Now his mind reviewed it, finding place after place where the scene broke down. All that light from that tiny moon? Well, maybe; how could he know, without being there? But that cable—why hadn’t he simply grabbed it and halted his fall? There was no question of his ability to do that; it was attached to him, so he could have circled it at its exit from the reel with his gloved hand, and clamped down, and held on.

With his weight only a fraction of its Earth amount, and the power of his arms, it would have been like catching a huge turkey someone threw to him. A jolt, but not impossible. Only the ambience of the dream had made that fall seem inevitable.

Yet a trifling detail bothered him most. Doug! the woman had called. That meant she knew him, though he could not draw her name from his memory. Not Mr. Quaid, not Douglas, but Doug, cried out with feeling. That feeling summoned a return feeling from him, even now that he was out of the dream, back in reality. She was important to him, more than important; she—

Then the rest of it clicked into place. How had he been able to hear her call—there in the near-vacuum of Mars’ atmosphere? They had not spoken throughout the dream, but there at the end the verisimilitude, the semblance of truth, had broken down.

The bright light at the conclusion—that was this light, the light of day on Earth, more intense than that of Mars. Not the brilliance of Heaven or the inferno of Hell encountered at his death, but the ordinary brightness of ordinary day when he overslept. That was a relief!

Yet that voice still tugged at him. That woman…