"Yes?"
"I'll kill you for that."
"You frighten me."
"I'm not kidding."
"I know you're not, kid. You're just not thinking straight at the
moment. You wouldn't be here if you were the type that could actually
commit suicide, when it came right down to the fact."
"We're dead already."
"Then how do you expect to kill me?"
"It will be fun trying, Marsh."
It finally hit me that this was asinine, childish, and getting nowhere
in a hurry. "Hell, kid," I said. "We've still got an engine in the
'dozer. It can be done. Maybe not neatly, but it can be done."
"Sure," she sneered, "sure it can be done. The 'dozer must have almost
half the power of this hulk. We'll get there all right. We'll get there
about the time the people upstairs pile up on the landing strip that
isn't there. Then we can use the 'dozer to give them a good, Christian
burial.
"Hell, Marsh, there's no sense trying to do it that way. That hole
can't be very big. If we take the mercury out of the 'dozer and add
what we can find lying around on the sand, and then pour it back in and
weld the hole shut, we'll be all right. We'll get there a day or two
later, but that won't be nearly as bad as if we try to tow with the
'dozer. Then we can swap mercury again and use the 'dozer. Couldn't be
any simpler than that."
Like a fool, I tried to be logical: "How long do you think that weld
would hold, kid? And then where would we be?"
"Right where we are now, only maybe a few miles closer. We haven't got
anything to lose, and we've got _everything_ to gain."
That was the start. In the course of an hour and a half, we covered
every possibility and impossibility of the situation. Whatever one of
us brought up, the other argued against. We talked like crazy.
We were.
When it finally penetrated that we'd both known everything we'd
covered, before we started, I said bluntly: "Shut up."
"Go to hell."
"I suppose I will, eventually. Should I expect to see you there?"
"No."
"I'm sure it can be arranged," I said as I got up.
"You're not going to--?" she asked, suddenly really alarmed.
"No." By that time, she was on her feet, too. I spun her around and
forced her to the floor. Then I tied her hands behind her back with
some wire that had been lying on the floor behind me. I didn't try to
tie her too tightly; just tight enough to be sure she couldn't get at
the knots.
She didn't resist nearly as much as I had expected.
I repeated the process on her ankles, then gagged her to stop the
insane conversation, and put her in her bunk.
Then I turned out the lights and crawled into my own.
It never occurred to me that there were dozens of things she could cut
herself loose with, just lying around the compartment.
* * * * *
I awoke and threw my arm up from sheer instinct. I grabbed something
soft, and half-heard a metallic clatter behind my head. There was a
weight on top of me, and then the weight and I were on the floor,
locked together with the blanket between us.
Full consciousness was slow in coming, in spite of the shock of the
activity. It seemed better, somehow, to just stay in that halfway state
and enjoy it without knowing why. Finally, gradually, it penetrated
that these were "the motions" that we were going through, but that we
were not just "going through the motions."
This was for real.
A nasty question followed the thought: if this was for real, why did
she keep wriggling and twisting all the time? The answer was close
behind. She never had been able to hold still when her husband held her.
It seemed ages before we both realized how unsatisfactory it was to be
separated by that blanket, and released each other and lay apart, with
the blanket half on me and half on her. After more ages, I got up and
turned on the lights. There were certain formalities that really should
be observed.
While I pulled on the outer skin of my spacesuit--I wouldn't be outside
long enough to need any more--Helene quietly picked out the large
wrench she'd dropped at the head of my bunk, and put it back in the
case it had come from.
_Love and hate are separated only by the thin edge of a coin ... flip
it and it can come up either way...._
I picked up a sterile specimen tube and a thin, small sheet of metal,
locked my helmet in place, and went out.
It took me a little longer than I'd expected to find a reasonably large
blob of mercury, but I made up for it by getting it into the tube on
the second attempt.