He wondered if anyone still drove Corvettes.

Now there was somebody walking towards him, along the side of the road. He couldn’t see who it was.

The muscles in his hands were starting to tremble, with the effort of gripping the frame. Your hands always got tired first, in microgravity…

There were two of them. They wore broad-rimmed white hats against the sun. “You old bastard.” It was Bart, and that other one who was worse than Bart. They grabbed his arms and just held him up like a doll. Bart got hold of the walker, and, incredibly strong, lifted it up with one hand. “I’ve had it with you!” Bart shouted.

There was a pressure at his neck, something cold and hard.

The light strengthened, and washed out the detail, the rocky ground, the blurred sun.

He was in a big room, white walled, surgically sterile. He was sitting up in a chair. Christ, some guy was shaving his chest.

Then he figured it. Oh, hell, it was all right. It was just a suit tech. He was in the MSOB. He was being instrumented. The suit tech plastered his chest with four silver chloride electrodes. “This won’t hurt a bit, you old bastard.” He had the condom over his dick already. And he had on his fecal containment bag, the big diaper. The suit tech was saying something. “Just so you don’t piss yourself on me one last time.”

He lifted up his arm. He didn’t recognize it. It was thin and coated with blue tubes, like veins.

It must be the pressure garment, a network of hoses and rings and valves and pulleys that coated your body. Yeah, the pressure garment; he could feel its resistance when he tried to move.

There was a sharp stab of pain at his chest. Some other electrode, probably. It didn’t bother him.

He couldn’t see so well now; there was a kind of glassiness around him. That was the polycarbonate of his big fishbowl helmet. They must have locked him in already.

The suit tech bent down in front of him and peered into his helmet. “Hey.”

“It’s okay. I know I got to wait.”

“What? Listen. It was just on the softscreen. The other one’s just died. What was his name? How about that. You made the news, one more time.”

“It’s the oxygen.”

“Huh?”

“One hundred percent. I got to sit for a half hour while the console gets the nitrogen out of my blood.”

The suit tech shook his head. “You’ve finally lost it, haven’t you, you old bastard? You’re the last one. You weren’t the first up there, but you sure as hell are the last. How about that.” But there was an odd flicker in the suit tech’s face. Like doubt. Or, wistfulness.

He didn’t think anything about it. Hell, it was a big day for everybody, here in the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building.

“A towel.”

“What?”

“Will you put a towel over my helmet? I figure I might as well take a nap.”

The suit tech laughed. “Oh, sure. A towel.”

He went off, and came back with a white cloth, which he draped over his head. He was immersed in a washed-out white light. “Here you go.” He could hear the suit tech walk away, laughing.

In a few minutes, it would start. With the others, carrying his oxygen unit, he’d walk along the hallways out of the MSOB, and there would be Geena, holding little Bobby up to him. He’d be able to hold their hands, touch their faces, but he wouldn’t feel anything so well through the thick gloves. And then the transfer van would take him out to Merritt Island, where the Saturn would be waiting for him, gleaming white and wreathed in cryogenic vapor: waiting to take him back up to the lunar beach, and his father.

All that soon. For now, he was locked in the suit, with nothing but the hiss of his air. It was kind of comforting.

He closed his eyes.

Paula Benacerraf and Bill Angel, two human beings from Earth, were climbing the highest mountain on a moon of Saturn. They were seeking water ice, to supplement their life support systems.

Toiling up the slope in their bulky white suits, and with their sleds sliding across the gumbo, they must look, Benacerraf thought, like two grubs hauling chunks of cast-off exoskeleton over the skin of some huge animal.

Benacerraf’s suit felt hot, and chafed at her groin and armpits, and she could feel blisters forming across the soles of her feet. Every step she took in the snowshoes, going up the gumbo slope, she had to angle her feet and dig in to get traction sufficient to haul the mass of the sled another few feet. Her visor was misted up from her breath, and she could feel her heart hammering.

She paused for breath. She leaned into the sled harness — it was adapted from an Apollo couch restraint — and she rested her gloved hands against her legs. Her helmet lamp splashed light over the glistening slope before her.

As he slogged ahead of her up the gumbo slope, dragging his sled, Bill Angel sang some kind of marching song to himself. Just a couple of phrases of it, over and over. It was easy for him to find his way, sight or no sight; he was just following the line of maximum slope. He was already maybe twenty yards ahead of her, and his form was dimming a little in the murky air, although his stained white suit still showed up brightly against the black layer of methane clouds that hid the mountain’s summit, and the splash of light of his helmet lamp — she made him wear it as a beacon — was clearly visible.

He was as encumbered by his sled as she was by hers. The sleds were just cone-section panels of Apollo Command Module hull, so big they would be impossible to pull under Earth gravity, even empty as they were right now. But this wasn’t Earth. And Angel just marched on, dwarfed by his sled, his legs shoving at the gumbo like pistons.

Rosenberg called from Tartarus, via S-band, his signal bouncing off Cassini.

Clumsily, Benacerraf flicked a switch on her chest panel. Rosenberg had rigged up two separate S-band frequencies: one open to the three of them, and the other available to Rosenberg and Benacerraf alone.

On the private band, Rosenberg said: “How’s it going up there?”

She lifted up her arm; there was a reflective panel there that let her read her chest panel. She had rigged up her panel so she could cycle it between the status of her own suit and Angel’s. “He seems to be doing okay. Heartbeat a little high, maybe…” She switched back into Angel’s voice loop for a second. “Still, he goes on with the damn singing. Over and over.”

“Singing I can forgive. Check your marker.”

She looked back down the slope. It was vertiginous — under Titan’s weak gravity, this ice mountain had a gradient of maybe one in four for most of this ascent — and they were already a couple of thousand feet above the reference level where Discovery sat. The mountain was a flat cone, thrusting out of the landscape. It was maybe nine miles across, two high. An ice mountain as steep as this would have been impossible on Earth because of the higher gravity; the pressure at its base would have melted the ice, and the form would subside, leaving hillocks only a fraction as high. From here, the base of the mountain was hard to see, washed out by the eternal murky haze. She could barely see the last marker she’d planted; it was just a ghostly vertical line of white metal against the dark-stained tholin slush.

From the pile in her sled she dug out another marker — an aluminum strut from Apollo — and rammed it into the gumbo.

When she turned, Angel was almost invisible, still ploughing upwards.

“Bill, don’t get too far ahead.”

His singing cut off as if she had turned a switch. He stopped moving; he straightened up and turned, as if looking down towards her.

She took a slug of stale recycled water from the nipple in her helmet, and leaned into the harness once more.