Slowly, exhaustedly, he came back to consciousness. His head ached; his tongue was thick. For a moment he lay quietly, trying to remember.
Dream? Arnsen cursed, threw his blankets aside, and sprang from the bunk.
O'Brien was gone. Tex Hastings was gone. Two space-suits had vanished from their racks.
Arnsen's face twisted into a savage mask. He knew, now, what had been so wrong about his vision of the night. The man he had glimpsed at the port had been outside the ship. Doug?
Or Hastings. It did not matter. Both men were gone. He was alone, on the mystery world.
Arnsen set his jaw, gulped caffeine tablets to clear his head, and wrenched a space-suit from its hooks. He donned it, realizing that sunlight once more was pouring down from the distant sun.
Soon he was ready. He went out of the ship, climbed atop it, and stared around. Nothing. The bleak, light-and-shadow pattern of the asteroid stretched to the sharply curving horizon all around. There was nothing else.
Nor were there tracks in the iron-hard slag. He would have to search at random, by pure guesswork. In the low gravity his leap to the ground scarcely jarred him. He gripped the billy at his left and moved forward, toward a high pinnacle in the distance.
He found nothing.