Two hours later, panting with exertion but still grinning with delight, father and son returned to the hab-rover.
They waited in the airlock for the specks of nitrogen ice covering their suits to melt and evaporate and for the heaters to warm the air, and then the inner door opened to allow them into the outfitting room. Andrew helped his son out of his suit, then began taking off his own while David wiped the sweat from his body with a damp towel. "How was the suit?" his mother asked, coming over to help him.
"A bit baggy," the boy replied. "It felt loose on my arms and legs."
"You'll grow into it," Susan replied. She reached out to grab a table to steady herself as the rover lurched back into motion, driven by James, David's older brother. The fourteen year old took the vehicle in a large circle until it was facing back the way they had come, then drove off back to the place from which the life hutch's distress signal had taken them.
"And take care of it," his father warned him as he stripped the suit's heated underlayer from his hips and legs. "If it's still in good condition we can sell it on when you need a bigger one. Recoup some of the cost."
"I know," said the boy as he pulled on a pair of briefs. "Can I go outside again when we get back to the dig site?"
"We'll see," said Andrew evasively. "I'll be too busy to look after you most of the time."
"The other families will be able to keep an eye on him," Susan told him. "You know he needs to familiarise himself with the surface. If some accident forces him outside in a surface suit and he makes some basic mistake because he's not familiar enough... The more he goes out, the safer he'll be."
"I know," her husband replied. "It's just that... After Henry Willow..."
"Nico Willow tried to save money by buying a sub-standard suit."
"I know that. The point I'm trying to make is that, on the surface, the slightest little thing can kill you. Maybe we should have left the kids in the city..."
"No!" cried David indignantly as he buttoned up the front of his one piece coverall, the same simple garment they all wore while in the comfort and safety of the inside whether it was the city, one of the smaller surrounding communities or a hab-rover. David's was decorated with cowboys riding horses while they chased herds of cows. A scene from centuries past. "I'll be careful! I promise!"
"I know you will," Andrew replied as he also got dressed. "But it's not just dangerous. The work we're doing is boring, for the most part. I worry that some of the other children will get bored, decide to go looking for adventure and persuade you to go with them."
"I won't," David promised him, staring up at his father with his large hazel eyes. "I promise. I just want to see the surface. To see the sky."
"Well, like I said, we'll see," Andrew did up the last buttons and slipped a pair of plimsolls onto his feet. "There's no rush. We're probably going to be out here for a good couple of months yet. The ice doesn't give up its treasures easily."
He left the outfitting room before his wife and son could continue the persuasion and made his way forward to the cockpit. His oldest son, James, was sitting in the pilot's chair but he moved across to the co-pilot's position as his father appeared in the doorway behind him. "How we doing?" asked Andrew.
The view outside the single, large cockpit window was blackness broken only by a long oval of white where the rover's headlights were reflected from the nitrogen ice. A trail of scratched up ice fragments led away in front of them. Their own wheel tracks that they were now retracing, standing out starkly from the smooth, unbroken icy surface that stretched away on either side. Andrew expected the first part of the return trip to be uneventful since they hadn't encountered any surprises on their way out. Any problems would come the next day.
"Thought I felt a vibration when I turned," James replied. "Wheel one, I thought. It's gone now."
Andrew frowned. "Hope it's not a bearing going," he said. "Expensive to fix, and several days laid up in a garage. I was hoping to make a tidy profit on this dig. Enough to pay back what we owe." He smiled at his son. "It would be nice to own this rover outright, wouldn't it?"
"Just in time for the Return," his son replied with an answering grin.
"If there is a Return. The Remainers may still get their own way."
James smiled confidently at him. "No, we're going back," he said. "Back to the sun. Think what mankind could do with the power of a star."
Before Andrew could answer, Susan appeared in the doorway with a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. "Thought you could use something warm and wet after your excursion," she said, handing it to her husband. "The three of us had something while you were outside."
