switch and said, “This is Tony Stratton. Evidently the ship can’t hear you, but I’m headed toward you on the surface. Do you copy?”
I heard only the wind for a long moment, then just as I was about to call again she answered. Static kept washing out her signal, but I heard her say, “Thank God it’s… wasn’t sure I’d fixed it right… crash. The pilot’s… don’t think I can fix the shuttle, and I sure as… fly it. Where are you?”
“I’m about six hundred kilometers or so south of you. Are you hurt?”
Her voice was softer than the wind. Even with the volume turned up all the way I could barely hear her through the buffeting and the static. “…got bounced around a little… nothing broken. The pilot’s got a bad gash on his head… fell on him. Can you hear me OK? Your signal isn’t very—”
“Stratton?” Duvall’s voice blasted over hers. “Who are you talking to?”
“Quiet!” I shouted. “I’ve got your shuttle on the radio. The pilot’s injured, but the passenger, Saskia something or other, is OK. Saskia, can you hear me?”
“Yes. Barely.”
“Same here,” I said. “There’s lots of static, and the wind’s blowing. I’m getting about three-quarters of what you say, but if you talk slowly I think we can manage. The ship’s listening in on my half of the conversation.”
“Good. How long until you get here?”
“A day if I don’t run into trouble. Maybe two. Can you hold out that long?”
“I’ve got half a year’s supplies… all over the ship.”
There came a long burst of static, then, “…Have to help the… making noise. Don’t go away now.”
“I won’t,” I said. Then, turning down the volume, I said, “Captain, she’s evidently checking on the pilot. I’m getting her signal directly, but it’s pretty weak; can you boost the gain on the comsats?”
“They operate at maximum all the time,” Duvall said. “There’s just too much atmosphere in the way at this angle to pick up a weak transmission. We could put a satellite in polar orbit, but we’d only get a few minutes of contact every hour or two when it passed overhead.”
The radar beeped at me and I swerved to miss a depression in the ice. “It’s not worth it,” I said. “I’ll probably be in contact more than that.”
“Right. We’ll monitor your signal.”
“Good, but don’t talk unless you have to. I’ve got the volume up all the way.”
“Understood.”
I waited for Saskia to come back, during which time I wondered if there was any point to my continuing on. The shuttle’s medical supplies were just as good as what I carried, and Saskia could care for the pilot as well as I could. She didn’t need me there just to help wait for the new shuttle.
But I was already close to halfway there, and if something else went wrong she might need me. And I could wait for my replacement there as well as back at the station.
I examined the radio while I waited for her, looking for some way to tune in her signal better. The control panel had a button labeled NR, so I pushed that in the hope that it meant Noise Reduction. It must have, for a few minutes later I heard Saskia’s voice saying, “Hello, are you still there?” It was still faint and shot through with static, but not as bad as before.
“Right here,” I said.
“Good. How far away are you?”
“About six hundred kilometers. Half a day’s drive, if nothing unexpected comes up.”
I couldn’t tell if I heard her sigh, or if it was just the wind. “Well, things haven’t exactly worked out the way I thought they would so far, that’s for sure.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Oh? Oh, you mean driving all this way. I’m sorry about that.”
I laughed. “No apology necessary. That’s not what I was talking about. This is the most exciting thing to happen to me since I got here; that’s the problem.”
“Is it so boring here then? I was afraid it might be.”
“It’s boring enough that I asked for an early replacement,” I said.
“You what?” I thought I heard panic in her voice for the first time. “You can’t do that… can you?”
“I can and I did. As soon as the Nereid gets another shuttle on line, I’m out of here.”
She was silent, and I suddenly realized what was wrong. She didn’t want to hear about people freaking out on the first day of her tour, especially after what she’d been through.
“Hey, look,” I said, backpedaling as fast as I could, “not everybody reacts the way I did to the place. You’ll probably be fine. I just discovered I’m not the solitude type after all. I made a mistake coming here, but that doesn’t mean you did.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “I don’t know. Hell.” She didn’t speak for almost a minute, and I was beginning to wonder if we’d lost contact when she suddenly asked, “Why did you come here?”
I looked out over the ice. Nothing but white flatness from horizon to horizon. “Escape,” I said simply.
“From what?”
I had to think about that. Not about the question so much as whether or not I wanted to answer. I’d never really talked to anyone about it before, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to now. So I just said, “A bad marriage.”
“Really? You were married? Tell me about it.”
“No.”
“Come on, I’m curious. Not many people do that anymore. Besides, if you really did ask for an early replacement, the Nereid’s counselor is going to rip you apart; you might as well polish your story.”
I didn’t much like her choice of words, nor was I crazy about trying to converse through all the static, but she evidently needed to talk, and I supposed she had a point. “All right,” I said, “what do you want to know?”
“Tell me what it was like.”
Hmm. How to describe marriage to someone who’d never been there? I thought about it a moment, then leaned back and said, “It was like bringing opposite poles of a magnet together…”
I described how wonderful my first few years with Roxanne had been, how we’d done everything together, exploring first all that the Earth had to offer and then moving to the Moon when I’d gotten the job there. I tried to explain how complete we felt, how inseparable. Then I told her about finding Roxanne in bed with somebody else, and how I’d felt so betrayed that I didn’t think I could ever look at her again, and how I’d left for Glacia so I would never have to. I finished up with, “—I thought I could forget her, take a tour with the World Restoration League and go back to Earth after a century or two and start over again, but it didn’t work. I keep dreaming about her. The harder I try, the worse it gets.”