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them, even to her husband: Ted couldn’t help that, it was his job. But what Steve most needed they couldn’t give him. She’d tried before the mission. She’d tried to provide some of the things he’d missed since his wife was killed: inviting him round for some of her home cooking, repairing his clothes, listening when the strain of the job was too much for him—all the feminine things that came so easily to her and made all the difference to a life. But now he was locked away from her while people like that absurd General Perry huffed and puffed about security. Poor Steve!
    Poor Steve stood outside in the garden looking in at her.

Mars was like that, only it hadn’t lasted. He’d watched the small blue star that was Earth, with its smaller, paler twin locked next to it, and he’d felt like an outcast for a while. But then the sheer immensity of the gulf that separated them from Earth began to tell. It began to represent an abdication from humanity. He grew silent and withdrawn from the others. Away from the ship he began to break the rules and encourage the others to do the same. He began to drift further away, lost in his private world. For it was a megalomania that had afflicted him. Something he’d had no training for, no warning about. It was exposure to the vastness and emptiness that had brought it on. And it was exhilarating, like being the first of creation. Like being God.
    There was nothing to engage the eye and mind in the monotony of the desert landscape. But up there in the deep blue twilight where the stars of the galaxy were strewn like a million flawless pearls. Ah! That was different.
    His heart and mind were always drawn further into space. It was like standing on the sea-shore looking out at an island. You must go there. And when you’d arrived and there was another island beyond, again you couldn’t rest until you’d journeyed there. And so on, out to the furthermost islands of space. Earth dwindled to insignificance in the thirst for conquest. They were the first of a new species that had turned its back on Earth. He felt new affinities stirring.
    That was how the misadventure had happened. They’d left the module that morning on routine exploration. As usual he’d separated from the others. He’d infected them with his indifference for sticking to the schedules. If the radio had been working it would have been different. But the umbilical cord with humanity had snapped. They took specimen bags and tools with them only for appearances.
    He’d wandered up on to one of the few rock masses that rose out of the desert. It was only two or three hundred feet high, but it took him a step nearer the edge so that he could spend the day looking out into the cold void.
    How long he’d been there he didn’t know. Time began not to matter. He’d seen a meteor drawn into the thin atmosphere of the planet and he followed the burning tail to its destruction. It had brought his gaze groundwards, and he suddenly became aware of a movement on the horizon. At first he thought it was a trick of the weak sunlight and as he stared the strain made him think it was his own eye, following the movement of its watery fluid. But it was growing quickly, as though the desert itself was being rolled up like a giant carpet.
    It was a dust storm sweeping towards him at an incredible speed.
    He panicked, driven by the fear of his nightmare when he’d lain in the module that first night and listened to the claws scraping on the hull. In giant gravity-free bounds he leapt down from the rocks, stumbling against their jagged surfaces, risking the precious skin of his space suit. But he could see the module nowhere and the storm was advancing in eerie silence across the red desert.
    The exertion was causing his helmet to steam up and his vision to blur. A last despairing glance over his shoulder and the sky, his universe, was obliterated by a vast red cloud.
    The outstretched fingers of the storm began to pluck at his