"Thanks," said Andrew, taking it from her and taking a sip. "Jasmine still in her room?"
"She spends all day chatting to Joe," Susan replied with a frown. "You'd think that, having gotten out of the city, she'd want to see a bit of the world."
"Not much to see," Andrew replied, looking back out through the cockpit window. "Can't even see the stars. Too much glare from the lights. Maybe she's got the right idea."
"I would have hoped she'd value our company a little more," his wife replied. "Guess we'll have to wait 'till dinner to see her. We're having Italian tonight. That okay?"
"Sounds good," Andrew replied.
Susan smiled at him, then turned and left the cockpit, closing the door behind her.
☆☆☆
That evening, the family convened in the rover's main living room, in front of the sixty inch monitor, for their daily conference with the other families they'd left at the Sellafield dig site.
"Good to see you, Andy," said Philip Badger, sitting in a large, comfy sofa in the recreation room of the expedition's inflatable habitat. Joe, his seventeen year old son, was sitting beside him while around them, sitting on other chairs and sofas, were the other members of the Sellafield expedition.
"Good to see you too," Andrew replied. Jasmine's hair tickled his neck as his daughter, kneeling behind him, shifted into a more comfortable position. "The hutch is back in business and we've got a new road we can use if we want to go somewhere north. Trusted terrain we can drive over."
"We were pretty sure it was safe to drive over,"Philip said, "but it's good to have it confirmed. No nasty surprises then?"
"Might have a dodgy wheel but it's holding up so far. Apart from that, everything's five by five."
"Hey, Andy!" said Shen Gongji. At fifty five, he was the oldest man at the dig site. He had his son, Feng and Feng's wife Naomi sitting on either side of him. Feng's three children were behind the sofa, kneeling on the soft, rubber floor to bring their heads down to the same level as their parents'. "Hey, Sue. Still looking good, I see." Feng and Naomi added their own greetings and the children waved from behind them.
"Hey guys," Andrew replied with a little wave. "Hey Viv, Nico. How you doing?"
Nico and Viviana Willow tried to make their reply sound cheerful, but there was a false note to it and Andrew noted that they were holding hands, their knuckles white with the tightness of their grip. Having four children in the room with them, plus three more on their monitor screen, must be painful, just a few weeks after the death of their own son, Andrew thought. He'd half expected the grieving couple to miss the conference and remain in their own rover, but the dig site was small and crowded. They had to associate with the other families there, unless they packed it in and returned to the city.
They weren't the kind to quit, though. They were doing their very best to make the others believe that they were glad to see them, and Andrew was glad for that. They were good friends and it would have saddened him if they'd withdrawn from the company of the others. Thankfully, the children tended to slip away after a few minutes to have their own conference call on their personal devices, leaving the adults to talk alone. Joe and Jasmine were already looking impatient, waiting just long enough to be polite before slipping away to moon and spoon to each other in the privacy of their own bedrooms.
"The dysprosium collection is well underway now," said Shen, looking pleased with himself. "Looks like there's even more stored here than they thought there would be. At least four tons."
"That's great news!" said Andrew. "That's easily enough for the whole fleet. Inner solar system, here we come!"
"As we expected, a lot of it has already been incorporated into control rods," Shen continued, "but the furnace is performing just as designed, refining out a five kilo ingot of pure dysprosium every few hours. Whoever dreamed it up did a good job."
"It's really lucky there was a facility of this kind this close to New London," said Reginald Fox, the leader of the expedition. "I don't know what we'd have done if it hadn't been here. Go to China for it, I suppose."
"The records from before The Freeze say that there was another facility in the USA making the same kind of control rods," said Feng. "In Illinois. I assume they had a stockpile we could have raided, if we'd had to."
"That would have been a long drive, though," said Shen. "On the other side of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. No-one's even explored that far out, let alone set up any life hutches. You get into trouble over there, you're on your own. Thank God we didn't have to do it. Everything we need is right here, and everything's going to plan."
