"Name?" said the machine.
The man pointed at Smith, shook with silent laughter. The back of Smith's head, which could not properly be called bald because he had never had any hair on it, was very red.
"Name's Jorak."
"Planet?" demanded the fully neuter machine.
There was the red star, a monstrous blotch of crimson swollen and brooding on the horizon and filling a quarter of the sky. There was the fleck of white high up near the top of the red giant, its white-dwarf companion in transit. These were the high jagged crags, falling off suddenly to the sundered, frothy sea with its blood-red sun-track fading to pink and finally to gray far away on either side.
Smith watched the waves break far below him, and he almost stumbled when someone tapped his shoulder.
"That was mean of the man named Jorak." She might have been a woman of Earth, except that she was too thin, cast in a too-delicate mould. Yet beautiful.
Smith shrugged, felt the heat rise to his face and knew that he must have looked like a mirror for the red sun.
"Is that really a blush, Smith? Are you blushing?"