"So" said Andrew. "What do the guys and girls at school think of us now?"
David, James and Jasmine were sitting in the living room, doing homework on their tablet computers. None of them looked up at their father's question. "No-one's been talking about it," said James, still focused on the half finished history project glowing on his screen. "Not while we've been online, anyway."
"What about chat forums?" asked Andrew. "You can look back, see what people have been saying while you were away."
"They've been speculating on our chances of success," James replied. This time he did look up, smiling. "The consensus of opinion seems to be that there's a secret remainer among us who'll sabotage the mission at some point."
"Do they think it's me?"
"Nobody's been saying that they think it's you, but that might just be because they think you're the obvious choice." James smiled with embarrassment. "No-one likes to bet on a sure thing."
"So long as they're not actually betting." The children glanced at each other while avoiding their father's eyes. "What?" demanded Andrew. "Are they actually gambling?"
"Philip's ten to on," said James, his eyes firmly fixed on the tablet. "Li's five to one and Lungelo's three to one."
"And what about me?"
The three children tensed up visibly. "You're even money," said James. "Sorry."
"The good news is that the three of us are all the way down at thirty to one," said David, smiling apologetically, "and Joe's all the way down at a hundred to one. That's because he was tied up, I suppose."
"I was tied up too!" said Andrew in disbelief. "Even money? For Pete's sake!"
"I've put twenty quid on Joe," said David brightly. "I'll really clean up if it turns out to be him."
"There are no remainers on this mission," said Andrew firmly. "And you, young man, should not be gambling."
"It's just a school thing. It's not like proper gambling."
"I'll still be fined if the police find out and you'll get a notation on your record that'll follow you for the rest of your life. Cancel your bet at once."
David looked crestfallen. "I only did it to show them that I don't think it'll be you."
"It's not going to be anyone. There are no remainers on this mission. We're going to go to LaSalle, get the dysprosium and bring it back and The Return will go ahead right on schedule. Cancel your bet and never gamble again. They work the odds so that only the house wins. You know that, right?"
"I didn't do it to make money," David looked close to tears. "I did it to show that I know you're not a remainer."
Andrew went over to sit beside him and put a hand around his shoulders. James and Jasmine had put down their tablets and were watching anxiously.
"I know that," he said, giving the boy's shoulder a squeeze. "You're a fantastic kid. One of the three best kids in the world, but you don't have to do something like that to show me how much faith you have in me. I already know it." He turned to look at James and Jasmine. "I know you all have faith in me. You don't have to prove it." He looked back down at David. "So cancel the bet, okay? Show them you have nothing but contempt for such immature activity."
"Okay," said David miserably.
Andrew squeezed his shoulder again and ruffled his hair. David squealed in protest, but when he looked up he was smiling again. "You okay?" asked Andrew. "Really?"
"Yeah," said David. "I'm okay. They'll all have to eat their words when we get back with the dysprosium, won't they?"
"They certainly will. Something for us to look forward to, right?"
"Right!"
Andrew got up and left the room, putting a hand on Jasmine's shoulder as he went past. She smiled up at him. Andrew then went forward to join Susan in the cockpit. The door was open and she'd heard the whole thing.
Andrew plopped himself down in the co-pilot's seat and stared out through the window. The terrain they were driving across was completely featureless. Nothing but smooth ice all the way to the horizon, fractured in a geometric pattern where it had cooled and shrunk. The rover was running at its maximum velocity of twenty kilometres an hour with hardly a vibration. Andrew imagined that he could probably have balanced a coin on the edge of the coffee cup holder.
"Funny how there're are no odds on us females being remainers," said Susan with a smile. "Maybe it's because they all trust us so much."
"That would be a great plot twist, wouldn't it?" Andrew chuckled to himself as he checked their position on the monitor screen. "We're busy digging the borehole when you suddenly pull out a gun and shoot everyone."
"Maybe I could seduce you into abandoning the dig."
"What about the others? Would you seduce them as well?"
"Sure. I'll take the men, you take the women. We'll have an orgy while the Earth sails past Malina and out into the darkness."
