power. He was falling at a crazy
angle and the desert was rushing 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 titanic 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 ship 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 glassite 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 shifting 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