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.

I was just beginning to feel the cold when I got back to the tractor.

Helene had the specimen preservation kit out and open. I sealed the mercury in transparent plastic, made a ring from a piece of wire, bonded the mercury to it, and coated the whole works with more of the transparent plastic.

It wasn't much, but—

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 

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