Andrew spent the next two hours talking to Susan, telling her everything that had happened. He had a pretty good idea that the New London authorities were listening in on the conversation but he didn't care. As Cheval had said, it would all come out at the inquest. What he needed was to bare his soul to his wife and gain her acceptance and understanding. Cheval had said that Kartoshka's death wasn't his fault. If Susan said the same thing, maybe he could start believing it.
Susan's face on the monitor screen was full of concern and he could see her cursing the distance between them. She needed to take his hand and squeeze it, and then give him a warm hug. She couldn't do that, though, and so she was forced to try to have the same effect with words only.
"The Sergeant's right," she said, leaning forward to stare straight into the camera of the terminal in her New London apartment. There was no sign of the children in the room with her. Andrew had asked her to send them out of the room. He would talk to then later, after having taken some time to decide how much to tell them. Right now, he just wanted to unburden himself without having to choose his words carefully for young ears.
"It was an accident," Susan continued. "That policeman was the one breaking the law. He put your lives in danger. Setting off a bomb inside a rover...There's no telling what other damage it might have done. The environmental controls are all in the cockpit. If the life support had started go wrong, you'd have had no way to fix it."
"There's an auxiliary control panel in the service area," began Andrew.
"You need special knowledge to use that thing, as you very well know. The environmental controls in the cockpit are user friendly, any layman can use them. Kartoshka put your lives in danger. You were acting in self defence."
"Me and Cheval could have taken him down between us if I hadn't been carrying that gun. He'd still be alive."
"You said Cheval was barely conscious. If he'd fainted again, what chance would you have had against a strong, physically fit policeman trained in overpowering criminals with his bare hands?"
"You're right," said Andrew. "Maybe I'd have lost, but Kartoshka would still be alive and another rover would have been sent to pick us up. There's nowhere Fox can take the dysprosium where we can't get it back later."
"That you know of," replied Susan. "Would he have started all this if he didn't have a destination in mind? I think that, if you weren't able to continue the pursuit, the dysprosium would be gone, forever, along with any chance of returning to the inner solar system."
"Maybe..." Andrew began, but he stopped himself. He'd been about to say that maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, but then he remembered that the authorities were very probably listening to everything he said and he wanted them on his side for the inquest. From now on, or at least until after the inquest was over, he intended to be the world's most enthusiastic advocate for The Return.
"Maybe they'd have found some more dysprosium somewhere," he said therefore. "Maybe I killed a man just so that The Return wouldn't be delayed for a few months. Is that worth a man's life?"
"The Police brought the guns onto the rover," Susan reminded him. "They brought the explosives onto the rover. They brought a remainer aboard the rover. They should have vetted their people better. Someone screwed up and it wasn't you. I think some nameless bureaucrat in Personnel is going to be the one raked over the coals when the inquest is over. If it turns out that it was Cheval who picked his team, then he's got a lot more reason to be worried than you have."
"Cheval's not worried," said Andrew. "He's not trying to pass the blame to me, the way he might if he thought he was to blame. He's been saying the same things you have."
"Then maybe you should start believing him," said Susan, smiling.
Andrew found himself smiling back. He felt a great weight starting to shift inside him, as if Kartoshka's death was a great boulder he'd been trapped under that was beginning to move aside. "Maybe I should," he said. "There's a dead man still lying in the middle of the carpet, though. I'm scared of what it'll feel like when I go back there and see him."
"You'll feel angry that one man was arrogant enough to think that he could decide the future of humanity all by himself."
"But that's just it, it's not just one man. There's Fox, and the man who left the message back at the life hutch. Who knows how many others there are out there, just waiting to make their move?"
"None aboard our rover, that's for sure. If there had been he'd have been on Kartoshka's side. One good thing about all this is that Cheval can hardly suspect you now."
She was wrong, though. Several hours later, when the Sergeant finally felt well enough to rise from his bed and visit Andrew in the cockpit, he had some sobering things to say. "I still don't trust you," he said, "and you're still barred from our command post. You have doubts about The Return. You've never made any secret of it. The only thing keeping you from taking direct action, like Fox and Kartoshka, is fear. You're too scared of getting caught."
Andrew began to protest but Cheval raised a hand to shut him up. "I saw how you were when Kartoshka was about to blow up the cockpit," he said. "You were terrified. Paralysed by fear. I know you stepped up eventually but you took a long time to work up the nerve to do it. My worry is that, one day, you might work up the nerve to sabotage The Return."
"If I wanted to sabotage The Return, all I had to do was let Kartoshka blow up the cockpit," pointed out Andrew angrily.
"There are several other rovers in pursuit of Reginald Fox," the Sergeant replied. "Perhaps you think that, if you wait long enough, an opportunity might arise to stop all of them."
"That's ridiculous!"
"Maybe, but I can't afford to take the chance. We were all nearly defeated by the betrayal of a man I trusted. I'm not going to make that mistake again. Windsor could have been killed so him I trust, but you're a civilian. You drive the rover. That's all you do, and we'll tell you where to drive. You do anything I don't like and next time I'll be the one who leaves you tied up in your own bedroom."
He then turned and left the cockpit, leaving Andrew with a hurt feeling of betrayal as he stared out the cockpit window at the endless, featureless miles of ice passing by beneath them.
☆☆☆
They picked up Fox's trail at around sundown, at almost the same time as Windsor finally remained consciousness.
He had a bandage tied around his head as he and Cheval came to the cockpit in reply to Andrew's summons. "You okay?" Andrew asked him.
"Still a bit woozy," Windsor replied, raising a hand to touch his head gingerly. "Sarge thinks I may have a cracked skull so I'm on light duties for a while."
"The bastard came close to smashing his head like an eggshell," Cheval added. It was an old saying that persisted in the language despite the fact that chickens had been extinct for a hundred years since the last specimens of the species had succumbed to a new variety of bird flu in New Beijing, the last of the other underground cities.
"Funny how he was more gentle with you, then," said Andrew, still bristling at the Sergeant's words to him earlier.
Cheval let the comment pass and looked out through the cockpit window at the tracks left by Fox's rover ahead of them. "So, we're heading south," he said.
"Straight as the terrain allows," Andrew replied, "as I'm sure you already knew with all your fancy, hi-tech equipment in your command post upstairs. So how far behind him are we now?"
"Twelve hours, as far as we can tell," Windsor replied. "We'll catch him before he gets to the Alps, though, and there doesn't seem to be anything between here and there that would allow him to put the dysprosium permanently beyond our reach. Unless there's something we're not seeing, we've got him."
Cheval wasn't so sure, though. "He turned south pretty soon after Kartoshka drugged you," he said. "That can't be a coincidence. The two were in communication somehow. This isn't two men acting independently. It's a conspiracy, and there may be more people in on it. Who knows what's waiting for us up ahead? All we can do is make as much speed as possible and try to catch him before he has a chance to do something."
"The sooner the better as far as I'm concerned," said Andrew. "I want you off my rover. I want my family back and I want to get back to my normal life."
"And we want to get back to our normal duties as well," said Cheval. "I won't say this little road trip hasn't been an amusing diversion from our normal lives but enough is enough. I want to get back to New London and start dealing with the backlog of cases that's sure to have built up in my absence."
"Full speed ahead it is, then," said Andrew, and he put his foot down hard on the accelerator.