“Visible signal, Mac,” I said over the radio. “Tell your suit.”

That was all I could say. I know the profile of a pod, I’ve seen them from every angle. And the silhouette ahead of us looked wrong. It had a twisted, sideways cant, bulging towards the left. I increased pace, stumbling dangerously along smooth slabs and around jagged pinnacles, striding recklessly across a quivering deep abyss. Mac was following, ready to help me if I got in trouble — unless he was taking worse risks himself, which was certainly not beyond him. I could hear his breath, loud on the suit radio.

It was their pod. No doubt at all. And as I came closer I could see the long, gaping hole in one side. It takes a lot to smash a transfer pod beyond repair, but that one would never fly again. Inside it would be airless, lifeless, filled only with the choking dust that was Vandell’s only claim to an atmosphere.

And the people inside? Would Jan or Sven have thought to wear suits before descent? It would make a difference only to the appearance of the corpses. Even with suits, anything that could kill their signal beacon would kill them too.

I took my final step to the pod, stooped to peer in through the split in the side, and stopped breathing. Somewhere deep inside me, contrary to all logic, there still lived a faint ghost of hope. It died as I looked. Two figures lay side by side on the floor of the pod, neither of them moving.

I groaned, saw Mac coming to stand beside me, and switched on my helmet light for a better view or the interior. Then I straightened up so fast that my head banged hard on the pod’s tough metal.

They were both wearing suits, their helmets were touching — and as the light from outside penetrated the interior of the pod, they swung around in unison to face me. They were both rubbing at their suit faceplates with gloved hands, clearing a space in a thick layer of white dust there.

“Jan!” My shout must have blasted Mac rigid. “Sven! Mac, they’re alive!”

“Christ, Jeanie, I see that. Steady on, you’ll burst my eardrums.” He sounded as though he himself was going to burst, from sheer pleasure and relief.

We scrambled around to the main hatch of the pod and I tried to yank it open. It wouldn’t move. Mac lent a hand, and still nothing would budge — everything was too bent and battered. Back we went to the hole in the ship’s side, and found them trying to enlarge it enough to get out.

“Stand back,” I said. “Mac and I can cut that in a minute.”

Then I realized they couldn’t hear me or see me. Their faceplates were covered again with dust, and they kept leaning together to touch helmets.

“Mac! There’s something wrong with their suits.”

“Of course there is.” He sounded disgusted with my stupidity. “Radio’s not working — we already knew that. They’re communicating with each other by direct speech through the helmet contact. Vision units are done for, too — see, all they have are the faceplates, and the dust sticks and covers them unless they keep on clearing it. The whole atmosphere of this damned planet is nothing more than charged dust particles. Our suits are repelling them, or we’d see nothing at visible wavelengths. Here, let me in there.”

He stuck his head through the opening, grabbed the arm of Jan’s suit, and pulled us so that we were all four touching helmets. We could talk to each other.

And for that first ten minutes that’s what we did: talk, in a language that defies all logical analysis. I would call it the language of love, but that phrase has been used too often for another (and less powerful) emotional experience.

Then we enlarged the hole so they could climb out. At that point I thought that we had won, that our troubles and difficulties were all over. In fact, they were just starting.

Their pod was in even worse shape than it looked. The battering from flying boulders that had ruined the hull should have left intact the internal electronics, computers, and communications links, components with no moving parts that ought to withstand any amount of shaking and violent motion. But they were all dead. The pod was nothing but a lifeless chunk of metal and plastics. Worse still, all the computer systems in Jan and Sven’s suits had failed, too. They had no radios, no external vision systems — not even temperature controls. Only the purely mechanical components, like air supply and suit pressure, were still working.

I couldn’t imagine anything that could destroy the equipment so completely and leave Jan and Sven alive, but those questions would have to come later. For the moment our first priority was the return to the other pod. If I had thought it dangerous work coming, going back would be much worse. Jan and Sven were almost blind, they couldn’t step across chasms or walk along a thin slab of rock. Without radios, I couldn’t even tell them to back up if I decided we had to retrace part of our path.

We all four linked hands, to make a chain with Mac on the left-hand end and me on the right, and began a strange crab-like movement back in the direction of the other pod. I daren’t hurry, and it took hours. Four times I had to stop completely, while the ground beneath us went through exceptionally violent paroxysms of shaking and shuddering. We stood motionless, tightly gripping each other’s gloved hands. If it was scary for me, it must have been hell for Jan and Sven. Mac and I were their lifeline, if we lost contact they wouldn’t make twenty meters safely across the broken surface. While the shaking went on, I was picking up faint sounds in my radio. McAndrew and Wicklund had their helmets together, and Wicklund seemed to be doing all the talking. For five minutes I heard only occasional grunts from Mac through his throat mike.

“Right,” he said at last. “Were you able to pick up any of that, Jeanie? We have to get a move on. Go faster.”

“Faster? In these conditions? You’re crazy. I know it’s slow going, but we all have plenty of air. Let’s do it right, and get there in one piece.”

“It’s not air I’m worried about.” He was crowding up behind us, so that we were all bumping into each other. “We have to be in the pod and off the surface in less than an hour. Sven’s been tracking the surges of seismic activity and dust speed, ever since they landed and everything went to hell. There’s a bad one coming an hour and a half from now — and I mean bad. Worse than anything we’ve felt so far. A lot of the minor cycles we’ve been feeling since we came out on the surface will all be in phase. They’ll all add together.”

Worse than anything we had felt so far. What would it be like? It wasn’t easy to imagine. Nor was the cause — but something had taken Vandell’s smooth and quiet surface and crumpled it to a wild ruin in the few hours since the other pod had landed.

Against my instincts I began to take more risks, to climb over more jagged rocks and to walk along shelves that might tilt and slide under our weight. I think that at this point it was worse for McAndrew and me than for Sven and Jan. They could walk blind and trust us to keep them safe; but we had to keep our eyes wide open, and study all the dangers around us. I wanted to ask Mac a hundred questions, but I didn’t dare to focus his attention or mine on anything except the immediate task.

At our faster pace we were within a hundred meters of the pod in twenty minutes, with what looked like a clear path the rest of the way. That was when I heard a grunt and curse over the suit radio, and turned to see McAndrew sliding away to one side down a long scree of loose gravel. Last across, he had pushed Sven Wicklund to safety as the surface began to break. He fell, scrabbled at the ground, but couldn’t get hold of anything firm. He rolled once, then within seconds was lost from view behind a black jumble of boulders.