The wind mocked him, then and thereafter. It mocked his efforts to find the ship's log and continue it. It mocked his efforts to live.
He tried to fight back. He lay prone and relaxed because that took less oxygen. He lay in the suit and not in the tent because that took less oxygen. He ate and drank but once a day because that took less oxygen.
So he had run out of water while there were still some potassium oxides left to refresh his thrice-breathed air, some oxygen for the tent.
George Main wanted to live, knew he would die. And was enraged at the thought that he would die without having accomplished anything. He and his friends, and the pioneering scientists back of them, had put too much effort into trans-System travel to have it all come to nothing like this.
Stubbornly he noted in the log that he was now dehydrated to the point of occasional delirium. And that he hated the wind.
As if that wind had not already done enough, it now sought to destroy his last remaining moments of sanity. It brought a horde of odd shapes to haunt him.
The shapes literally rolled into the dust-filled metal cavity where he lay writing. The wind rolled them. But when they got into shelter—had rolled to one side or the other of the holes through which they'd come—the shapes began to move, slowly, under their own power.
They all looked alike. There were a couple of dozen, maybe—George counted ten and gave up because counting was too much like work. They were teardrops—eight-inch yellow teardrops with the point down. And each point rested on an extensible foot that looked like a blue starfish, about four inches across its seven points.
They came in, rolling along the ground as the wind took them, and then extended their stars from some hidden place and moved on them when out of the wind.
That is, they seemed to. But whether they were in the hull or in his mind, George was by no means sure.