DEGREEZ Don 'Hacksaw' Crilly was at the end of the eighth crevass when he broke down and cried loudly and frustratedly into the Titan sky. With words of programmed sincerity and feeling his android SalAmhat4 reeled out an economic utterance of huma-komfort. 'Professor Crilly, I am impressed with your emotional durability and physical endurance given our conditions. It will be only 17hours and 25 minutes 33 seconds before the solar reflector device begins to warm this sector of Titan.'. Of the explorers on the Titan southern polar zone Crilly and Anderson were the only two assigned an SM4 droid. It had allowed them to make more sure calculations. The downside however was the empath's designers poor efforts to make 'salami' companionable. Despite the unit's accuracy, the politeness function was becoming about as popular as a papal envoy on a nudist colony's shooting trip. Anderson had passed away in the crossing of the Miranda Gorge a week earlier.... probably only days from finding the exit crevasses that Crilly was passing through. Their separation was guaranteed 'to make survival 74.3885% more possible. 'We'll try it Don!' Reg Anderson had said to the man the TAG (Titan Adventurers Group) had christened 'Hacksaw' (after Crilly had raided the iced chocolate and tea biscuit tins at base camp Dorian armed only with a hacksaw). Only later did the bio-comlink show that Anderson had been unable to keep out the chill factor in his meanderings towards the meeting point beyond the Mirandan mountains. The viz had shown a grey screen marked with telltale ice streaks before it fizzed off. He must have been lying with hands downward when he died was the only thought Crilly could hold as a terror of loneliness swept his sensitive soul... This small fact and the decimal percentage 'salami' had quoted seeded his white blanked memory. He would get out. He would present his report.... but 'friendship was friendship' and 'a loss was loss' he told himself as he pulled his fur-lined hood further over his ice-cold ears. 'I have to get over this ... for Reg... and keep going!'. If only the other parties would have got in contact with me!... please!.... God... make them remember us and call!. 'The jaguar embodies immeasureable power and agility' the edu-link on Cygnus 18 entoned whilst the three Crilly children.. Meaghan, Kirk and Alice watched their favourite show 'Animal Safari' on the library's old earth programs. Madeleine Crilly didn't mind them watching these outmoded shows.. the filming style was very quaint and could be classified as 'Art'... Art with a capital A...besides,. a good case had been made for terrestrial animals' collection and breeding in the 2000's... until it had all got worse down there. Madeleine thought on ... 'It was natural and history... they did get scared at times.. recently it was the rhino file that had troubled little Alice... Oh Don!' she sighed gazing from the children's rumpus room doorway. In the evening comfort of the oribital-meccana she often thought about her other half.. what was HE doing on Titan now? She missed his bright eyes, even the dingy chivalry, the envelopes from Trans-Titan and the drolly drawn caricatures of his co-workers... Anderson, Geesin, Jenks, Mundey and 'old tinned salami'. On the screen a tribal African opened the vein of a captured wildebeest and unholily lapped at a gourd full of blood. Accch... the children shouldn't see that I think!. Another African with a throbbing sack full of baby ostrich gazed blankly at the screen, his friend boastfully shook his spear to the camera. Madeleine and Don Crilly in differing circumstances were being led to experiencing how the life's aggressive side can not be usurped by the piques of angry intellectual disapproval. The war of survival writes no laws and asks no lawyer's fees!. Opposition of entities in the raw world of Titan (as in Africa) was dealt with more simply.... It was find!... contact! and remove him from the shared airspace!. Mike Mundey had begun his stay on south Titan in a similarly naive capacity. His grab-bag of 'Beatles-esque' CDs had been spolit by the icy conditions on day 1 of the trek from the unload vessel. His Asian foot rug and poetry books had met a similar fate at Dorian. Along with the Montague boys Mike had been forced to acquaint himself with the inner survival creature within the inner man after only a month on the wastes of Titan. Trudge, trudge trudge, crunch, crunch, crunch went the relentless percussive rhythm through the snow filled crevasses of the Miranda hill quadrant... as the android and the man wended their weary way towards the high road at Jeffries Base. Consuming only recycled biofluids and the small cannisters of army rations from 'Hut 83' Crilly stopped only to take on body fuel. That and take a crap. He avoided the issue of his home relationships and capitulated to upright evacuation of faeces at morning light...This was a chilly procedure assisted by warming android thermal blasts helping against frostbite... a warm space although entombed in the icy caverns. 'Forget Madeleine and the kids' he thought .... The site training had prepared him well for the possibilities of mental wandering, wavering and hallucinations. He had kept to the survival mnemonic... 'what you can't use to move forward and can't be consumed safely must not be entertained in mind or body'.. His staggering ice journey was becoming a toil of the most arduous physicality. 'But the concrete riders of Terra would never have got this'... he sneered and smote the ice wall beside him half-triumphantly using a pre-historic Martian pickaxe souvenired from a previous 'adventure'. At Jeffries Base Colonel Pavelaak sat at his mahogany desk reading 'Vestigal Creationism on Mars'.. when he was interrupted by a startling flash of light filling the sky not too far outside the camp complex's window. Lights on the giant concrete bunker shimmered first blue-mauve and then green. 'Twice now... in this shift' he coughed to Commander Oakley who stood near the supply cabinet adjacent his position. The flares had signalled the return of members of the TAG whom Jeffries had almost given up for dead following a calibration vortex's extinguishing of electric lines. It had been a nervous Colonel who had said to Oakley... 