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planet.
    Damn that wind! It howled like a dozen wind machines, like a chorus of lost souls out of Dante’s Inferno . There was a curious illusion in the wind. It sounded as if, very far away, someone was calling his name.
    Andrew Carr! Andrew Carr!
    It was an illusion, of course. No one within three hundred miles of this place even knew he was here, except maybe the ghostly girl he had seen when the plane crashed. If she was actually within three hundred miles of this place. And of course he had no idea if she actually knew his name, or not. Damn the girl, anyway, if she even existed. Which he doubted.
    Carr stumbled and fell full length into the deepening snow. He started to rise, then thought, Oh, hell, what’s the use , and let himself fall forward again.
    Someone was calling his name.
    Andrew Carr! Come this way, quickly! I can show you the way to shelter, but more I cannot do. You must take your own way there .
    He heard himself say fretfully, against the dim voice that was like an echo inside his mind, “No. I’m too tired. I can’t go any farther.”
    “Carr! Raise your eyes and look at me!”
    Resentfully, shielding his eyes against the howling wind and the sharp needles of the snow, Andrew Carr braced himself with his palms and looked up. He already knew what he would see.
    It was the girl, of course.
    She wasn’t really there. How could she be there, wearing a thin blue gown that looked like a torn nightdress, barefoot, her hair not even blowing in the bitter snow-laden wind?
    He heard himself say aloud—and heard the words ripped by the wind from his mouth and carried away, so that the girl could not possibly have heard them from ten feet away, “What are you doing now? Are you really here? Where are you?”
    She said precisely, in that low-pitched voice which seemed always to carry just to his ear and not an inch farther, “I do not know where I am, or I would not be there, since it is nowhere I wish to be. The important thing is that I know where you are, and where the only place of safety is for you. Follow me, quickly! Get up, you fool, get up!”
    Carr stumbled to his feet, clutching his coat about him. She stood, it seemed, about eight feet ahead of him in the storm. She was still clad in the flimsy and torn nightdress, but although her bare feet and shoulders gleamed palely through the rents in the garment, she did not seem to be shivering at all.
    She beckoned—now that she knew she had his attention, it seemed, she would not waste any more effort trying to make herself heard—and began to walk lightly across the snow. Her feet, he noticed with a weird sense of unreality, were not quite touching the ground. Yeah, that figures, if she’s a ghost .
    Head down, he stumbled after the retreating figure of the girl. The wind tore at his coat, sent it flapping out wildly behind him. His shoes were thick, half-frozen lumps of wet snow, and his hair and the stubble of beard were icy streaks of roughness against his face. Now that the snow had obscured the ground to even whiteness, covering the lumps and shadows, two or three times he tripped over some hidden root or unseen chuckhole, and measured his length on the ground; but each time he struggled up and followed the shadow ahead of him. She had saved his life once before. She must know what she’s doing.
    It seemed a very long time that he floundered and stumbled in the snow, although he thought afterward that it was probably not more than three-quarters of an hour, before he blundered full into what felt like a brick wall. He put out his hand, incredulous.
    It was a brick wall. Or, anyway, it felt like one. It felt like the side of a building, and feeling about a little, he found a door which was made of placed wood, worn smooth, and fastened with stiff leather straps, hauled through a rough-cut wooden latch, and knotted. It took him some time to tease the wet leather knot apart, and he finally had to take off his gloves and fumble with stiff bare