When the others had secured their gear, he gave the signal to return to Bandit. They struck out, trudging through the blackness in single file, following a serpentine path between the occasional rills and knolls scattered between the two ships. Crag swung his arms in an effort to keep warm. Tiny needles of pain stabbed at his hands and feet, and the cold in his lungs was an agony. Even in the darkness the path between the rockets had become a familiar thing. Despite the discomfort and weariness he rather liked the long trek between the rockets. It gave him time to think and plan, a time when nothing was demanded of him except that he follow a reasonably straight course. There was no warhead, no East World menace, no Gotch. There was only the blackness and the solitude of Crater Arzachel. He even liked the blackness of the lunar night, despite its attendant cold. The mantle of darkness hid the crater's ugliness, erasing its menacing profile and softening its features. He turned his eyes skyward as he walked. The earth was huge, many times the size of the full moon as seen from its mother planet, yet it seemed fragile, delicate, a pale ethereal wanderer of the heavens. Crag did not think of himself as an imaginative man. Yet when he beheld the earth something stirred deep within him. The earth became not a thing of rock and sea water and air, but a living being. He thought of Earth as _she_. At times she was a ghost treading among the stars, a waif lost in the immensity of the universe. And at times she was a wanton woman, walking in solitary splendor, her head high and proud. The stars were her lovers. Crag walked through the night, head up, wondering if ever again he would answer her call. He had almost reached Bandit when Nagel's voice broke excitedly into his earphones. "Something's wrong with Prochaska!" Crag stopped in his tracks, gripped by a sudden fear. "What?" "He was somewhere ahead of me. I just caught up to him...." "What's wrong with him?" Crag snapped irritably. Damn, wouldn't the man stop beating around the bush? "He's collapsed." "Coming," Crag said. He hurried back through the darkness, cursing himself for having let the party get strung out. "Too late, Commander." It was Richter's voice. "His suit's deflated. Must have been a meteorite strike." "Stay there," Crag ordered. "Larkwell...?" "I'm backtracking too...." They were all there when he arrived, gathered around Prochaska's huddled form. The yellow lights of their torches pinned his body against the ashy plain. Larkwell, on his knees, was running his hands over the electronic chief's body. Crag dropped to his side. "Here it is!"