"You're leaving me here?" shrieked Meek.
"Why sure," the man said. "You wanted to see the Solar System, didn't you?"
They backed away from him, guns in hand. Frozen in terror, he watched them enter the ship, saw the port close. An instant later the ship roared away, the backwash of its tubes buffeting Meek to the ground.
He struggled to his feet, watching the blasting tubes until they were out of sight. Clumsily he stepped forward and then stopped. There was no place to go ... nothing to do.
Loneliness and fear swept over him in terrible waves of anguish. Fear that dwarfed any emotion he had ever felt. Fear of the ghostly shimmer of the peaks, fear of the shadow-blackened valley, fear of space and the mad, cold intensity of unwinking stars.
He fought for a grip on himself. It was fear such as this that drove men mad in space. He'd read about that, heard about it. Fear of the loneliness and the terrible depths of space ... fear of the indifference of endless miles of void, fear of the unknown that always lurked just at elbow distance.
"Meek," he told himself, "you should have stayed at home."
Dawn came shortly, but no such dawn as one would see on Earth. Just a gradual dimming of the stars, a gradual lifting of the blacker darkness as a larger star, the Sun, swung above the peaks.
The stars still shone, but a gray light filtered over the landscape, made the mountains solid things instead of ghostly shapes.
Jagged peaks loomed on one side of the plateau, fearsome depths on the other. A meteor thudded somewhere to his right and Meek shuddered. There was no sound of the impact but he could feel the vibrations of the blow as the whizzing mass struck the cliffs.