He was shaking.
After a time he said, "Rodney, Wass, it's dust, down there. Remember the wind? Air currents are moving it."
Rodney sat down on the metal flooring. For a long time he said nothing. Then—"It wasn't.... Why did you close the hatch then?"
Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him, otherwise. He said merely, "At first I wasn't sure myself."
Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun loosely, and his hand shook. "Then prove it. Open it again."
Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney and he, too, had drawn his gun.
The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it, outlined in the light of two torches.
For a little while he was alone.
Then—causing a gasp from Wass, a harsh expletive from Rodney—a tenuous, questing alien limb edged through the hatch, curling about Martin, sparkling in ten thousand separate particles in the torchlight, obscuring the dimly seen backdrop of geometrical processions of strange objects.