"Mebbe you better look, Mr. Brait," he said. "If Russ says there's a man there, then there's a man there."
So I looked. And to look was to act. I cut in my intercommunicating unit and bawled a stop hypo order to Chief Lester in the engine room below. Bartlett was right. There was a single, bulger-clad figure sprawled on the craggy rock of a tiny asteroid hurtling beneath us. A man who lay there quietly, did not rise, did not wave, gave no sign of noticing our approach even when I dropped the Antigone down toward the spatial island.
Bartlett, peering through the duplicate lens, said, "Dead, Brait. He must have cracked up. He's not moving."
But there was no wrecked spaceship anywhere around. I said, "We'll know in a few minutes." And then the Skipper burst into the bridge, startled and curious. "Something haywire, boys? Here, I'll take over."
He was a good man, Cap McNeally. A hardened spacehound, canny and wise to the ways of the void, always on deck in moments of emergency. That's why the IPS, the Corporation for which we work, had placed him in command of the Antigone, finest and fastest ship in the fleet.
But I calmed his rotors. "Everything O.Q., sir," I told him. "We're standing by to take on a space-wrecked sailor. I think."
My guess was right. A few minutes later we threw out a grapple, space-anchored the Aunty, and a rescue party landed on the asteroid. They brought back with them a sad looking specimen of the genus Homo sapiens. His cheeks were drained and sunken beneath a bristling, unkempt beard; his skin was blistered frightfully from long exposure to solars and cosmics; his limbs were so feeble that he couldn't walk unaided. He had to be carried.
