You've got to find him, he thought. You've got to find the man with the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.
The dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and about forty and he hated spacemen.
His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a part of Ben as sight in his eyes.
Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips spitting whiskey-slurred curses.
Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle from a corner of the gaping mouth.
You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a memory that has burned into your mind.
It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate. He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.
"Spacemen," he muttered, "are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you see's spacemen."
He was a neatly dressed civilian.