Part 2

"I know you're not, kid. You're just not thinking straight at the moment. You wouldn't be here if you were the type that could actually commit suicide, when it came right down to the fact."

"We're dead already."

"Then how do you expect to kill me?"

"It will be fun trying, Marsh."

It finally hit me that this was asinine, childish, and getting nowhere in a hurry. "Hell, kid," I said. "We've still got an engine in the 'dozer. It can be done. Maybe not neatly, but it can be done."

"Sure," she sneered, "sure it can be done. The 'dozer must have almost half the power of this hulk. We'll get there all right. We'll get there about the time the people upstairs pile up on the landing strip that isn't there. Then we can use the 'dozer to give them a good, Christian burial.

"Hell, Marsh, there's no sense trying to do it that way. That hole can't be very big. If we take the mercury out of the 'dozer and add what we can find lying around on the sand, and then pour it back in and weld the hole shut, we'll be all right. We'll get there a day or two later, but that won't be nearly as bad as if we try to tow with the 'dozer. Then we can swap mercury again and use the 'dozer. Couldn't be any simpler than that."

Like a fool, I tried to be logical: "How long do you think that weld would hold, kid? And then where would we be?"

"Right where we are now, only maybe a few miles closer. We haven't got anything to lose, and we've got _everything_ to gain."

That was the start. In the course of an hour and a half, we covered every possibility and impossibility of the situation. Whatever one of us brought up, the other argued against. We talked like crazy.

We were.

When it finally penetrated that we'd both known everything we'd covered, before we started, I said bluntly: "Shut up."

"Go to hell."

"I suppose I will, eventually. Should I expect to see you there?"

"No."

"I'm sure it can be arranged," I said as I got up.

"You're not going to--?" she asked, suddenly really alarmed.

"No." By that time, she was on her feet, too. I spun her around and forced her to the floor. Then I tied her hands behind her back with some wire that had been lying on the floor behind me. I didn't try to tie her too tightly; just tight enough to be sure she couldn't get at the knots.

She didn't resist nearly as much as I had expected.

I repeated the process on her ankles, then gagged her to stop the insane conversation, and put her in her bunk.

Then I turned out the lights and crawled into my own.

It never occurred to me that there were dozens of things she could cut herself loose with, just lying around the compartment.

* * * * *

I awoke and threw my arm up from sheer instinct. I grabbed something soft, and half-heard a metallic clatter behind my head. There was a weight on top of me, and then the weight and I were on the floor, locked together with the blanket between us.

Full consciousness was slow in coming, in spite of the shock of the activity. It seemed better, somehow, to just stay in that halfway state and enjoy it without knowing why. Finally, gradually, it penetrated that these were "the motions" that we were going through, but that we were not just "going through the motions."

This was for real.

A nasty question followed the thought: if this was for real, why did she keep wriggling and twisting all the time? The answer was close behind. She never had been able to hold still when her husband held her.

It seemed ages before we both realized how unsatisfactory it was to be separated by that blanket, and released each other and lay apart, with the blanket half on me and half on her. After more ages, I got up and turned on the lights. There were certain formalities that really should be observed.

While I pulled on the outer skin of my spacesuit--I wouldn't be outside long enough to need any more--Helene quietly picked out the large wrench she'd dropped at the head of my bunk, and put it back in the case it had come from.

_Love and hate are separated only by the thin edge of a coin ... flip it and it can come up either way...._

I picked up a sterile specimen tube and a thin, small sheet of metal, locked my helmet in place, and went out.

It took me a little longer than I'd expected to find a reasonably large blob of mercury, but I made up for it by getting it into the tube on the second attempt.

I was just beginning to feel the cold when I got back to the tractor.

Helene had the specimen preservation kit out and open. I sealed the mercury in transparent plastic, made a ring from a piece of wire, bonded the mercury to it, and coated the whole works with more of the transparent plastic.

It wasn't much, but--

Then we got out the Bible.

Later, we set up a double bunk.

We didn't set the alarm. _That_ was our honeymoon.

* * * * *

Neither of us said a word in the morning; actually it was past noon. We didn't have to. There was only one thing we could do that made the slightest sense.

I got out the welder and burned off the tractor's cab, then went underneath and cut through the mountings on the useless engine and everything else that wasn't an absolute essential.

Helene dumped everything movable and non-essential from inside.

Shortly before dusk I tossed the now-useless welder on top of the other junk and climbed onto the 'dozer and pulled out. There weren't any brakes on what was left of the tractor, but that would have to not matter. We were going to have to drive 'round the clock or not get there in time. A bulldozer is not a fast vehicle under any circumstances.

Logically, I couldn't see that we had much chance of covering eleven hundred miles in that rig, without having to make at least one stop quick enough to collapse the towbar and land the tractor on top of the 'dozer.

Emotionally, I couldn't believe a word of it. I _knew_ we were going to get there.

We did.

Forty-eight days after the crash, I drove through the blackened edge of the northernmost "marker area," and parked just inside its southern tip.

When I came up through the airlock, Helene was looking out what had been the forward port of the tractor, which now faced the area we would have to make into a landing strip.

When I had the inner layer of my suit half off, she spoke for the first time since we'd been married: "We made it, Marsh."

I joined her and looked out into the dusk. It was going to be rough, but we could do it. "Not quite," I said, "we've still got that strip to chew out."

She was silent a moment, then said, tightening her arm around me: "I know. I said _we_ made it, Marsh."