Saskia had listened patiently to it all, but now she said, “So, what, you’re going to run away from this, too?” Even with the lousy signal, I could hear the scorn in her voice.
“What else can I do?” I demanded. “Solitude didn’t work. It’s driving me crazy.”
“Nothing’s driving you crazy but your own guilt,” she said. “You can’t outrun that.”
“What guilt? She’s the one who cheated on me.”
“So what? You still love her. It’s obvious you do. But you ran out on her just the same.”
“You’re crazy. I don’t love her. Not any more.”
Saskia laughed. “You’re a terrible liar.”
That stung. “It makes no difference!” I shouted. “She doesn’t love me, and even if she did she’d be over a hundred years old by the time I could get back to Earth.”
“How do you know she doesn’t love you? Did she tell you so? Or is it just because she slept with another man?”
“Isn’t that enough?” I asked. I was coming up on a meter-high drift. The radar beeped at me, but I kept the crawler aimed straight ahead, imagining Hammond’s body lying in front of me. The crawler slammed into it, bouncing high and spraying ice and snow in all directions.
Saskia said, “God, I didn’t know men could be so dense. You were on the Moon! The most permissive society since the 1960s. And I don’t suppose your wife had a job or anything. What did you expect her to do with her time?”
“You’re saying she did it just because she was bored?”
“Bored and homy. I’ve lived on the Moon; the lifestyle gets to you. I don’t know what your sex life was like, but it sounds like you were busy at work all the time, too tired to perform when you got home most nights, right? Who could blame her for a little recreation, especially when it was so easily available.”
“I could,” I said.
“Look, she was probably doing you a favor. She could have started demanding more from you at home, made you give her more attention when you were already tired. Your job would have suffered.”
“Oh, so now she did it to save my job? I don’t buy it. If she loved me, she wouldn’t have—”
“Oh for Chrissake, Stratton, wake up. Look here, you still love her, don’t you? Come on, admit it.”
“All right!” I said. “Maybe I do. What of it?”
“This of it. You’ve been on this dirty snowball for six months without a woman. You’ve been bored out of your mind the whole damned time, but now there’s me. You’ll be here tomorrow, and I’ll admit I’m already hot for a man’s touch. You’re going to turn me down?”
“Cut that out!”
“What for? I’m stuck here now, too. I signed the same damned contract you did, and I don’t plan to waste what few opportunities I get for recreation.”
The wind whistled past while I tried to think of a response.
She didn’t give me a chance. “I’m young, Stratton. My breasts are round and firm and my nipples stick out when I’m cold, and there’s nothing but ice all around me now. I’ve got warm, hungry lips. I’ve got legs that can wrap all the way around you. What do you say?”
My mind was numb, but it didn’t matter. Hormones were in control of me now.
“Come on, Stratton, what do you say? It’s been a long six months.”
I had to swallow before I could speak. “I say you’re right. Damn you for a psychologist, but I say yes. I hope you really want what you’ve talked yourself into.”
“More than you could know,” she answered, and I heard the triumph in her voice even through the wind.
There didn’t seem to be a whole lot more to talk about. Saskia signed off, saying she needed time to prepare her boudoir, and I tried to concentrate on my driving. I called the Nereid a few times for navigational fixes, but I suddenly didn’t feel too talkative with them, either. Maybe I was afraid Duvall would come on to me, too.
And maybe I was afraid I’d accept.
I felt more disoriented now than when I’d found Roxanne and Hammond in the sack together. A woman I’d never seen, never even talked to before, had just propositioned me, and I’d just taken her up on it. Why had she done that? Why had I?
This of it, she’d said, and then the come-on. She’d been trying to prove that Roxanne loved me. What a strange way to do it!
But she’d made her point. I did love Roxanne, I knew I did, yet I’d accepted a proposition from another woman. No matter that I’d never see Roxanne again; I’d proven with my own actions that she could have still loved me when she did the same thing on the Moon.
Then I’d been a fool to leave her. I’d been the worst kind of fool, a proud one, and I had let my pride send me off to a place from where I could never return. I had wanted her out of my life; well I’d done a good job, and in doing it I had done her a wrong much worse than the one she had done to me.
But it was already eighty years too late to change it.
So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances: I drove northward toward the woman who waited for me now.
The compass buzzer pulled me out of a trance a few hours later. I shook my head and straightened out of the crawler, wondering why my head felt so fuzzy. It was still daylight.
Idiot. I’d driven far enough north, it would be daylight for another month at this latitude. I looked at my watch and realized I’d been up for almost twenty-six hours. I had adjusted to Glacia’s long days, but there’s a limit. I called Saskia to tell her I was stopping for a nap, but she didn’t answer my call. Either she’d turned the radio off, or the skip conditions had changed. I told Nereid what I was doing, then pulled back on the throttle and let the crawler shudder to a stop.
The wind seemed lighter here. Either that, or it just seemed that way without the constant rumble of the tracks on the ice. I unlatched my seatbelt, set my watch alarm for four hours, and lay back in my seat to wait for sleep to take me.
When I woke, I felt completely refreshed, better than I usually felt after a whole night. I wondered why, then realized I hadn’t dreamed at all. Marvelling at the novelty of it, I fixed myself breakfast, then powered up the crawler again and drove away.
The mountains advanced steadily as I drove. I still couldn’t raise Saskia, but the Nereid called with more course corrections and landmarks to look for, and they assured me that the shuttle was still radiating infrared, so nothing had happened to her life-system.
Under the Nereid’s watchful eye I managed to keep out of the most rugged terrain, and soon I found myself between two canyon walls, climbing the gently-sloping glacier they said would take me all the way to the top. There were boulders in the ice bigger than the crawler, but the glacier was wide enough that I had plenty of room to steer around them.
I laughed at my earlier apprehension. I should have known the polar ice would wear a nice, wide gap through the mountains after all the millennia of glaciation. I did know that, but I was always making things seem worse than they really were. That’s how I’d gotten to Glacia in the first place. If I’d thought things through before I’d acted, I wouldn’t have come. I would never have left Roxanne, and I wouldn’t be yearning for her now.
Enough of that. She was gone, and I’d best start getting used to the idea. I’d been stupid and I’d made a colossal mistake, but it was done and there was no way to undo it. The only thing I could do now was learn from it and try to do better in the future.
The future. There was something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I still had one, though, and it waited personified in a shuttle only a few hundred kilometers to the north. Except I was shipping out with the Neried as soon as they could come to get me.