All happiness comes from the desire for others to be happy. All misery comes from the desire for oneself to be happy.

—SHANTIDEVA

It took me a full day to recover from my thirty-day slumber, during which time I was relieved to learn that Asteroid 1997 XF11 missed Earth by 22,700 miles, Lara’s pet squids were doing well, and that ABE, though stuck in hibernation mode from the cryogenic cold, would eventually thaw out and recover.

Andria and I had a long talk. Since then, she’s yet to leave my side.

The next day, at precisely noon, GOLEM fired Oceanus’s rocket engines, the inferno coming from its four upper exhausts turning the refrozen ice shelf to slush. Forty minutes later we were back on the surface, surrounded by a convoy of trucks and all-weather terrain vehicles.

My uncle greeted us as we stepped off the habitat gangway arm in arm, my exhausted mind basking in the reassurance of subfreezing temperatures beneath a cobalt-blue sky. “So, Robbie, I hear you decided to take a thirty-day siesta after all.”

“Don’t even go there. What happened with the lunar investigation?”

“Preliminary reports indicate your computer was right, the helium-3 isn’t active enough to generate a stable fusion reaction. Looks like it’s on to Europa, although the crew’s dropping like flies. First GOLEM determined Kevin Read was unfit for command, then the computer replaced every male crewman except Jason Sloan, then the Buddhist woman resigned. What the hell happened since we last saw one another?”

“Not much. Just an Ice Age, four-hundred-foot tidal waves, telepathic octopi that climb trees, cloned women who wanted to seduce me, and some nasty blue crabs.”

“The women had crabs?”

“No, no … giant crabs. Never mind.”

Andie kissed my cheek. “Tell him the news.”

“We’re getting married.”

“Mazel tov,” my uncle said, “but I pretty much assumed that when the two of you got engaged last year.”

Andria slapped me playfully upside the head. “Not that news, the other news.”

“Oh, right. I’m going to Europa.”

Uncle David’s eyes widened. “That must have been some dream.”

“It wasn’t the dream, it’s that I love Andria and I want us to be together.”

“For the record, General, I offered to resign. But your nephew insisted.”

“Without Andie, I would never have survived the Great Die-Off. But having survived, the one thing I forgot is that life’s too short … that each day is a gift. I’ve been too wrapped up in my work, and it’s not fair to ask Andie to give up her dream. The way I figure it, I’ve witnessed the near end of humanity twice. This time around, I want to help secure our species’ future the right way.”

Andria kissed me, her lips cold. “We struck a deal with GOLEM. The computer agreed to push back the launch date to train the replacement crew long enough for us to take a month-long honeymoon.”