Here in this terminal hut,

he began to piece together some sort of existence. Inside the hut he found a set of psychological tests, out of curiosity he ran them on himself. Although he had no means of checking them, his answers seemed to establish an identity. He went on to forage, and came back to the hut with some documents and a coke bottle.

At times when Xero approached the forlorn group sitting on the embankment, his shadows formed bizarre patterns on the concrete, transcripts of cryptic formulae and insoluble dreams. These ideograms, like the heiroglyphs of a race of blind seers, remained on the grey concrete after Xero had gone, the detritus of this terrifying psychic totem.

To begin with she wants to spend all her time writing poems on the damaged typewriter. Later, when not writing the poems, she wanders away to an old solar energy device and loses herself in the maze of mirrors.

All sorts of rubbish is lying in the sand: a typewriter with half the keys missing (he picks out fragmentary sentences, sometimes these seem to mean something), a smashed neurosurgical unit (he pockets a handful of leucotomes, useful for self-defence). Then he cuts his foot on the coke bottle, and spends several feverish days in the hut. Luckily he finds a drill for trainee astronauts, half of an 80 hour sequence.