We weren’t making near the time I’d thought. It was slower going when you were walking on snow and around chunks and ridges of ice. But it felt good to be in the dimension of nothing. Close to four o’clock now, the sun was lower on the horizon, a whiter hole in a white sky. It didn’t shine. It looked like a dead sun, a ghost sun, as if the heat had all burned out of it. You could look right at it. We had maybe two hours before dark, so we had to make good time.

I couldn’t hear anything but my own breath and my boots and Susie’s boots like an echo after mine. The sled felt like it was loaded up with lead. I could hear Hobbes snoring, so I figured he was taking a ride.

Spaceman Spiff had been disconnected from the spaceship and was just drifting, drifting, drifting away into the vacuum. Earth kept getting smaller until it was a blue basketball and then a blue baseball and then a blue marble, and he stared and stared until it was a blue dot. His air ran out and his body died, but weirdly he didn’t decay in the vacuum of space, and one day an alien garbage man picked him up and Spiff’s eyeballs were wide open and filled with shiny blue atoms—

Susie stopped. For a second I’d forgotten how to stop, and then I remembered.

Susie: Listen.

She was staring into the sky, staring like a blind person would stare—unseeing, listening with her whole body.

Me: What?

Susie: What do you hear?

Me: My breathing.

Susie: No, Calvin. Listen. Just listen.

So I listened.

When you’ve lived all your life with the sound of Life in General, you don’t even hear it anymore. You don’t hear the noise of cars, trucks, trains, airplanes, refrigerators, air conditioners, furnaces, and you don’t feel radio and television waves shooting through you, and you don’t hear telephones, animals, birds, floors creaking, doors opening, the voices of six billion people all talking and laughing and crying, and over a billion cows mooing and nineteen billion chickens clucking and a million species of bugs buzzing, and you don’t realize that it all adds up to this low hum of Life in General.

Life in General doesn’t live in the middle of the lake.

Me: It’s quiet.

Susie had closed her eyes. She didn’t answer me.

My ears started straining for something, like they had this need to hear something, anything, like that little eardrum needed something to beat its bongos. After a long moment, I did.

Me: It’s the sound a planet makes when it travels a hundred thousand kilometers an hour through space.

Susie: It’s a truck.

Me: Huh?

Susie: That sounds like a truck!

Hobbes: A planet spinning through space sounds like a truck?

Susie (turning): Calvin—

We turned around.

A truck was coming.

A gray truck.

Coming straight at us.

Me: It’s a truck.

Susie:

Me: On the lake—driving on the lake—

Susie:

Me: Tell me you see that.

Susie: I see it.

The truck slowed down as it pulled up beside us. It had no doors or roof, but it was a truck.

A man wearing a plaid hat with earflaps nodded to us, as if he met people walking on the lake all the time.

Plaid-hat guy: Have you seen Fred?

Me:

Susie: We … we don’t know a Fred.

Plaid-hat guy: Okay. Thanks.

Me: Bit chilly without the doors and roof of your truck?

Plaid-hat guy: We take ’em off. If the ice breaks, we can jump out.

Me: Oh.

Susie stared down at the ice.

Plaid-hat guy pulled away.

Me: Okay, a truck just drove up to us on the ice and asked for Fred. Sometimes the world is crazier than me.

Susie (staring after the truck): Stuff like that only happens when I’m with you.

She looked doubtfully at the ice and started walking.