Part 3 (1/2)

There was no strength in his arms and hands, yet they moved in front of him as though things detached from his body; skillfully, surely, playing deftly across the colored studs.

Scanners on. Scanners on, kid....

He watched the screens again, unconscious of what his fingers did on the panels. The dull red sphere loomed large once more. The picture was off-center; without knowing what he did he rectified course with the bow jets; it was centered again. But it was a different place. Still the desert, but with ridges of brown-green at its horizon; oddly-formed crater-places....

It was coming up fast, now; faster, until the horizon was only a gentle arc against a thin span of blackness, and the rest was cold red.

Hardly knowing what he did, his fingers suddenly raced over the control console, even before the scanner-alarms began their ear-splitting clanging!

The s.h.i.+p lurched into a direction-change that threatened to wrench the hull apart, and the picture in the scanner reeled crazily. He knew his own brain was not dictating the commands of control to his fingertips, nor was it evaluating for itself the madly fluctuating values indicated on the panels. A human brain could not have done it, he knew that....

He had cut power. At least there was no power. He was falling at a crazy angle and the desert was rus.h.i.+ng up now, hurtling up to smash him.

They'd hit him, then, yet he'd felt nothing....

It was getting hot. His hull must be glowing, now, even in the thin atmosphere of Mars--it was a long fall. Slower than a fall on Earth, through thinner air layers, yet he was glowing like a torch.

The ocean of sand rushed up.

And suddenly his left hand rammed the full-power stud.

It was as though he'd been hit from behind with all the brute force of some gigantic fist, and there were two things. There was the split-second glimpse of a crescent formation suddenly wheeling toward him and there was the clang of the scanner-alarm. There were those two things his brain registered before the t.i.tanic force of full power squeezed consciousness from it and left him helpless.

He was running. In a nightmare of a dead planet that was not dead, he ran, away from something.

That was how his consciousness returned. While he ran. He stopped, stumbling, turned to look behind him.

And the s.h.i.+p was there. Landed perfectly, stubby bullet-nose pointing to the sky. And above it--

_Run!_

The command hit his brain with almost physical force. A will that was not his own took hold of his whole being, and he was running again, plowing his way through the sucking sand with strength summoned from a well of energy within his body that had never been there before.

Through the thin gla.s.site walls of his helmet he could hear the _thuk, thuk, thuk_ of his boots as they pounded somewhere below him, and there was another pounding, a deadly rhythmic bursting pressure in his chest.

And a whine in his ears....

The wind-strewn sand stretched flat and infinitely before him. Then leaped at him headlong and there was no horizon; there was only the sudden awful wrench of concussion, a tremor of pure sound which would, in denser atmosphere, have destroyed him with the inertia of his own body.

He could not move. Only cling to the s.h.i.+fting desert floor that rocked sickeningly beneath his outstretched body ... cling to it for dear life.

There was no thought, no understanding. Only a sensation which he could not comprehend, and the sure knowledge that none of this was real. Not real, but the end of survival nonetheless.

Pain, and seeing two bright objects transiting the darkness at which he looked; seeing something then between.

His brain began identifying. The darkness; sky. The bright objects; Diemos, Phobos.... And the something between--

It was a transparency of some sort; curved, or he would not have been able to detect it at all. A vaulted ceiling through which he could see....