“Not tired of it?”

“No. Like to run a job by myself.”

The passenger nodded agreement.

“And it’s steady. I like routine; you can think. Fifteen days on the run, fifteen off with the partner in New Hope. Year in, year out, drought, famine, whatever. Nothing changes, it’s always drought down here. I like the run. Get the water out, will you? Cooler’s back underneath the locker.”

They each had a long swig from the bottle. The water had a flat, alkaline taste, but was cool. “Ah, that’s good!” the passenger said gratefully. He put the bottle away and, returning to his seat in the front of the cab, stretched, bracing his hands against the roof. “You’re a partnered man, then,” he said. There was a simplicity in the way he said it that the driver liked, and he answered, “Eighteen years.”

“Just starting.”

“By damn, I agree with that! Now that’s what some don’t see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around enough in your teens, that’s when you get the most out of it, and also you find out that it’s all pretty much the same damn thing. And a good thing, too! But still, what’s different isn’t the copulating; it’s the other person. And eighteen years is just a start, all right, when it comes to figuring out that difference. At least, if it’s a woman you’re trying to figure out. A woman won’t let on to being so puzzled by a man, but maybe they bluff… Anyhow, that’s the pleasure of it. The puzzles and the bluffs and the rest of it. The variety. Variety doesn’t come with just moving around. I was all over Anarres, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I came back here, and I do this run every three decads year in year out through this same desert where you can’t tell one sandhill from the next and it’s all the same for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and go home to the same partner—and I never been bored once. It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.”

“That’s it,” said the passenger.

“Where’s the partner?”

“In Northeast. Four years now.”

“That’s too long,” the driver said. “You should have been posted together.”

“Not where I was.”

“Where’s that?”

“Elbow, and then Grand Valley.”

“I heard about Grand Valley.” He now looked at the passenger with the respect due a survivor. He saw the dry look of the man’s tanned skin, a kind of weathering to the bone, which he had seen in others who had come through the famine years in the Dust. “We shouldn’t have tried to keep those mills running.”

“Needed the phosphates.”

“But they say, when the provisions train was stopped in Portal, they kept the mills going, and people died of hunger on the job. Just went a little out of the way and lay down and died. Was it like that?”