318 light-years from Earth, on the planet XR-334, Malcolm Halleck, a planetary geologist, performs his daily chore of heading out into the wilderness, collecting samples, cataloguing them, and transmitting the results back to Central. However, despite being part of a two man team, Halleck has been on his own for the past eight months. His partner was injured in a rockslide and had to be planet-lifted off. Central told Halleck that his replacement would be with him shortly. But two months later he lost radio contact with Central and the transmitter has been silent ever since...

Now Halleck has started to receive radio signals but they are not from Central. In fact he's not sure if they're even real...