"Beth!  The nearest shelter is back at Weisskopf--that's half an hour at top speed and I've got an advisory here of twenty minutes.  Tell me what  to do!"

But the first sleet of hard particles was coming in too hard to make out anything more.  A hand, his apparently, floated forward and flicked off the radio relay.  The voices in his head died.

The crackling static went on and on.  The truck sat motionless, half an hour from nowhere, invisible death sizzling and popping down through the cab roof.  He put his helmet and gloves on, doublechecked their seals, and unlatched the door.

It slammed open.  Pages from the op manual flew away, and a glove went tumbling gaily across the surface, chasing the pink fuzzy-dice that Eurydice had given him that last night in Sweden.  A handful of wheat biscuits in an open tin on the dash turned to powder and were gone, drawing the tin after them.  Explosive decompression.  He'd forgotten to depressurize.  Gunther froze in dismayed astonishment at having made so basic--so dangerous--a mistake.

Then he was on the surface, head tilted back, staring up at the sun.  It was angry with sunspots, and one enormous and unpredicted solar flare.

I'm going to die, he thought.

For a long, paralyzing instant, he tasted the chill certainty of that thought.  He was going to die.  He knew that for a fact, knew it more surely than he had ever known anything before.

In his mind, he could see Death sweeping across the lunar plain toward him.  Death was a black wall, featureless, that stretched to infinity in every direction.  It sliced the universe in half.  On this side were life, warmth, craters and flowers, dreams, mining robots, thought, everything that Gunther knew or could imagine.  On the other side ...  Something?   Nothing?  The wall gave no hint.  It was unreadable, enigmatic, absolute.  But it was bearing down on him.  It was so close now that he could almost reach out and touch it.  Soon it would be here.  He would pass through, and then he would know.