'Well at least they have had their survival training'... it was only now that they needed to use it.... Along with Crilly, the plastic shielded SM4 android also noticed the flares and took advantage of this fact to regale Don with another round of cordially recited facts...'Ground Temperature rising Professor Crilly... we are only 18 kms approximately from Jeffries Base'. Crilly groaned, though more out of habit than out of pain and irritation... 'Arrrggghhh, alright.. Salami.!!.' He resented the android's untiring valve and piston walking action and took from the word 'approximately' a masochistic glee...that he felt sure was offered by his automated companion's 'unconscious sadism'. Time seemed to be moving slower on Titan... was it the result of the magnetics of the planet?... the pivoting of asteroids in the northern realm? ... Don wished he had taken Commander Oakley's lecture on Titan space-time anomalies, but Madeleine had been insistent.. Time went slowly when you tire... when you see no change in environment... just the same freaking ice hills and red brown sky...time distortion results in moody introversion and ang-er.....Crilly's introduction to at least 200 different 'powerful people of Terra' (via the children's vid-library) had engaged him in the task of summoning a stoic affectation of character that he called 'courage'... It was courage when you had to eat a dead man in the Arctic... courage to stand up for the rights of a nation against it's oppressor... courage to finish a swim marathon with chronic asthma .....Whenever Don had heard talk of expeditions he had managed to declare himself 100% fit and prepped... this was his war with 'the others'. The lesson of aggression... he had privately called it. 'It had been compared to .... the end of that ... we sing and praise thy power'....Crilly mumbled chaotically to himself as the lights of Jeffries Base slowly grew closer on the horizon. To the chief officers heliported to Jeffries, it had also been an anxious wait... There were bigger ... much bigger, issues arising from the Titan work. Several of the recovered parties had spoken of blank-faced almost comatose colleagues...the siren-like auto-nags of the trial spacesuits..and the impersonal uptight manner of training staff. The words of the psalmist 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? were close to the hearts of all the pioneer parties..'.It could mean an insurrection... certainly a future distrust of trek missions here'... mused Oakley and Pavelaak together as early reports started coming in. But the adventurers would rest and return to loved ones... when night is enveloped by daytime, however... 'in the night season, I am not silent'. 'It was amazing that the LORD did not swallow them up' - canteen attendant Marge muttered to fellow grey uniformed co-worker Eva. Another much hoped-for vessel had departed to attend another batch of returnees. 'Frankly I think, it downright sucks' Eva replied shortly. Beside a simulated open fire their womanly hospitality went out to the chilled adventurers from the south... as they relaxed, gazed or devoured the evening Base meal of hot Sylabian stew and cornbread... Like an undisciplined human battle-axe hacking away at the ice Don 'Hacksaw' Crilly finally cleared a significant U-hollow and inserted his gubflare . By using the small belt torch, he lit the twisted brown paper at its base... and waited...... Nothing!!! Immediately 'Salami' the android jerked into verbal anim-action. 'There is at least a 72% possibility that sleeping on the gubflares last night has affected the charge... however, we remain 5 and a half kilometres from Jeffries Base... and Wednesday evening is Sylabian stew and cornbread.'... Now Crilly fell forward onto his knees.... the voice of his old mentor arose in his fevered mind..... 'I will destroy them from the earth ...and their seed with those of the plastic body from among the children of men ....they shall burn dazzlingly as a flame of evil against thee ....until the coming of the device of mischief'.. With trained sensors the android ducked as a speeding ice-pick clattered into the frost-blue wall beside him... 'Professor!... I shall endeavour to secure our passage to Jeffries Base by utilising conduits from my radio-processing unit as a morse beacon...there is a 67.65553% that reception will be favourable at this distance...' 'What-fucking-ever .. you metal hearted bastard... I give up!!....blurted out Crilly, now at the lowest ebb of endurance... a hopelessly resigned condition. As the orange and cream marked verocarr finally sped with Crilly and Salami across the tundra to the Base ...whispered agitation broke out amongst returnees watching from the balconies. In protest of their treatment they stood with their backs turned away insultingly from the command room centre.. where Oakley and Pavelaak stood as official reception. Both Anderson and Crilly were well liked amongst the others... they represented almost an elite faction of the adventurers... highly educated... they certainly were seen as leaders... but now it looked like.. 'Anderson has gone' .'You're kidding', 'shit!' ..the muffled comments rose in an angry wave... as the number of returnees from party ix was recorded as '1+1 android'. After a quick medical, Don discovered that he had suffered severe hypothermia, eardrum perforation and severe frostbite to the facial extremities... Walking past the officer's rooms and throbbing from anaesthetic dulled limbs, Crilly flipped a weakly scrawled note from a bandaged hand onto the carpeted floor, turned, spat on an ornamental cactus and returned to his friends in the camp lounge... The note read... 'I Donald Crilly - adventurer 4387610089CRI ... would like to make complaint against the serious lack of thermal clothing outfitted at Titan South camp... and I wish to make it known that neither I nor my progeny will EVER be available for similar excursions on TITAN in the future!'... After adventurer 4387610089CRI's SM4 droid had read the note to the distinguished leaders of Jeffries Base.. he remarked sanguinely... 'That is all very well... but there is still the question of whether the ground level training manuals are completed in accordance with Extra-Terran Law... he HAS to come back...' Colonel Pavelaak turned to 'salami', coughed and glibly replied... 'Dead right, old son, but how else can we make these clones adjust themselves to new life out here on Titan... safari tapes???... now you ask me!'