he stars. Phobos hadn't risen; Deimos, the
farther moon, was too small to furnish appreciable light.

Something touched him from behind, and he recoiled, pushing Nance back.
He yanked the machete from his belt, and struck blindly... Oh,
_no!_--you didn't get caught like this--not usually, he told himself.
Not in their actual grip! They were too slow--you could always dodge! It
was only when you were near something not properly disinfected that you
got Syrtis Fever, which was the worst that could happen--wasn't it...?

He heard an excited rhythm in the buzzing. Now he remembered his
shoulder-lamp, fumbled to switch it on, failed, and stumbled a few steps
with Nance toward the hill. Something caught his feet--then hers. Trying
to get her free, he dropped his machete...

Huth's voice spoke in his helmet-phone. "We hear you, Nelsen! Hold
out... We'll be there in forty minutes..."

Yeah--forty minutes.

"It's--it's silly to be so scared, Frankie..." he heard Nance stammer
almost apologetically. Dear Nance...

Screaming, he kicked out again and again with his heavy boots, and got
both her and himself loose.

It wasn't any good. A shape loomed near them. A thing that must have
sprung from _them_--someway. A huge, zombie form--the ugliest part of
this night of anguish and distortion. But he was sure that it was real.

The thing struck him in the stomach. Then there was a biting pain in his
shoulder...

There wasn't any more, just then. But this wasn't quite the end, either.
The jangled impressions were like split threads of consciousness,
misery-wracked and tenuous. They were widely separated. His brain seemed
to crack into a million needle-pointed shards, that made no sense except
to indicate the passage of time. A month? A century...?

It seemed that he was always struggling impossibly to get himself and
Nance somewhere--out of hot, noisesome holes of suffocation, across
deserts, up endless walls, and past buzzing sounds that were mixed
incongruously with strange harmonica music that seemed to express all
time and space... He could never succeed though the need was desperate.
But sometimes there was a coolness answering his thirst, or rubbed into
his burning skin, and he would seem to sleep... Often, voices told him
things, but he always forgot...

It wasn't true that he came out of the hot fog suddenly, but it seemed
that he did. He was sitting in dappled sunshine in an ordinary lawn
chair of tubular magnesium w