So I looked. And to look was to act. I cut in my intercommunicating unit and bawled a stop hypo order to Chief Lester in the engine room below. Bartlett was right. There was a single, bulger-clad figure sprawled on the craggy rock of a tiny asteroid hurtling beneath us. A man who lay there quietly, did not rise, did not wave, gave no sign of noticing our approach even when I dropped the _Antigone_ down toward the spatial island. Bartlett, peering through the duplicate lens, said, "Dead, Brait. He must have cracked up. He's not moving." But there was no wrecked spaceship anywhere around. I said, "We'll know in a few minutes." And then the Skipper burst into the bridge, startled and curious. "Something haywire, boys? Here, I'll take over." He was a good man, Cap McNeally. A hardened spacehound, canny and wise to the ways of the void, always on deck in moments of emergency. That's why the IPS, the Corporation for which we work, had placed him in command of the _Antigone_, finest and fastest ship in the fleet. But I calmed his rotors. "Everything O.Q., sir," I told him. "We're standing by to take on a space-wrecked sailor. I think." My guess was right. A few minutes later we threw out a grapple, space-anchored the _Aunty_, and a rescue party landed on the asteroid. They brought back with them a sad looking specimen of the genus _Homo sapiens_. His cheeks were drained and sunken beneath a bristling, unkempt beard; his skin was blistered frightfully from long exposure to solars and cosmics; his limbs were so feeble that he couldn't walk unaided. He had to be carried. Someone unscrewed his face-port for him. He drew a long, deep breath of the pure _Antigone_ air. His wan eyes lighted dimly and he spoke in a voice that was a thin husk of sound. "Thank you, gentlemen. I had hoped that at last I might--But you meant well, I suppose." Which was, I thought at the time, a damned strange speech of gratitude. But I had no time to answer. For his knees suddenly buckled beneath him, his eyes closed. Had it not been for the friendly hands that supported him, he would have pitched forward on his face. Cap McNeally snapped, "Sick-bay! Snap it up, you lubbers! The man's in bad shape. Out on his feet, cold!" Sparks whispered, "Gosh, he looks like a corpus!" as the sailors bore our unexpected passenger away. I stared at him disgustedly. "Corpse." I said. "Huh?" said Sparks. "Corpse!" I repeated. "Corpse!" "You," suggested Sparks, "oughta take somethin' for that indigestion, Lootenant. My sister had it. It made her a physical reek." It's against the rules for a Second Mate to punch a radioman. So I kicked him. There are limits. * * * * * That was our first meeting with the mysterious Paul Moran. We didn't know his name then, of course. We learned that several days later. After Doc Jurnegan, our medico, had coaxed, bulldozed and sulfanilamided him back off the brink of the dark and nasty.