It took a week to melt and remove all the water ice covering LaSalle's research centre.

     The nitrogen ice above it was far quicker and easier to remove. It only had to be warmed by a couple of dozen degrees for it to sublime and float away, a process that took just a few hours, but the water ice below had to be warmed thirty times as much to have the same effect. A pipe was lowered into the deepening crater to pump the luke warm water up to the surface and deposit it on the other side of a low ridge, where it formed a spreading sheet of material that no-one from the twenty first century would have recognised. Ice, but spongy and foamy where it was frozen in the act of boiling. David took great delight in running across it and feeling it crunching under his feet, the closest thing in his world to walking through freshly fallen snow.

     Finally, though, a rectangular, fifty metre long area of ground had been completely laid bare, surrounded on all sides by twenty metre high cliffs of blue nitrogen ice on top of white water ice. At the bottom lay the crushed remains of the buildings that had once stood there. The walls were still standing, for the most part, but nowhere had the ceiling survived. Every room, every corridor, had been laid bare so that Andrew, standing at the top of the ice cliff, could see the building's layout as if it were a floor plan printed on a sheet of paper.

     It allowed them to immediately identify the part of the building they were interested in, and they planted explosive charges to destroy the walls around it. Then, that entire part of the building reduced to rubble, they sent the fork lift truck in to clear it, its fork replaced by a bulldozer shovel. It pushed the rubble into piles, picked it up one scoop at a time and carried it up a ramp they'd left in the side of the ice cliff to a wide, empty area where they could spread it out and sort through it.

     Andrew was in the machine shop, using steel and other metals they'd scavenged on site as raw materials to make the tools they'd need later, when Susan came in looking excited. She was carrying something in her hand. A transparent plastic container in which a small ingot of silvery metal was sitting. She held up up triumphantly as if it were a trophy.

     "Is that..." said Andrew, leaving the lathe to go take a closer look at it.

     "Dysprosium," said Susan, grinning manically. "There's hundreds of them. Nearly three hundred kilos in all, just sitting there in a sealed cabinet. Nearly a tenth of what we need, all picked up in one go."

    Andrew took the container from her and lifted it up to look at it. The ingot had a slightly greenish tinge to it, probably where it had become exposed to the air at some point and become slightly tarnished. "Be nice if it were all like that. Ready made into ingots ready for us to just take away."

     "Unfortunately, most of it's in the form of dysprosium titanate. More than enough for what we need but it'll be a long process refining out the pure metal. How long before we've got the refinery up and running?"

     "Not long," said Andrew, looking back at the component he'd been working on. "This time tomorrow?"

     She nodded. "That'll give us time to get a good stockpile up here, ready to chuck into it." She grinned happily. "If there are no problems, we should be heading back to the city with a cargo rover full of pure dysprosium within the month..."

     She was interrupted by Joe and Jasmine as they came dashing in, grinning with excitement. "You'll never guess what we found," said Joe, almost hopping on the spot as if the news he was carrying was trying to physically escape from his body.

     "What?" asked Andrew, grinning back at them. Seeing his daughter happy was one of the great joys of his life.

     "A cow!" said Jasmine, the word bursting from her mouth as if she'd been trying to hold it captive and had failed.

     "A... Cow?" said Susan, confused.

     "A cow!" Joe confirmed. "You know, a large, bovine mammal. They go moo and produce milk, or at least they did back before The Freeze."

     "A cow?" said Andrew. He glanced at his wife as if she could explain, but she could only stare back. "A live cow?"

     Jasmine and Joe exploded into laughter, holding onto each other to keep from falling over. "No, not alive," Joe managed to say at last. "How could there be a live cow? After two hundred years?"

     "So, you found a dead cow," said Andrew, still confused. "Okay, that's interesting. I don't really see what makes that so exciting..."

     "It's perfectly preserved!" said Jasmine, her eyes shining. "It must have gone inside during the early days of The Freeze, looking for somewhere warm. It just got colder and colder, though, and eventually it froze."

     "No-one's seen a cow in two hundred years," said Joe. "They were too big to keep any in the underground cities and we've mainly been digging in towns and urban areas, looking for stuff we can sell to the city. It'll be years yet before anyone starts exploring farms and such."

     "That's very interesting," said Andrew. "I still don't really see what makes it so exciting, though."

     "It's perfectly preserved," said Joe, staring at him as if it was obvious. "And no-one's had beef in two hundred years."

     Andrew stared at him in astonishment. "You want to eat it?" he said. He stared at Susan, who stared back in perplexity.

