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.