Paul then tried the Z-wave. It was not dead, so far as Paul could tell. It did not crackle with cosmic static, but there was a faint hiss. Paul wondered about the connection to the station across the plain. They must have some sort of connection otherwise the flanged-up evidence would not ring true. Paul began to tune the Z-wave receiver, just partly in hope and partly for lack of something to do. "Damn!" he swore. "Grayson! Grayson! That you?" Paul blinked. Hearing things--? "Grayson! Paul Grayson! Is that you?" Paul grabbed the microphone like a drowning man clutching a straw. "Hello! Hello Neoterra. This is Paul Grayson marooned on Harrigan's Horror with a low air supply. I'm about two miles from the radio beac--" "Grayson! Forget it. I know where you are. This isn't Neoterra. This is your old friend Evans waiting around in space until you stop trying things. For all we know, you might be able to figure a way out. Take it easy, pal. Such energy takes a lot of air--and you haven't much left...." CHAPTER 12 Nine days had passed according to the Solar clock on Paul's instrument panel. Nine days with the air slowly becoming stale. It was beginning to smell a bit, now. Paul did not notice it particularly, but someone just in from a planetary atmosphere would say that the air reeked to high heaven. His senses were beginning to numb. This was not a fast death, but slow and sordid. Paul yawned constantly, and took deep heaving gulps of air only to try again. Paul fought sleep. He fought it because he knew that he might drift off to sleep never to awaken. But he had no recourse. Most of his time he spent a-sprawl on the cot in the instrument room because he had too little energy to be up and around and when he fought himself to get erect, there was nothing to do but to curse at the inert machinery. He had tried everything. He had considered everything, even up to and including the start of a diary in the hope that someday someone might find it. But it was a fruitless task. Sort of like putting a daily account on the bottom of a cave in the hope that someone, someday, might investigate the cave and find out what happened. He did not know the periodicity of Harrigan's Horror. But the sun--still a catalog number--was running lower along the horizon. The beacon had been placed near enough to the South Pole of rotation so that it could always look at the distant stars to and from which the radio beacons ran. This was a nice job of latitude selection regarding the plane of the planet's ecliptic and rotation for the Galactic Survey beams. But Paul was dully uninterested in facts. He slept more than he knew, and was awake much less than he believed. His dreams were vivid enough to make him believe that he was awake, excepting those that dealt with Nora Phillips and John Stacey, neither of whom could have been there.