     "Think about it," said Joe, taking a step forward and staring straight into his eyes as if he was trying to explain by telepathy. "All the old movies we've seen. They all have people eating huge great steaks, cooking them on barbecues and stuff. They all go on about how delicious it is, how satisfying it is to eat, and no living person has any idea what they mean. Wouldn't you like to be the first to know? The first in two centuries?"

     "It'll have gone off," said Susan. "You'll get food poisoning from it."

     "No we won't," Joe replied. "The cow is perfectly preserved, like it died yesterday. Still frozen solid. There's absolutely no reason we shouldn't be able to eat it."

     "What's that?" said Lungelo, entering behind the two teenagers. "Eat what?"

     "They found the carcass of a cow," said Andrew, smiling to share the joke with him. "They want to eat it."

     "Eat it?" said Lungelo, his eyes widening with interest. "Like in the old movies? A twenty pound, two inch steak grilled over an open flame? Medium rare, pink on the inside. Moist and delicious."

     "See?" said Joe to Andrew triumphantly. "He gets it."

     "Any way of telling how long the cow was dead before it froze solid?" Lungelo asked him.

     "Not long," said Joe. "Not long enough for it to go off."

     "You don't know that," said Andrew doubtfully. "No-one's eating a dead animal. That's final."

     "It should be safe enough, Andy," said Lungelo, though. "Back before The Freeze, they sometimes found mammoths frozen in the Arctic tundra. There are several documented instances of people eating mammoth meat with no ill effects."

     "That's not the point. There's no reason to go taking unnecessary risks when we've got all the food we can eat right here in the rovers. Good, safe food."

     "Algae," said Lungelo. "Textured and flavoured, admittedly, but algae none the less, with the occasional onion or carrot for special occasions."

     "They say it's indistinguishable from real meat."

     "Now would they know? Have they ever eaten real beef? I think we should do it, as a celebration for having come this far."

     "Right!" agreed Joe enthusiastically. "That's settled then..."

     "It is not settled," said Andrew, though. "Eating something that's been dead for centuries, I can't believe you're even considering it!"

     "I'm doing more than considering it," said Lungelo emphatically. "I'm going to do it, aboard my own rover if I have to. It would be better if we could do it here, in the habitat, though, with everyone present. Make an occasion of it. What do you say, Andy?"

     "Yes, dad," said Jasmine, coming forward and staring up at him with her soft, brown eyes. "What do you say? Say we can do it. Please!"

     Andrew sighed. He could see he wasn't going to win this one. "Let Joe and Lungelo eat first," he said. "If they don't die horrible deaths..."

     Jasmine took her father's uninjured hand in hers and squeezed tightly, beaming with delight. "Thanks!" she said. "Oh, this is going to be wonderful!"

☆☆☆

     It took two full days for the carcass to thaw out. In the meantime, they rigged up an electric grill to cook it on, the closest they could come to a flaming barbecue in an enclosed, indoor space.

     Nobody had any experience in butchering a carcass so they figured it out as best they could based only on what they knew from watching movies and reading books from before The Freeze. Andrew was shocked and horrified by the amount of blood that came out of it. Gallons  of it, pouring out to form a puddle of sticky red on the floor of the machine shop. They quickly put bowls and pans under it to catch the blood, throwing it out the airlock to boil and freeze on the surface of the ice.

     They cut off its head and lower limbs with knives they'd made for the purpose in the machine shop. They skinned and gutted it, then hung it from a hook while the last of the blood came dripping out. Andrew stared at it hanging there, a curious mix of emotions going through his head. It still looked vaguely cow shaped with its stumpy legs sticking out sideways. Only the huge gash in its belly spoiled it, the opening through which its entrails had been removed, now also freezing on the ice. That was once an animal, he thought. Once, it had wandered the surface of the Earth, living its life. Eating grass along with others of its kind, staring curiously at the humans it shared the world with. Had it known that the humans controlled every aspect of its existence, he wondered, that they cared for it only so that it could kill and eat it one day, or had that concept been beyond its simple animal brain? Maybe it had thought that humans were just another kind of animal like horses, dogs and birds.

     When it had finished draining, Susan and Joe chopped the carcass into small pieces, kept some of them for immediate consumption and put the rest back out onto the ice to freeze, to be eaten on some future occasion if they liked their first meal. Joe and Lungelo then chopped the piece of sirloin into steaks similar in size to what they'd seen in the old movies.

