Man Alone by Don Berry — Read

Harkins slept only lightly, turning restlessly in the large control chair. Finally the pain of his headache increased to the point he could no longer sleep at all, even lightly. Just before he wakened, he thought he heard a sound at once intolerably loud and somehow soothing. Which was impossible, of course.

Opening the viewport shutter a crack, he found the land outside lit ambiguously by the false dawn that was beginning to spread against the eastern hills.