Andrew took off his armour while he was still in the airlock and activated the radiant heaters to begin warming it up. He bent down to look at the shoulder area and saw a tiny sliver of water ice lodged between two steel plates, still too cold to begin melting. He straightened up, opened the inner door and stepped out.
Susan was waiting for him in the outfitting room and immediately began helping him out of the surface suit. He heard her give a sharp intake of breath when she saw his shoulder. "You idiot!" she said furiously. "What were you thinking of?"
"How's it look?" he asked.
"Nasty. It's going to hurt when it warms up. You'll need painkillers. Maybe it'll teach you not to do something so stupid again."
She helped him out of the rest of the suit and took him into the kitchen area. James was there in his bare skin, standing while Jasmine applied thermal cream to the frostbitten areas of his back. "You okay?" asked Andrew anxiously.
"Fine," James replied. "What about you? Mum sounds quite upset."
"Upset is right," said Susan. "You finished with that?" she asked Jasmine.
"Just about," Jasmine replied, handing the tube of cream over. Susan took it, squeezed a large dollop into her hand and smeared it onto the large cluster of blisters that had appeared on Andrew's back. It immediately began to feel warm, which then turned to stabbing agony as the frozen skin began to revive. Andrew, driven by his masculine pride, struggled to give no outward sign of the pain.
"Be as quick as you can," he said. "We've got to take the bridge up again when we're over it."
"Don't even think of going out there again!" warned Susan firmly. "You're in no condition."
"I can't leave the others to do the work. That's not fair."
"I'll do it."
"You can't go out there!" declared Andrew firmly.
"Why not?" demanded Susan. "Because it's too dangerous?"
"I'll be okay to go out again," said James confidently. "The others know what to do. All I've got to do is lend a helping hand where necessary."
"Nope," said Jasmine firmly. "My turn. Right, Dad?"
"You sure you're up to it?" asked Andrew. He went to look at James, studying his back and shoulders. Then he turned him around with a hand on his shoulder to look at his front. It didn't look too bad, he was forced to admit. A few small frostnips that should heal in a couple of days without leaving a mark to show they'd ever been there.
"Sure," Jasmine assured him. "If a fourteen year old boy can do it, so can a sixteen year old girl, or are you going to get all sexist on me? It should have been me the first time."
"It's an innate part of human nature for men to want to protect women," said Andrew. "Especially daughters. If you came back with a cold burn like this one..." He indicated the one on his back."
"You'd smear some cream on it and tell me to take it easy for a couple of days," the girl replied, smiling sweetly. "So I can go, right?"
Andrew nodded reluctantly and Jasmine grinned happily. "You're done," she told James. She handed him the tube of cream and began stripping off her clothes.
"Dad," came David's voice from the cockpit. "It's our turn to go across. Shall I go?"
"Let the autopilot do it," Andrew replied. "Do you know how to turn on the autopilot?"
"Is it the big switch with the word 'autopilot' over it?"
Andrew was forced to smile. "That's it," he said. "The tracking system's already on, it'll follow the path left by the others. If, for any reason, it starts to go astray just shut the engine off and holler. You got that?"
"Got it," the boy replied.
Susan, meanwhile, had been examining the rest of Andrew's body and applying thermal cream where necessary. "Why don't you go up there and make sure he's okay?" she suggested. "You might as well." There was a determined look on her face that warned him not to even think about putting his surface suit back on. "Just don't sit down. You'll smear the cream."
"Right," said Andrew, deciding to accept the inevitable. He turned to Jasmine. "Be careful out there," he said. "If you get ice lodged in your armour, get back in right away. Don't be like me. I'm an idiot. You understand?"
"You're not an idiot, Dad," Jasmine told him. "But I won't take any chances. I promise."
She went back to the outfitting room. Susan started to follow her and Andrew grabbed her elbow to stop her. "Where are you going?" he asked.
"I'm not letting my daughter go out there alone," she replied. "I've got just as much surface experience as you have."
That was true, he had to admit, and so he just nodded unhappily. She reached out to squeeze his hand and smile, then followed Jasmine into the next room.
"I think mum missed a couple of spots," said James, looking his father's body up and down. "Stand there and I'll do you."
Andrew nodded silently. James squeezed a small drop of paste onto his finger and applied it gently to a spot near the base of his spine.
☆☆☆
All the rovers crossed the bridge without incident, and then it took another hour to recover the bridge, separate and fold up the three sections and stow them away on the sides of the rovers. Then they drove on, towards the line of cryo-volcanoes that were still out of sight beyond the horizon.
"I hope there aren't too many crevasses like that," said Jasmine as James applied thermal cream to the frost nipped spots on her back. She had pulled her hair around to the front of her body to keep it from getting in the way.
"Well," said Andrew as he performed the same task for Susan. "It's not called the fracture zone for nothing."
Susan kept looking at Jasmine's body, he noticed. His wife was growing increasingly self conscious of the lines and wrinkles that were starting to appear on her body, especially in the stomach area. Andrew still found her unbelievably beautiful, but that cut little ice with Susan who had her daughter right there in the rover to compare herself to.
"That looked like a recent fracture," he added, "which I take to be a good sign. It means there was an ice-quake quite recently, which will hopefully have relieved the stress in the ice. It means we might be able to get through the Charlie Gibbs gap without another ice-quake."
