cracked under the strain. They had seen and endured too much. But Darrel Bond ... he was still young. He couldn't be cracking up now! Why he ... hell!

This was no hallucination! The fragrance of the black-haired girl's lips was still on his mouth. It was heady.

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

There! A thin streak of violet across the veins of his hand. Lipstick! It was unmistakable. A violet shade of lipstick. He put his tongue to the streak tentatively.

It was lipstick all right.

He rose to his feet and stared across the intervening space at the girl. She seemed to blend with the pale and rolling surrealist landscape of Neptune. His brain was reeling. This sort of thing just didn't happen. You land on an unexplored planet and, wham! a girl kisses you! No, despite the lipstick, it must be a dream.

And that walking backward. That settled it. People walked backward only in dreams.

Grumbling thickly, he reentered the open airlock. The thing to do now was repair the ship. Later, he would explore around a little and see what Neptune was like. If he recorded enough valuable information about the planet, maybe the Admiral would be lenient when he hauled him up before the mast for galavanting off with a Corporation ship.

Darrel hauled the wrecked plates outside the ship to work on them in the open. He could get things done faster out where there was more room to move around. The mysterious girl was still there, quietly watching his every action. He hunched deliberately over the delicate gravitation unit that bulged from the base of one plate. A hyper-thin vibrator rod had been cracked. But he could mend it.

He laid down his tools and paused in the work. Lazily, he lighted a Martian cigarette and looked toward the girl.

If she were an hallucination, why didn't she go away?

Instead, she rose and came toward him briskly—her jet-black hair contrasting vividly with her yellow, short-skirted tunic—walking backward.

Darrel scratched his head helplessly and watched as the girl, her back toward him, strode weirdly up to the ship. She turned about and smiled sadly.

"Lerrad, retal nruter liw I," she said. "Noos, on I, gniveel ra ooy."

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