"Horrible", breathed Otaga. "Look at it. There's nothing here for us. I've seen cheerier neutron stars."
"But not flatter ones, eh, Diane?" laughed McFee. "I don't know, I kinda like the place. Look at the clouds, the way they, you know, sort of roil."
"Roil? What kind of word is that?" Otaga looked confused. This was not the sort of comment she'd expected from McFee, whose vocabulary normally seemed to consist of about fifty engineering terms and three swear words. "Anyway, it looks like Peniakov's going to have a quiet time."
"Why's that, Diane?" responded the ecologist.
"The whole place must be sterile, Sergei. High temperatures, toxic fumes in the atmosphere, and this black stuff all over the"
"All over the what?" asked Sergei testily. "Diane, could you please do me the courtesy of finishing your sentences?"
"Diane? Where are you?" There was a note of panic in McFee's voice. "Captain, she was standing right here a moment ago, then there was some kind of flash and she vanished!"
"McFee, get back in here now", rapped Sorensen. "Peniakov, fire up the surveillance systems and give me a ten kilometre scan. I want to see anything that's out there." The airlock hissed again. "Kevin, put on the helmet, I want a full memory scan of the time you were out there." McFee placed the neuroscanner on his head, closed his eyes, and winced as the electronic stimulants flooded his memory cells. In a few moments, the vidscreen was playing back his memories in slow motion.
At first, there was just blackness, which resolved itself into black clouds and blacker ground. "It takes a moment for your eyesight to adjust", commented McFee. For a few minutes there was Otaga, moving slowly around the field of view. Then something blurred the screen. "Freeze frame", ordered Sorensen. "Step and hold". But even at the finest temporal resolution, there was nothing but a silver blur for the merest instant. And when it had gone, so had Otaga. Nothing was left but a small white disc on the dark surface of the planet.