Andrew realised the door was still open and that the children were probably listening. He reached over to push it closed with his fingertips. "Uh, maybe I shouldn't have done that," he then said. "They'll think we've started the seduction right here, on the pilot's seat."
"Well," said Susan, smiling eagerly. "That wouldn't be the worst idea."
She reached a hand towards the waistband of his coveralls, but then one of the monitor screens lit up and Philip's face appeared. Susan snatched her hand back with a guilty smile.
"Am I interrupting something?" Philip asked, his face expressionless.
"Not at all," said Susan, desperately trying to keep her face under control. Through the window, the top half of an oil tanker's accommodation area protruded above the ice in the rover's headlights, its bridge and funnel bedecked with outstretched fingers of water ice where it had been lashed by storm force winds during the early days of The Freeze. The rover changed course automatically to go around it. "What can we do for you?"
"Just wanted to offer to take the lead for a while. Give the two of you a break from having to keep a lookout."
"That's very kind," said Andrew. "We'll slow down, let you go past."
"Roger. Passing you on the right."
Andrew turned off the autopilot and reduced speed. A moment later Philip's rover came into view, pulling ahead and drifting to the side until it was directly ahead of them. Andrew turned the autopilot back on and activated the tracking system.
They glanced at each other, both of then thinking about carrying on with what they'd been about to do, but Philip's interruption had spoiled the mood, for the moment at least, and so they just sat there, looking out across the frozen expanse of what had once been the North Atlantic. The silence dragged on until Andrew felt driven to say something just to break it.
"Do you remember when they opened the blast doors, twenty years ago, and we emerged onto the surface for the first time?"
Susan smiled at the memory. "The door wouldn't open at first," she said. "They had to warm it to melt the ice on the other side."
"And then, when it did open, there was nothing but a great wall of nitrogen ice on the other side. We had to dig our way through it. I was just a teenager at the time. They dressed me in a surface suit, pushed a heat lance into my hands and said off you go. Get on with it."
"Well, you did volunteer," said Susan with a smile. "So did I. Helping our parents. Getting used to the equipment. We cleared a tunnel up to the surface in half the time they expected. Me and my dad were among the first to stand there and look out at the surface of the new world."
"Me too," said Andrew. "I must have been standing right alongside my future wife and I didn't know."
"And then the first rovers rolled out. The old IceRunners."
"God, but those things were awful!" said Andrew. "And cramped! Six of us having to bunk down in a room barely larger than this cockpit. You, me, Dave Hornbill, Dawn, I forget her last name."
"Kelp," said Susan. "Dawn Kelp. And Sheila and Sid. Sidney Grass."
"You had a thing going with Sid, didn't you?"
"It wasn't serious," Susan replied. "Just a bit of pleasant evening recreation. It wouldn't have lasted even if you and I hadn't been part of the same crew. Besides, Dawn was rather into you, wasn't she?"
"She was into anything with a pulse. I never slept with her, though. Nice body but too shallow." He looked across at Susan. "Besides, you were right there, on the same rover. How could she compete with you?"
Susan beamed with pleasure. "That equipment storeroom certainly saw a lot of use," she said, smiling fondly. "My poor bottom! And people were always needing to use the room, to get some piece of equipment because something had broken down somewhere, and half the time they had to wait while a couple of red faced people hurriedly disengaged from each other. And then reached for their clothes! Why? We all shared the same bedroom. There wasn't a single inch on anyone's body that the others hadn't seen a hundred times before."
"Being caught coitus interruptus isn't the same as climbing out of bed," said Andrew. "Amazing that some of those old IceRunners are still in service. They were cramped but sturdy. Took a licking and kept on ticking."
"Completely automated now, of course," said Susan. "You wouldn't want to put people aboard one these days, except in an emergency. Like the one they sent out to rescue the Mallards a few months back." She smiled. "That family spent two days reliving the hardships of the first generation of surface explorers. I hope it made them appreciate the new hab-rovers more."