"Who was Charlie Gibbs anyway?" asked Jasmine.
"No idea," said Andrew. "Probably some scientist from before The Freeze." He gave his wife's body one last looking over. "I think you're done," he said. "You came off quite lightly compared to me and Jim."
"The ice storm seemed to be lessening," she said. "I think it's ending."
"Good," said Andrew. "And good riddance."
"You're done too," said James to Jasmine, giving her a double pat on the shoulder to emphasise the fact.
"Thanks" she said, going to the mirror and turning her back to it, looking over her shoulder to examine the blobs of cream on her shoulders and bottom. She took the tube from her brother and read the writing on the back. Leave for half an hour before carefully washing off, it said. She put the tube down and went to the ladder, to lie face down on her bed for a while.
Susan was getting ready to leave as well. Andrew put a hand on her arm to stop her. "What?" she asked.
"Just stand there for a moment, will you?" said Andrew, taking a couple of steps back. "I like looking at you."
She beamed with pleasure. "You see me like this several times every day."
"And I cherish every occasion. You are beautiful, Mrs Birch."
She blushed with embarrassment, knowing he'd seen her looking at Jasmine. "Silly of me to be jealous of my own daughter," she said.
"Silly and unnecessary, pretty girl. Half an hour, you say? Before you can lie on your back?"
"Get a room, you guys," said James, smiling as he packed away the first aid cabinet.
"You heard the man," said Susan. "I'm sure the half hour will fly by."
"Can't fly too fast for me," said Andrew as they left the room together.
☆☆☆
Later than day, Andrew was looking at maps made by the terrain mapping satellites of the way ahead.
He'd always thought that the Mid Atlantic ridge looked like the broken spine of some huge beast. It ran mostly north to south, a long line of mountains formed where the east and west sides of the sea bed were pulling apart, but near the northern end there was a break where the range ended and then started again about a hundred kilometres further to the west. Between these two halves were a pair of transform faults. Places where one part of the sea bed slipped sideways relative to the other. There were cryovolcanoes there too, but further apart and with stretches of flat ice between them. Places where a rover could cross without having to climb a steep slope of treacherous, ever shifting gravelly ice.
The problem was that the place was subject to savage ice quakes that had left the area broken into tilted slab of ice of various sizes. Similar to the glacier they'd crossed near the beginning of their pursuit of Reginald Fox, but on a far grander scale. They would have to take a circuitous route that avoided cliffs of ice dozens of metres high, crossing from one slab of ice to another where they were at more or less the same level. It was possible. It might even be simple, so long as another ice quake didn't occur while they were there.
That was the possibility that had him pacing across the living room, too filled with nervous energy to take a seat. "What do the latest satellite images say?" asked Susan, trying to calm him down.
"No detectable change since they last passed over the area," Andrew replied. They'd received the new images just a few moments ago, probably the last contact they'd have with the city with the geosynchronous communications satellite now virtually on the horizon. They were now on their own, unable to even talk to anyone not part of their caravan, for the first time in their lives. Something that was only adding to Andrew's nervousness.
"Well, that doesn't mean anything, right?" said Susan. "They say there's an ice-quake around here once every twenty years or so and there was one just five years ago."
"They don't come like clockwork," said Andrew though. "Another might happen at any time."
"But what are the chances that a one in twenty year earthquake will happen during the three or four days it'll take us to pass through the gap?"
"There are other dangers," Andrew reminded her. "There's snow here. It might have covered a crevasse. There might be a void beneath solid looking ground."
"Which is why we're sending the unmanned rover ahead of us, to test the ground, right?"
"What if the ground's firm enough for the first rover to pass over, but it's weakened so that the next rover..."
"Andrew!" snapped Susan angrily. "Stop it! You're being silly! Everyone else agrees that the danger's small, that we'll almost certainly make it without any trouble. Philip's happy to bring his ten year old daughter this way. The others are happy to come here with their spouses and Lungelo's got his daughter..."
"Who's twenty three. Hardly a child."
"Even so, they still care about her. They wouldn't want to put her in danger, and yet they brought her. The experts back in the city were happy for us to come this way. Besides, there's no alternative. So long as that volcano's erupting in iceland, a proper lava volcano, we either go this way or go home."
"Right now, going home seems like a rather attractive prospect."
"And face failure again? Is that what you really want?"
"I don't want to put my reputation ahead of the safety of the children." Andrew ran a hand across his face. "You're right, though. In all probability it'll just be a nice, easy drive. I know I worry too much. I always have. Dammit, I hate being in charge!"
Susan put a hand on his arm. "One of the reasons the others aren't worried is because you worry so much. They know you're looking at everything from every possible angle. The trick, though, is not to overdo it. They're my children as much as they're yours and I'm not worried. Well, not very much. If it becomes too dangerous we can turn back at any time. We're not going to be digging up any dysprosium if we're all dead."
"One day at a time," said Andrew, nodding. "One hour at a time. Hell, one second at a time. But the moment I think the danger's too great, we turn back."
"And I'll support you every inch of the way," Susan promised.
"I know you will," said Andrew. "I think a spell in the driver's seat'll calm me down a bit. Being able to look out the window to see there's no danger ahead. Shall we go take over from the boys?"
"Let's," Susan replied, and they made their way forward.