"Is—is anything broken?" she asked.
"Don't know. Help me up." Between them he managed to struggle to his feet. He winced. He said, "My name's Jonathan Fawkes. I'm a space pilot with Universal. What happened? I feel like I'd been poured out of a concrete mixer."
She pointed to the wreck of a small space freighter a dozen feet away. Its nose was buried in the turf, folded back like an accordion. It had burst open like a ripe watermelon. He was surprised that he had survived at all. He scratched his head. "I was running from Mars to Jupiter with a load of seed for the colonists."
"Oh!" said the girl, biting her lips. "Your co-pilot must be in the wreckage."
He shook his head. "No," he reassured her. "I left him on Mars. He had an attack of space sickness. I was all by myself; that was the trouble. I'd stay at the controls as long as I could, then lock her on her course and snatch a couple of hours' sleep. I can remember crawling into my bunk. The next thing I knew you were bending over me." He paused. "I guess the automatic deflectors slowed me up or I would have been a cinder by this time," he said.
The girl didn't reply. She continued to watch him, a faint enigmatic smile on her lips. Jonathan glanced away in embarrassment. He wished that pretty women didn't upset him so. He said nervously, "Where am I? I couldn't have slept all the way to Jupiter."
The girl shrugged her shoulders.
"I don't know."
"You don't know!" He almost forgot his self-consciousness in his surprise. His pale blue eyes returned to the landscape. A mile across the plain began a range of jagged foothills, which tossed upward higher and higher until they merged with the blue saw-edge of a chain of mountains. As he looked a puff of smoke belched from a truncated cone-shaped peak. A volcano. Otherwise there was no sign of life: just he and the strange yellow-headed girl alone in the center of that vast rolling prairie.
"I was going to explain," he heard her say. "We think that we are on an asteroid."