He headed for the meteor shower of three days before, and found it after an hour of running across the featureless sands.
The area was small, which in itself was strange, for meteor showers cover miles of area, not square yards. The sands were pocked with small craters, and Paul looked at them until he found a crater of medium size where the rock was still showing. He hefted the stone from the sky and carried it to the sand-jeep. On his way back to the little buggy, he caught sight of a glitter less than fifty feet away.
He dropped the stone in the back of the jeep and strode over to see what could be glittering this brightly in Proxima's veritable sea of bland, yellow sand.
Then he stood dumbfounded, for the glitter came from the circular disc of glass, the eyepiece of a space suit, which was buried in the sand. A crater of irregular shape surrounded it, and the meteorite was lying in half-exposed view. Paul dropped into the crater and lifted the stone, to disclose a nauseous clot of brownish blood, the remnant of space suit, and contained in it, the remains of a man. Mostly buried by the impact, the man's body stood almost upright, the headpiece at ground level while the rest of the body was curved brokenly backwards down in the crater, driven into the sand instantly by the meteor.
Paul shrugged and removed the helmet.
The face was vaguely familiar. The man wore clothing under the suit but there was no sign of identification in it. The face bothered Paul, however. He believed he had seen it somewhere.
Not only that, but just exactly why any man possessed of sane mind would be on Proxima I (save Paul, who had business there) was mystery at its best.
Paul stood up and looked around the plain.
He caught another glitter, and got into his jeep to investigate. It was the semi-submerged spacecraft, and Paul wondered at it. It was smashed flat by a gigantic meteor, ruined beyond any hope of reconstruction. Paul tried to enter to inspect it. It had been too badly wrecked by the meteor.
Abandoning the spacecraft as a hopeless job for immediate identification, Paul went back to the lone victim. There was still something vaguely familiar about the man's face. The difference was not because the vacuum of Proxima had distorted the face, for the suit had been sealed at the break by the meteor and the sand and there was no distortion.