"I wonder if Jasmine's awake yet," said Susan, her voice heavy with concern and worry.

     She and Andrew were loading fragments of broken control rod into the furnace. The control rod assembly they were currently dismantling consisted of nineteen steel guide tubes in a hexagonal arrangement, held in position by spindly frameworks along its length. It was a beautifully constructed sculpture of gleaming steel, as perfect as the day it had rolled off the assembly line. Preserved by the cold. No corrosion could take place when both water and oxygen were frozen solid.

     It was so perfect that Andrew felt twinges of regret as he snipped the end caps from the tubes with a pair of power pliers and tipped the neutron absorbing pellets they contained into the canister Susan was holding. Nearby, two of the New Philadelphia soldiers in surface suits were cradling machine guns in their hands as they watched them. Alert for any sign that the New Londoners might be about to attack them or try to damage the furnace. Widmark and McLaglen, Andrew thought they were. They had arrived to relieve Hayes and Bronson a few minutes before. Andrew couldn't see their faces through the faceplate of their helmets, but one of them was visibly shorter than the other, making him think it was Widmark, and he and McLaglen always seemed to go around together.

     "I'm worried about her too," said Andrew, pausing in his work to adjust his grip on the power pliers. "If she has woken up, they've got no way of letting us know. They're out of radio range."

     "But just a seven hour drive away," said Susan. "Do you think they'd let us take one of the rovers back, just to find out?" She indicated the soldiers, who were looking at them suspiciously, wondering why they'd paused in their work. Andrew and Susan were talking on a private channel, still surprised that the soldiers had allowed them to do that. They'd half expected them to insist that all communications take place over the public channel so they could overhear, to make sure the New Londoners weren't plotting something, but apparently they weren't afraid of that, which made sense, Andrew admitted to himself. After all, the New Londoners could plot and scheme as much as they wanted at night, in the privacy of their own rovers, so denying them private communications while they were working would have been a little pointless.

     "I can't see them agreeing to that," Andrew replied regretfully. "It would delay our work, and these men have wives and families they want to get back to. Plus, they'd only have our word for it that we'd be going to New Philadelphia. What if they're afraid we'll head back to New London to tell them all New Philadelphia's secrets?"

     "They could make sure the rover only has enough food for one day," said Susan, but she sounded defeated as if she knew she was arguing a hopeless cause.

     Andrew stepped closer and put a thickly padded hand on her suited arm. "I want to know if she's awake as well," he told her softly. "It's breaking my heart not knowing how she is. Also, if she has woken up, she could tell us who the remainer is. She could tell us who threatened or blackmailed her into doing what she did. Believe me, I want to know that more than anything." The power pliers gave a whine of complaint as his other hand tightened on it and he forced himself to relax. The day of reckoning would come. He just had to be patient.

     Susan nodded, putting her gloved hand on his, and then they went back to work. When the canister was full, Susan climbed the steps that had been set up beside the furnace and poured the dull grey pellets into the loading hopper. Heat radiated from the device, causing warning messages to pop up on her helmet's visor display, and she hurried back down the ladder before her surface suit, which was designed to keep heat in rather than out, suffered an overload. Inside the furnace, the pellets were heated by power provided by a plutonium generator until the atomic bonds were broken and the various substances of which they were composed were separated into their individual atoms. Then, a small amount of the incandescent gas was allowed to enter the centrifuge where the precious dysprosium would be separated out from the rest.

     Beside the furnace was a pile of cold slag. Everything in the pellets that wasn't dysprosium was cooled to freezing temperatures before being dumped onto the surface of the ice. Beside the waste chute was another, much smaller opening that, every couple of hours, would disgorge a small ingot of pure dysprosium. At the end of the day, Andrew would pile them up on a small motorised trolley and drive them to the unmanned cargo rover which contained all the dysprosium they'd collected so far. Nearly half now of all they'd need. The operation was going very well, and only the situation their children were in kept him from feeling a warm glow of satisfaction.

     Andrew felt a tremble in the ice under his feet that told him that the former fork lift truck, now a bulldozer, was approaching, bringing another bucketload of control rod assemblies up from the ruined factory and research complex. The ruins gave every indication of containing all the dysprosium they would need, they'd been pleased to find. Philip, Joe and Valentina were sifting through the wreckage, picking through rubble and concrete, some still glued together with iron hard water ice, looking for the treasure they'd come to find whether it was in completed control rods or pellets of raw dysprosium titanate.

     Andrew looked around and saw Lungelo in the driver's seat. He waved as the bulldozer came level with them, then tipped the control rod assemblies on the pile that was already there. A light flashed in the corner of Andrew's vision, his suit telling him that someone was trying to talk to him over the public channel. He changed channel and the other man's voice sounded in his ears.

