"Is ... is everything all right?" she asked in a weak voice.
"Don't worry dear," Roger replied soothingly. "We'll be landing in another half hour. You won't have to go through much more of it."
"Thank goodness!" Linda breathed a sigh of relief and laid her dark head on Roger's shoulder. Roger put his arm around her and held her until the rocket came in with a squeal of runners against hard packed snow. Lights flashed by the eyeport as they slid along the runway. In the distance the lighted, slablike towers of Arctic City loomed against the dark sky. The night was clear and bitterly cold.
The rocket slid to a stop, and an electric tractor came to tow the ship to the top of an elevator shaft. A few minutes later the passengers streamed along a conveyer walk into the Arctic City terminal. The sounds of hurried activity echoed through the tunnel. The rumble of heavy freight conveyers, the shouts of stevedores, the whine of heavily loaded electric motors, and the hum of conversation mingled in a medley of sounds that spoke of commerce and industry, of people busy at an almost endless array of tasks.
"Are you Roger Lorin?" The question came from a short, stocky, gray-haired individual.
"Yes, I am," Roger replied.
"I'm Jacob Darcy. I'm supposed to show you to your apartment and help you get oriented."
"Good," Roger said. "You lead. We'll follow." Darcy turned and led them to a small electric monorail car which sped them through a maze of underground streets past the windows of many shops and stores.
After a ten minute ride in the monorail and a fast ascent in an elevator, the three of them entered a small apartment high in one of the slablike buildings. The apartment was comfortable and compact, though not luxuriously furnished. One transparent wall of the living room looked out over the city and the arctic landscape.
"I thought things would be more primitive," said Linda as she looked around her future home. "This doesn't seem like a frontier at all."