Andrew smiled at the memory. "It was one of the very first, too. Zero three. My dad drove that one once. Did I ever tell you that? The New Beijing incident." He fell silent, staring ahead thoughtfully.
"They say the whole city was in chaos," said Susan quietly. "The workers in the lower levels rising up against the tyrannical rulers. Critical life support machinery wasn't maintained properly..."
"Imagine what it must have been like," said Andrew soberly. "Everyone knew that anyone left in the city would die, so there was a mad struggle for the rovers. Those that made it out were heavily overcrowded. Too many people for their life support machinery to handle."
"They were counting on us to come out and rescue them," said Susan.
Andrew nodded. "But the nitrogen rain was in full torrent by then. They tried. My father was one of the ones who took a rover out to pick up survivors, but he was forced to turn back." He paused, as if choosing his words, and Susan waited patiently for him to continue.
"My father got drunk one day," Andrew eventually said. "Him and a bunch of friends were celebrating something, I forget what. One of his friends, almost as drunk as he was, helped bring him home. They made a noise coming in through the door and it woke me up. Mum too. She got up to see what was going on and my dad's friend left dad with her. Then he left."
"What happened?" asked Susan softly.
"I was at the door, trying to listen to what was happening on the other side. I must have been about five at the time, if that. I don't have many memories from that age but I remember this clearly. He was crying, the only time I ever heard him cry. He told mum about the rescue mission, about driving through nitrogen rain that reduced visibility almost to zero. There were rivers of it washing across the ground, currents fast enough to almost sweep the rover away. And the nitrogen rain was carrying heat away by conduction. He said that he had to put the heaters up so high he thought they might overload. Somehow he got close enough to the Chinese that he could hear them over the radio, begging for help, but there was nothing he could do. He came across a river of liquid nitrogen so deep and fierce that he couldn't get across it. He had to turn back."
"Of course he did," said Susan, taking his hand. "It was almost suicidal to go outside in the first place. It's a miracle he made it back."
Andrew nodded. "I think he's been haunted by the incident ever since but he buried it. Buried it deep. But then he got drunk one day and the alcohol brought it all back to the surface."
"Have you even spoken to him about it?"
"I wouldn't know how to raise the subject. I imagine he'll probably be happier just trying to forget it even happened. I'm pretty sure that's what I would do. As for the rest of us, we had to somehow come to terms with the fact that we were the last surviving city. The last remaining outpost of humanity. If we failed to make it, that would be it for the human race. The underground cities would have been nothing more than a brief appendix to the story of mankind."
"Let's hope that doesn't still turn out to be the case," said Susan. "Our existence is still as fragile as ever. If any of a dozen of the city's essential systems fails, everyone dies. Before they found Malina, they were thinking of creating self sufficient colonies elsewhere on the surface, for redundancy. If one city dies, others will survive."
"But then Malina was discovered," said Andrew. "Some clever egghead worked out that we could go to Mars, if we wanted, and so the colonies were abandoned. Everyone stayed in New London so they could contribute to The Return project. We kept all our eggs in one basket."
Susan shivered with fear and Andrew took her hand. It wasn't good for think too long about the tightrope the human race had been walking on for two hundred years, he realised. This conversation has to end before we lapse into a suicidal despair. Dad was right. Some things are better just not thinking about.
"The rover can drive itself for a while," he said. "Why don't we go upstairs and avail ourselves of the opportunity Phil's given us?"
"I'm not really in the mood anymore," Susan replied, staring at the instrument panel without really seeing it.
"Well, I know a great way to improve your mood." He stood, took her hand and urged her to her feet. "We could lay a few blankets out in the equipment storeroom. Thicker blankets than we had in the old days. We could pretend we're nineteen again in one of the old IceRunners, catching a bit of fun between shifts."
She stared in astonishment which quickly turned to delight. "If one of the children comes in..."
"I think they'll know what we're doing in there. They'll give us some space."
Susan stared for a moment longer, wondering if he was serious. Then she grinned and opened the door, almost dragging Andrew out of the cockpit and towards the dirty, cluttered room at the back of the rover.