     "How you guys doing?" Lungelo asked.

     "Fine," Andrew replied. "Going to have to go in soon to recharge the pliers. They're getting low."

     "Anytime you want to swap jobs, sit down for a while, just let me know."

     "Will do. We're fine for the moment, thanks."

     They saw Lungelo nod in the bulldozer's cabin. "Listen, Phil says it's getting hard to find more completed assemblies where he is. Another couple of hours and he thinks he'll be mined out."

     "Yeah, that's pretty much what we expected," Andrew replied. "This place supplied control rods for over two hundred power stations, in the USA and abroad. They shipped them out pretty much as soon as they were completed. I'm surprised we found as many as we did. No, the assembly plant is where we'll find the rest of what we need. The place where these control rod assemblies were made."

     "You got any idea how much of the stuff there is here?" asked Susan. "I really don't want to have to raid the cores themselves for used dysprosium."

     Andrew shared her wish. Used dysprosium would be contaminated with unusable isotopes. It could still be used, but would take much longer to process to make it safe. Plus, of course, there would be the fuel rods themselves to deal with, which would still be radioactive even after two hundred years. Going to the cores of the nuclear reactors would be very much a last resort. Very much.

     "I don't think there'll be any need for that," said Lungelo, though. "Phil seems to think there's more than enough for what we need. The only problem is getting to it under all the rubble, but we're making progress. You guys sure you're okay here? Just let me know if one of you wants to have a go in the driver's seat. Sit down and rest for a while."

     Andrew looked across at his wife, who shook her head. "We'll let you know," he said. "In the meantime, just enjoy the..."

     He broke off at the sight of two people emerging from the huge, circular hole in the ice, at the bottom of which were the factory ruins. Two New Londoners. Their surface suits were newer and smarter looking than the antique suits being worn by the New Philadelphians. One figure was small, which meant it was Valentina. The other could have been either Philip or Joe. They were both large, physically imposing men, the seventeen year old son almost as much as the father.

     Susan and Lungelo followed his gaze and saw the two figures as well. "Where are they going?" asked Susan.

     "They've left someone alone in the factory," said Lungelo. "We're not supposed to leave someone alone in case it's the remainer."

     "I don't think there's much mischief the remainer could get up to in the factory," said Andrew. "Everything down there's already destroyed." He sent a hail signal to Philip and got a reply almost immediately. "Hey, Andy. What's up?"

     "Hey, Phil," said Andrew. "Where're Joe and Val going?"

     "Joe wanted to check something in the cargo rover," Philip replied. "He said it was rather urgent and he'd explain later. Val went with him just in case, you know."

     In case Joe was the remainer and he wanted to sabotage the rover. Andrew nodded. "Okay," he said. "I just wondered if there was something wrong, that's all."

     "Nothing so far as I know. Joe's not answering my hails. I think he turned his radio off by accident."

     "Okay. Thanks, Phil." He signed off, shrugged to his wife, and hailed Val. She answered with a cheerful voice. "You okay, Val?" he asked.

     "Sure," she replied. "Just helping Joe with something. I think he accidentally turned his radio off, I can't get through to him. We're going to the cargo rover. I'll ask him what's going on when we get inside and we can take our helmets off."

     "Okay," said Andrew. "Take care, Val."

     "You too, Andy."

     Andrew watched them for a moment or two longer as the two figures made their way towards the habitat. They were going inside, then, he realised. Into the rover's small and rather rudimentary habitable area. They weren't just getting something from the large cargo hatch in the rover's side. He watched them going in through one of the habitat's vacant airlocks, then turned his attention back to cutting open steel guide tubes. He looked up again a couple of minutes later to see the two figures through the window of the rover's cockpit, along with the two New Philadelphia soldiers who'd been guarding it. Hayes and Bronson, he thought. He watched as one of the soldiers looked out at him through the cockpit window, wondering what it was that was giving him a feeling of slight unease. Then, again, he turned back to his job.

     He finished emptying the control rod assembly he'd been working on and tossed the gleaming silver framework on the scrap pile along with the others. The scrap pile, and the pile of slag beside the furnace, looked out of place on the shimmering, pristine ice. Are humans capable of doing nothing without marring and spoiling the world? he thought. Of course, it could be argued that the world was irretrievably ruined beyond all hope anyway and that, therefore, nothing they did to it could possibly make it worse, but even so...

