"The Hole Man" is told in the first person by a member of an expedition from earth to Mars. The narrator is important because he, and only he other than Lear, knows what Childrey and Lear said to one another before the accident (or was it?) that killed Childrey and doomed Mars: "One day Mars will be gone." The narrator knows how to spin out a yarn and how to wait until the last possible moment before explaining his mysterious assertion that Mars will disappear: "We study the alien base for what it can tell us, while the center of the world we stand on is slowly eaten away.

It's enough to give a man nightmares." His opening statements make the narrator's story seem to focus on why Mars is doomed, but in fact the process by which the planet is to be destroyed...