Ah God, he thought, this isn't worth doing.  Then a rock the size of his head came bounding toward his helmet.  Frantic hands jerked at the controls, and Siegfried skewed the truck wildly, so that the rock jumped away and missed him.  Which put an end to that line of thought.

He cued his peecee. Saint James' Infirmary came on.  It didn't help.

Come on, you bastard, he thought.  You can do it.  His arms and shoulders ached, and his back too, when he gave it any thought.  Perversely enough, one of his legs had gone to sleep.  At the angle he had to hold his head to watch the road, his mouth tended to hang open.  After a while, a quivering motion alerted him that a small puddle of saliva had gathered in the curve of his faceplate.  He was drooling.  He closed his mouth, swallowing back his spit, and stared forward.  A minute later he found that he was doing it again.

Slowly, miserably, he drove toward Weisskopf.

The G5 Weisskopf plant was typical of its kind: A white blister-dome to moderate temperature swings over the long lunar day, a microwave relay tower to bring in supervisory presence, and a hundred semiautonomous units to do the work.

Gunther overshot the access road, wheeled back to catch it, and ran the truck right up to the side of the factory.  He had Siegfried switch off the engine, and then let the control pad fall to the ground.  For well over a minute he simply hung there, eyes closed, savoring the end of motion.  Then he kicked free of the straps, and crawled out from under the trailer.

Static skatting and stuttering inside his head, he stumbled into the factory.

In the muted light that filtered through the dome covering, the factory was dim as an undersea cavern.  His helmet light seemed to distort as much as it illumined.  Machines loomed closer in the center of its glare, swelling up as if seen through a fisheye lens.  He turned it off, and waited for his eyes to adjust.