Huw closes Marcus’s faceplate and signals to Giovanna, and together they carry the dead man up the slope, down the far side, and across the basin to the ship. It is not an easy task, despite Marcus’s slenderness and the slightly lessened gravitational pull. The dispiriting emanations of this planet claw at their souls, robbing them of will and strength. But somehow they manage. They load Marcus into his acceleration chair and slide into their own.

Giovanna says, “You’re really going to investigate some other site before we go back?”

“I really am, yes. Don’t you think you can handle it?”

“I think it’s a waste of time.”

“So do I,” Huw says. “But we’ve worked very hard to get ourselves here. If I don’t make one more attempt at seeing if we can cope with this world, I’m going to wonder for the rest of my life whether I was too hasty in leaving. Humor me, Giovanna. I can’t turn back this fast.”

“Even with Marcus sitting here next to us and—”

“Even with,” he says. As he speaks, he is busy requesting lift-off assistance from the drive intelligence. The drone probe works its way through its sealing maneuvers, the hatch swings closed, and the usual array of readouts begins to announce the little ship’s readiness for going airborne. Huw does not attempt to take direct command of the vessel himself; he is too drained by what has occurred here, and he wants simply to sink back in his acceleration chair and let things happen around him, at least for a little while.

They are in the air now. Heading eastward, flying at an altitude of a thousand kilometers, crossing a calm gray-green ocean with an almost waveless surface that has a curiously greasy look. Night begins to descend around them, and very quickly they are in darkness. This planet has no moon. The stars, against that pure black backdrop, are nearly as intense in their gleaming as they would be in space. Huw, studying the sky, tries to arrange the unfamiliar patterns into constellations. That one, he thinks, is something like a tree with huge feathery branches, and he traces another outline that strikes him as reminiscent of a dog’s head, and another that seems to be a warrior about to throw a spear. He tries to point these figures out to Giovanna, but she is unable to see them no matter how carefully he directs her to the key stars, and gradually Huw loses them himself in the general confusion of the bright cosmic clutter.

The probe is over land again. A greenish dawn is breaking. Huw assumes manual control and searches for a good place to bring them down.

This continent is one big desert, a sea of orange dunes. Perhaps it doesn’t radiate nightmare waves like the continent in the western hemisphere, but it doesn’t look like a very good bet for settlement all the same. From the air Huw sees nothing that might be a river, a lake, even a stream — just sand and more sand, and squat flat-topped hills separating one cluster of dunes from another, and some isolated patches of dismal scrubby vegetation. Still, he has come here for the purpose of finding out something particular about this side of the planet, and he intends to follow through on that intention.

Huw sets the probe down carefully in a windswept area where the dunes have been pushed aside, and begins the hatch-opening procedure. But already the wrongness of this world is manifesting itself once more upon them, here in the first instants of their second landfall. He can feel the icy, invisible skeletal fingers scrabbling at his brainstem again, the queasiness expanding in his gut, the conviction that a web of some constricting fabric is being woven around his heart.

There is a curse on this filthy place, he tells himself.

He glances over at Giovanna. She nods. She’s feeling it too.

“Let’s go outside anyway,” Huw says.

“What for?”

“To say that we did. Come on.”

Giovanna shrugs and releases herself from her acceleration chair and follows him out. As before, the waves of fear intensify as they make actual contact with the surface of the ground. Huw looks upward at the brightening morning sky. An unreasoning conviction begins to grow in him that there are winged creatures circling around up there, though he has not seen any form of animal life at all, airborne or otherwise, since their arrival on this world: huge gliding monsters overhead with sharp teeth and great curving black wings, he is sure of it, batlike beasts that even now are making ready to swoop down on them and wrap those dreadful wings around their faces.

There is nothing in the sky. No monsters. Not even a cloud.

He fears them, even so. He imagines that he can hear the slashing sound of their swift descent, the heavy rustling of those immense wings as they enfold him. He feels the dry, rough, rasping texture of them. Smells the parched, burned odor of them. His breath shortens and his heart pounds. He puts his hand to his throat. He is choking. He is definitely choking.

He takes it for a moment more. Then, suddenly, Huw pulls his faceplate open and fills his lungs with the air of this terrible planet.

It is cold, harsh, thin air, the kind of air that Mars would have, perhaps, if Mars had any air at all. There is a disagreeable medicinal undertaste to it, bitter stuff: some unfamiliar trace element, no doubt, present in a quantity larger than Huw is accustomed to getting in his air. But he sucks it in anyway in great sighing gusting intakes of breath.

Giovanna is looking at him worriedly. “Why are you doing that?” she asks.

Huw doesn’t want to say anything to her about airborne monsters, about huge rough-skinned wings clamping remorselessly down over his head to cut off his intake of air. He simply says, “I’ve come a long distance to get here. I want to breathe the air of another world before I leave.”

“And if breathing it is dangerous?”

“Marcus was breathing it,” Huw says. “It’s just air. Oxygen and nitrogen and CO₂and some other things. What danger can there be in that?”

“Marcus is dead now.”

“Not from breathing the air,” says Huw. But after a couple of further inhalations he fastens his faceplate again. His sampling of the atmosphere of Planet A leaves an unpleasant chemical aftertaste in his nostrils and throat, but he suspects that there’s little significance to that, if any: for all he knows, it’s mere imagination, just another of Planet A’s cheery psychic tricks, one more turn of the screw.

They are here to explore. So they dutifully walk around a little, fifty meters this way, thirty the other. Giovanna prods at the sandy soil and discovers a colony of shining, metallic-looking insects just below the surface, and they occupy her scientific curiosity for a minute or two.

But it is only too obvious that the same malaise of soul is afflicting them here as on the other continent. Huw keeps watching the sky for monsters; Giovanna is unable to focus her concentration very long on her investigations. The same fidgety fitfulness is afflicting them both, though neither has admitted it to the other yet. Whatever the effect is, it doesn’t seem to be a phenomenon confined to a single locality, not if two random landings have produced the same results, but must emanate from the core of this world to its entire surface.

Huw looks toward Giovanna. She is outwardly calm, but her face is pale, sweat-shiny. Evidently she, like him, has already learned some techniques for holding Planet A’s terrors at bay; but clearly it is as much of a full-time struggle for her as it is for him. A planet where you are always thirty seconds away from a wild shriek of horrible baseless fear is not a wise place to choose for mankind’s second home.

“It’s no good,” he says. “We might as well clear out of here.”

“Yes. We might as well.”

They return to the ship. Marcus, unsurprisingly, is right where they left him in his acceleration chair. To find him anywhere else would have been real occasion for shock, and yet Huw is unable to avoid wincing as he sees the strapped-in corpse lying there. Giovanna, coming in behind him, appears to avert her eyes from the sight of Marcus as she enters her chair.