With a bump, the truck started to move.

It was a hellish trip.  The truck, never fast to begin with, wallowed down the road like a cast-iron pig.  Siegfried's optics were bent over the controls, and couldn't be raised without jerking the walker's hands free.  He couldn't look ahead without stopping the truck first.

He navigated by watching the road pass under him.  To a crude degree he could align the truck with the treadmarks scrolling by.  Whenever he wandered off the track, he worked Siegfried's hand controls to veer the truck back, so that it drifted slowly from side to side, zig-zagging its way down the road.

Shadows bumping and leaping, the road flowed toward Gunther with dangerous monotony.  He jiggled and vibrated in his makeshift sling.  After a while his neck hurt with the effort of holding his head back to watch the glaring road disappearing into shadow by the front axle, and his eyes ached from the crawling repetitiveness of what they saw.

The truck kicked up dust in passing, and the smaller particles carried enough of a static charge to cling to his suit.  At irregular intervals he swiped at the fine grey film on his visor with his glove, smearing it into long, thin streaks.

He began to hallucinate.  They were mild visuals, oblong patches of colored light that moved in his vision and went away when he shook his head and firmly closed his eyes for a concentrated moment.  But every moment's  release from the pressure of vision tempted him to keep his eyes closed longer, and that he could not afford to do.

It put him in mind of the last time he had seen his mother, and what she had said then.  That the worst part of being a widow was that every day her life began anew, no better than the day before, the pain still fresh, her husband's absence a physical fact she was no closer to accepting than ever.  It was like being dead, she said, in that nothing ever changed.