     Lungelo was driving the bulldozer back down the ramp in the ice to the ruined factory. Andrew picked up one of the control rod assemblies the other man had just brought and put the power pliers to the end of the first tube. He applied pressure with his fingers and the motors responded by closing the jaws of the pliers with much more force than he could have managed alone, snipping neatly through the steel. Susan came closer with the canister and Andrew tipped the neutron absorbing pellets into it. It was boring, repetitive work and his mind drifted away, thinking about the children and how they were coping, separated from their parents. Alone in a strange city. Meanwhile, his body carried on snipping tube after tube like a machine on autopilot.

     Suddenly the two soldiers who'd been guarding him turned and stared towards the cargo rover. Andrew, his mind snapping back to the here and now, paused in his work to stare in the same direction, wondering what had captured their attention. The rover was still sitting there, seemingly normal, everything as it should be, but the two soldiers then ran madly towards it, Andrew and Susan forgotten. Their bodies radiating alarm and anger.

     He and Susan had gone back to their private channel once Lungelo had left. He switched back to the public channel and suddenly there were voices shouting in his ears. "She's gone mad!" Joe was shouting. "She's got a gun!"

     Susan saw him give a start of alarm and, realising he was no longer on their private channel, she switched to the public channel as well, just in time to hear the sound of gunshots. She spun around, trying to look in all directions at once, the cleats on her boots sending up sprays of ice. Cries of pain came over the channel, followed by more gunshots.

     Andrew turned to look for a place of safety, to hide, then cursed his cowardice. He was the leader of this expedition. Time to start acting like it. He turned to follow Widmark and McLaglen towards the cargo rover, knowing they wouldn't let him get involved with whatever was going on but feeling he needed to be there anyway. Susan made to follow him but Andrew grabbed her by the arm to stop her. "Get down to the factory," he told her.

     "But..."

     "No buts. Get to the factory and find Phil. They probably don't know, they're probably still on their own channel. Tell them to stay down there and stay safe. And stay there yourself."

     "I'm not some helpless woman who..."

     "Dammit, Susy, I've got no time for this. Go get safe and warn the others to stay out of the way."

     Susan stared angrily at him for a moment, but then she nodded. This was no time for a family row. They'd talk about it later. She turned and ran for the ice ramp down to the ruined factory, therefore, passing the other two soldiers who'd been on the same channel as the other New Philadelphians and had heard the commotion.

     Andrew waited just long enough to make sure Susan was doing what he'd told her to do, then ran for the habitat. It took a seeming eternity for the airlock to cycle, but then he was through, where he found Joe sitting with his back to the wall, his arms around his knees, trembling with terror. "She shot them!" he sobbed desperately, staring up into Andrew's face. "She had a gun hidden in there somewhere."

     "That's impossible," Andrew protested. "We searched all the rovers before we left New London..."

     "She had a gun!" Joe protested desperately. "And explosives. She's going to blow up the atomic engine. The explosion will leave the dysprosium contaminated with radiation. Unusable."

     Andrew swore. "Go to your rover," he told the boy. "Shut yourself in. Stay there until this is all over."

     Joe nodded and climbed unsteadily to his feet. "Some hero I am," he sobbed. "Dad was right about me..."

     There was no time for reassurance and consolation. It would have to wait until later. Andrew forgot about him, therefore, and resumed his run around the habitat's circular corridor to the airlock the cargo rover was docked to. He arrived to find Widmark, who grabbed his arm to stop him. "What's happening?" Andrew demanded.

     "Hayes and Bronson are down," Widmark told him. He looked around at two surface suited bodies lying on the ground. McLaglen was kneeling beside them, examining them.

     "The woman's sealed herself in the rover," Widmark continued. "We can't get in."

     "Are they dead?" asked Andrew, his stomach feeling like a cold, lead weight in his belly.

     "No," said McLaglen with a sigh of relief. "They would be if they were outside, but we're in warm atmosphere here. I need help getting their suits off before they bleed out. Help me get them in there." He pointed into the recreation room and Arness and Grey, who'd just arrived behind Andrew, ran forward to pick them up.

     Andrew also went forward to help, but Widmark stopped him. "How do we get that door open?" he demanded, pointing at the rover's airlock.

     "You can't," Andrew replied. "Not if the inner door's open. It's a safety feature to keep the rover from decompressing."

     "She tried to kill my men!" Widmark said, and there was deadly fury in his words. "I want to get in there and get her! How do I do that?"

     Andrew's head was spinning with confusion, though. "I can't believe she'd do this," he said, leaning against the wall as if he might fall otherwise. "She's kind, gentle..."

     "Go take a look at my men to see how kind and gentle she is. Now how do we get in there?"

     Andrew forced his head to think clearly. "There's another way in," he said. "A hatch in the airlock's floor, accessible on the underside of the rover. To let you get in when two rovers are docked back to back."

     "Come show me how," said Widmark. Andrew nodded and led the way back outside.