"Things are going so well, in fact," said Philip, "that we've already moved on to the secondary objectives. We've set up a secondary dig site over what used to be the University of Central Lancashire and we're looking for their biology labs." He poured himself a drink and raised it in a toast to the others, who responded with their own drinks. "Like everything else, the whole place's been crushed flat by the ice. Totally pancaked. It's going to take a long time to see if any biological samples have survived. When you get back you can help us."
"I still think it'll have degraded beyond use between the onset of The Anarchy and The Freeze," said Feng Finch. "And what's the point in searching for ancient DNA anyway? I mean, if we're all going to be leaving this planet soon and heading back to the inner solar system... Any animals they clone back to life will be adapted to Earth gravity. How will they cope on Mars?"
"That's still a big if," said Andrew. "We've only got a couple of years until the Malina rendezvous and none of the ships are anywhere near ready. If we miss it, there's nothing else out here big enough to give us the gravity assist we need."
Shen nodded. "It was a million to one chance that we're coming this close to Malina," he agreed. "The average distance between large bodies this far out from the sun is more than a hundred million kilometres. Coming this close to Maline is like a gift from God. If we miss it, there won't be another."
"Perhals we can do it without a gravity assist," said Feng, studying his father hopefully.
"It would take way too long," Shen replied. "A thousand years at least. People start suffering DNA damage after just twenty years in hypersleep. With DNA repair meds they think they can stretch that to a hundred years, and that's the absolute minimum the journey will take even with a gravity assist." He looked around at the other adults and their older children, squeezed shoulder to shoulder in the small room. "The fact of the matter is, if we miss Malina, we're trapped on this planet for the rest of eternity."
"Well, would that be so bad?" said Andrew. "We've been safe under the ice for two hundred years. Now that the atmosphere's finished freezing out we're beginning to emerge onto the surface again, to re-take the planet..."
"One city," pointed out Feng. "Out of twelve. Just one survived."
"Most of the others were overrun during The Anarchy," Andrew reminded him. "Billions of people, all wanting to get their families into refuges that only had room for six hundred thousand. I don't want to sound callous, but since the last of those left on the surface died, New London has endured with virtually no trouble for two hundred years and there's no reason it can't continue to do so. We've got everything we need. Atomic power, geothermal energy, an entire planet of resources and raw materials including all the coal and oil they didn't use up before The Freeze..."
"But we'd be trapped here!" said Feng, labouring his voice as if explaining something very simple to a child. "Drifting helplessly out into interstellar space. On Mars we'd have the sun. Enough energy to launch ourselves out to the stars one day, when we've rebuilt the civilisation we had before The Freeze. The whole galaxy can be ours one day."
"He's right," said Reginald Fox, nodding. "The future of the human race is on Mars."
"The first Mars colony failed," Andrew reminded him. "What makes you think a second attempt would be any more successful?"
"We've learned a lot about closed ecosystems since then," said Feng, "and we've got more people. Nearly a hundred thousand instead of just one."
"But here we've already got all the infrastructure. The industries, the manufacturing capability we need to colonise a planet. On Mars we'd be starting completely from scratch with only the kit we can carry there in the spaceships. It's such a huge risk..."
"So you're a remainer?" said Feng, his eyes widening with shock. "Like the idiots who sabotaged the life hutch?"
"No, of course not. I'd never put lives at risk like that. I just think we need to be very, very sure what we're doing before we put the entire future of the human race in danger."
"What's the smallest number of people who can go?" asked Naomi.
"We all go or we all stay," Andrew answered her. "There aren't enough people with key skills to divide them. If we go to Mars, the entire human race would be taking a huge gamble."
"Well, enough of all this strife and tension," said Naomi with stern glances at Andrew and her husband. "Let's talk about something more pleasant." She turned to Susan. "So, tell me, Dear. How did Davey's first walk on the surface go?"
Susan smiled gratefully and answered her while, around them, the conversation drifted on to other subjects.