om it. His astrogeologer-navigator was dead, and the planet was
dead, so a man just didn't walk away.

There was plenty of room for him to scramble through the yawning rip in
the buckled hullplates--just a matter of crawling up the river of red
sand and out; it was as easy as that.

Then Johnny Love was on his feet again, and the sand clutched at his
heavy boots as though to keep him from leaving Ferris and the ship, but
it didn't, and he was walking away....

* * * * *

Even one hundred and forty million miles from the Sun, the unfiltered
daylight was harsh and the reflection of it from the crimson sand hurt
his eyes. The vault of the blue-black sky was too high; the desert plain
was too flat and too silent, and save for the thin Martian wind that
whorled delicately-fluted traceries in the low dunes that were the only
interruption in the flatness, there was no motion, and the planet was
too still.

Johnny Love stopped his walking. Even in the lesser gravity, it seemed
too great an effort to place one booted foot before the other. He looked
back, and the plume of still-rising smoke from the broken thing that had
been his ship was like a solid black pillar that had been hastily built
by some evil djinn.

How far had he walked; how long?

He turned his back on the glinting speck and made his legs move again,
and there was the hollow sound of laughter in his helmet. Here he was,
Johnny Love, the first Martian! and the last! Using the last of the
strength in his bruised body to go forward, when there was no forward
and no backward, no direction at all; breathing when there was no
purpose in breathing.

Why not shut off the valves now?

He was too tired for hysteria. Men had died alone before. _Alone, but
never without hope! And here there was no hope, for there was no life,
and no man had ever lived where there was not life!_

But he had come to see, and he was seeing, and in the remaining hours
left to him he would see what no man had seen in a half a million years.

Harrison and Janes or Lamson and Fowler would not be down for twenty
days at the inside; that had been the time-table. Twenty days, twenty
years ... he heard himself laugh again. Time-table!

He and Ferris first. Then Harrison and Janes. Then Lamson and Fowler,
all at twenty-day intervals. If all landed safely, they would use
Exploration Plan I, Condition Optimum. If only two crews made it down,
Plan II; Condition