It was a fairly obnoxious question, but she took it nicely. She giggled. I could tell that because we were faceplate to faceplate, and I could see her face shadowed inside the helmet. But I couldn't hear what she was saying until she remembered to nudge her voice switch, and then what I heard was, ".. . romantic, just the two of us."
Well, we didn't have time for that kind of chitchat. I said irritably, "Let's quit wasting time. Remember what I told you. We have air, water, and power for forty-eight hours, and that's it. Don't count on any margin. The water might last a little longer than the others, but you need the other two things to stay alive. Try not to work too hard. The less you metabolize, the less your waste-disposal system has to handle. If we find a tunnel and get in, maybe we can eat some of those emergency rations over there-provided the tun
nel's unbreached and hasn't heated up too much in the last couple hundred thousand years. Otherwise, don't even think about food. As to sleeping, forget it; maybe while the drills are going we can catch a couple of naps, but-"
"Now who's wasting time? You've told me all this stuff before." But her voice was still cheery.
So we climbed into the igloo and started work.
The first thing we had to do was to clear out some of the tailings that had already begun to accumulate where we'd left the drill going. The usual way, of course, is to reverse and redirect the augers. We couldn't waste drilling time that way; it would have meant taking them away from cutting the shaft. We had to do it the hard way, namely manually.
It was hard, all right. Heatsuits are uncomfortable to begin with. When you have to work in them, they're miserable. When the work is both hard physically and complicated by the cramped space inside an igloo that already contains two people and a working drill, it's next to impossible.
We did it anyway.
Cochenour hadn't lied to me about Dorrie. She was as good a partner as any man I'd ever had. The big question before us was whether that was going to be good enough. Because there was another question, which was bothering me more and more every minute, and that was whether I was still as good as a man.
Lord knew, I wasn't feeling good. The headache was really pounding at me, and when I moved suddenly I found myself close to blacking out. It all seemed suspiciously like the prognosis they'd given me at the Quackery. To be sure, they'd promised me three weeks before acute hepatic failure, but that hadn't been meant to include this sort of bone-breaking work. I had to figure that I was on plus time already.
That was a disconcerting way to figure.
Especially when the first ten hours went by ... and I realized that our shaft was down lower than the soundings had shown the tunnel to be ... and no luminous blue tailings had come in sight.
We were drilling a dry hole.
Now, if we had had plenty of time and the airbody close by, this would have been no more than an annoyance. Maybe a really big annoyance, sure, but nothing like a disaster. All it would have meant was that I'd get back into the airbody, clean up, get a good night's sleep, eat a meal, and recheck the trace. Probably we were just digging in the wrong spot. All right, next step would be to dig in the right one. Study the terrain, pick a spot, ignite another igloo, start up the drills, and try, try again.
That's what we would have done.
But we didn't have any of those advantages. We didn't have the airbody. We had no chance for food or a decent sleep. We were out of igloos. We didn't have the trace to look at-and time was running out on us, and I was feeling lousier every minute.
I crawled out of the igloo, sat down in the next thing there was
to the lee of the wind, and stared up at the scudding yellow-green sky.
There ought to be something to do, if I could only think what
it was.
I ordered myself to think.
Let's see, I said to myself. Could I maybe uproot the igloo and
move it to another spot?
No. That was a no-go. I could break the igloo loose with the augers, but the minute it was free the winds would catch it arid it would be good-bye, Charlie. I'd never see that igloo again. Plus there would be no way to make it gastight anyway.
Well, then, how about drilling without an igloo?
Possible, I judged. Pointless, though. Suppose we did hit lucky and hole in? Without a sealed igloo to lock out those ninety thousand millibars of hot, destructive air, we'd destroy anything fragile inside before we got a look at it.
I felt a nudge on my shoulder and discovered that Dorrie was sitting next to me. She didn't ask any questions, didn't try to say anything at all. I guess it was all clear enough without talking about
it.
By my suit chronometer thirteen hours were gone. That left
thirty-some before Cochenour would come back to get us. I didn't
see any point in spending it all sitting there.
But, on the other hand, I didn't see any point in doing anything
else.
Of course, I thought, I could always go to sleep for a while
