"Why should he? There's hardly enough gravity to pull him down; there's no wind to blow him down. There are no earthquakes on a planet as small as this." "How did he get there?" Mick shrugged his shoulders. It was a puzzle, certainly; but there were possible solutions. The first and most logical was that this fellow had exposed himself, rather than to die a lingering death from starvation or lack of oxygen. "Let's take a look at his quarters," Mick suggested. He dropped lightly to the ground and entered the lock. He quickly inspected the lock control apparatus, making sure that the outer doors would function properly. Then he closed the locks and opened the inner doors. The glass of Mick's space helmet frosted as warm air from the interior struck its surface. Wiping away the mist he stepped aside. * * * * * Standing in the center of the room, smiling at them, was an exact replica of the man they had seen on the ledge. But this one was alive! "Welcome to Dead Man's planet!" the faint human voice drifted to the ears of the men. "You may remove your helmets. The air here is pure and there is plenty of it." The man's greenish eyes drifted down over the figures of the human beings facing him. "But you needn't point your guns at me." The welcome was not as warm as the two spacemen might have expected from an exile on the asteroid. There was a note in the pale-faced man's voice that sounded false. It was not distrust that Mick felt, nor a sense of danger, for there was nothing to indicate that this lonely man intended to harm his visitors; but some subconscious reasoning in the spaceman's brain seemed to detect an uncanny sort of insincerity. Mick could not forget the grisly object on the ledge above the doorway. Why hadn't the dead man been buried? The pallid host watched the spacemen skin themselves of their airtight suits and sniff the warm, sweet air of the buried spaceship. "You're men," he said. "Men!" "My name's Michael Conner, a space pilot; this is Alf Rankin, co-pilot and engineer. We fused and blew a rocket on the earth-Jupiter orbit and we landed here to make repairs." The pallid man smiled. There was the cunning of the fox and the savage craft of a spider in his expression. "Call me Ghor," he said. Mick's eyes cruised over the pointed face. Ghor was a strange name. It wasn't terrestrial and it didn't sound like any of the Martian dialects. Ghor might be a criminal, preferring exile to a life in prison. "You're a strange man, Ghor," Mick said. "You present a mystery. Are you from Mars? How does it happen you live on this Godforsaken bit of rock?" "I was born here," Ghor said. "Oh!" There was an awkward pause after this unexpected answer. Mick's eyes unconsciously lifted toward the roof, above which stood the frozen human figure.