     Philip took one of the steaks, though, and cut it into thousands of tiny pieces, as small as he could make them. "What are you doing?" asked Andrew curiously.

     "Making burgers," the other man replied. "You're supposed to mince the meat, but we don't have a mincer so..." He raised the knife and continued cutting. "Is it okay if I use one of the onions? Mix them in with the meat? I know they're for special occasions..."

     "Everyone seems to think this is a special occasion," said Andrew, deciding to give in to the inevitable. "Go ahead."

     Philip grinned and produced the large onion he'd already had hidden under the table. He peeled off the outer layers and began chopping it up while Andrew wandered away, shaking his head in disbelief.

     Finally, that afternoon, Joe lay the first steak on the yellow hot bars of the electric grill. Everyone gathered around to watch as it sizzled and steamed, and then a smell began to rise from it. An aroma unlike anything they'd ever experienced. "Oh my God!" said Halona, leaning forward to breathe it in. "It's wonderful!"

     No-one disagreed, not even Andrew, and they all gathered closer, shoulders pressed together, until they could feel the heat on their faces along with the occasional pinprick of sharp pain as a droplet of flying fat landed on their skins, ignored as they breathed in the smell of cooking meat. "I never imagined!" said Lungelo as he stared down at the shrinking piece of meat. "I thought I could imagine, but I never imagined anything like this!"

     Joe used a wide knife to lift the steak and flip it over. The underside was striped with brown lines where the bars of the heater had burned it, but it only added to the desirability of the barbecued meat. Andrew found that his mouth was watering. He wanted that steak. Something ancient and primitive at the base of his brain craved it. There's plenty of it, he told himself. Plenty for everyone. We don't have to fight each other for it.

     "How do we know when it's done?" asked Philip. "The old stories say it best when it's still pink in the middle, but they also warn of diseases and parasites."

     "We should cook it thoroughly," said Susan. "Just to be safe." She was staring at the steak as hungrily as the others, though. She wanted it now. Undercooked or not.

     With a great effort of willpower they waited until the steak was half its original size and brown on both sides. Then Joe removed it from the grill and placed it on the kitchen table with as much care and reverence as if it were a religious artefact. Philip immediately placed another steak on the grill and the sizzling resumed. Joe cut the first steak in half, and they saw with delight that the meat was visibly softer and pinker on the inside. Joe cut off a small piece, just large enough to go on the end of a fork, and raised it up to his eyes, studying it carefully. Then, watched by everyone, he placed it in his mouth and began chewing.

     His eyes widened with astonishment, then closed in ecstasy. "Oh my God!" he breathed around the half chewed steak. "Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" He began cutting off another piece while still chewing the first.

     "Hey, wait a minute?" protested Lungelo. "Share it around!"

     Joe reluctantly surrendered the knife and Lungelo cut off a piece for himself. Everyone else took turns, including Andrew, completely sold by the expressions of dreamy delight on the faces of the others.

     "How can we have lived our whole lives and not experienced this?" said Philip, staring around at the others. "Just like the real thing? My arse! How long 'till the next bit's cooked?"

     "What do you say now, Andy?" said Lungelo to Andrew, grinning triumphantly. "Still got doubts?"

     "If we die from some horrible disease, it'll almost have been worth it to have experienced this," Andrew conceded. "I only regret that there's only one cow. When it's all gone, there'll be nothing but the algae again."

     "There'll be other cows," said Joe hopefully.

     Andrew shook his head, though. He was remembering the mummified corpse they'd found in the ancient library they'd fallen into in Augsburg. The last survivor of a small group of refugees who'd been driven to eat each other in the last extremity of their hunger. He didn't doubt that they'd already eaten everything it was possible to eat before succumbing to that final, desperate extremity. Every cow, every rat, every beetle. And it would have been the same all across the world. It had been a miracle that a cow had somehow been overlooked here and he doubted there were more than a handful of others to be found across the entire planet.

     He didn't say this, though. He didn't want to spoil the happy moment, and so he just ate the rest of his portion of meat while making sure to fix it firmly in his memory. When the last of the cow was gone, he was quite sure that he'd never taste anything quite so wonderful again, and neither would any other human being, ever. He would live the rest of his life on the fake algae meat, knowing in a way he never had before just what a poor substitute it was for the real thing. He didn't know whether to pity the rest of the human race, who weren't able to share this moment, or envy them for not knowing what they were missing.

     Behind him, Philip placed the first of his home made beefburgers on the grill while Halona began preparing the algae buns they would eat them between. David went back to the kitchen to fetch a bottle of tomato sauce.