Then we got out the Bible.
Later, we set up a double bunk.
We didn't set the alarm. _That_ was our honeymoon.
* * * * *
Neither of us said a word in the morning; actually it was past noon.
We didn't have to. There was only one thing we could do that made the
slightest sense.
I got out the welder and burned off the tractor's cab, then went
underneath and cut through the mountings on the useless engine and
everything else that wasn't an absolute essential.
Helene dumped everything movable and non-essential from inside.
Shortly before dusk I tossed the now-useless welder on top of the
other junk and climbed onto the 'dozer and pulled out. There weren't
any brakes on what was left of the tractor, but that would have
to not matter. We were going to have to drive 'round the clock or
not get there in time. A bulldozer is not a fast vehicle under any
circumstances.
Logically, I couldn't see that we had much chance of covering eleven
hundred miles in that rig, without having to make at least one stop
quick enough to collapse the towbar and land the tractor on top of the
'dozer.
Emotionally, I couldn't believe a word of it. I _knew_ we were going to
get there.
We did.
Forty-eight days after the crash, I drove through the blackened edge of
the northernmost "marker area," and parked just inside its southern tip.
When I came up through the airlock, Helene was looking out what had
been the forward port of the tractor, which now faced the area we would
have to make into a landing strip.
When I had the inner layer of my suit half off, she spoke for the first
time since we'd been married: "We made it, Marsh."
I joined her and looked out into the dusk. It was going to be rough,
but we could do it. "Not quite," I said, "we've still got that strip to
chew out."
She was silent a moment, then said, tightening her arm around me: "I
know. I said _we_ made it, Marsh."