Part 2

As Joshua Thorn, and as Man. He would not let Man die yet. Not out here. Not in the cold dark, alone. Somehow, Thorn thought, Man had earned a better way, a better place to die....

But of course it was silly to think that Man should ever die, that he _could_ ever die....

Ridiculous.

Baloney. Oh, you could kill a lot of people, certainly. Sure. But the whole race of Man--nuts to the philosophers! The only thing they knew how to do was think!

He worked methodically, ascertaining first that at the present point in her orbital swing, Venus, approaching as she was from aphelion, would be in close enough proximity as she passed by to be met within the time limit set by his remaining store of food and oxygen. And he ascertained secondly that he had sufficient "emergency" fuel (and this, he assumed, might be classified as an emergency of sorts?) to blast him out of orbit and into Earth's wake with barely sufficient speed to assure him of not falling back. If the computers weren't lying, there'd even be enough after that to warp him into the gradual, drifting arc that would intercept Venus in her path around the Sun, and then--perhaps enough to effect landing. Barely, if at all. His taut mouth twitched in a humorless little smile. What an irony to actually succeed--to make it all the way, across the millions of miles of Space, first human in history to accomplish it--and then, maybe one or two hundred feet above surface, to have the final drop of fuel run out....

So ... what was there to lose but the race of Man.... And that anyway, eventually. Thirty-five more years (if he were lucky; he smiled again) appended to--how many? Half a million?

But half a million years was only a nervous twitch on the skin of Time. A spark in an eternal, all-consuming fire; a spark that died even as it flared its little second and then crumbled into ashes.

* * * * *

He smiled a grim little smile, and made a note of the date; it was 1800 hours, October 21. He did not even glance at the pale-blue thing that rolled and shimmered grotesquely a scant thousand miles on his left. Be damned to you! But you are damned already. So good-bye.

His fingers finished the business of tightening the heavy buckle of his seat-belt, and then they punched the red firing-studs, and Vanguard-I broke her bondage.

The ferroelectric brains of the computers considered silently; acted.

The organic brain of the man hazed red, hazed darkly, and trusted, for it was powerless to do more save fight a primal struggle for consciousness. It could not regard the situation. It could not think: I am the first human being to fly Space. It could not think, of all the things that all the humans in all of history have ever done, I alone have done this.

Roll the drums for Agamemnon, Roll the drums for Hercules!

Roll the drums for Caesar, Alexander, for Amenhotep, Rameses ... drum the drums for Khan, for Suleiman, for Plato, Aristides--drum your drums for York and Tudor, Bacon, Michelangelo.... For Austerlitz. For Yorktown. Chickamauga, Ypres, and Anzio....

Roll the drums. Roll the drums for me....

* * * * *

Motors off.

Click-hum, computers....

Silently.

Wheel your eternal wheeling, stars.

Darkly.

Cold.

* * * * *

The screens showed white, thick white, and the fuel-pumps disgorged the remainder of Vanguard I's life-blood into the roaring combustion chambers. The muted complaining of heavy atmosphere keened up the scale to a banshee's lament and sweat poured from Josh Thorn's half-nude body as his tiny metal cell grew stifling.

Power--how much power to keep from becoming a vagrant meteorite in Venus' milky skies? From flaring, white-hot, and falling ... a cinder from nowhere, with nowhere to go, the last of Earth's ashes....

One hundred miles.

Fifty. Thirty. Twelve....

Cooler, now. He shivered in 105 degrees Fahrenheit, shivered in 99, in 87.... His sweat was cold.

Ten thousand feet! Slowing, slowing, a century of time to drop to nine thousand, ease off the power, eight thousand, steady; fuel, barely, six thousand, steady.... Steady.

Watch your screens! Green. Brown, yellow, blue-veined green; low-rolling magenta mountains westward, cloud-shadows rippling, mingling with tenuous wisps of steam ... steam from the jungles of tall forest....

One thousand feet. No sign of mobile life on this planet, in this valley into which Vanguard-I lowered. But all sign--all sign, indeed, of the rich lushness that would support it, embrace it, hold it close like a long-denied lover....

Thorn sweated again--hot sweat, now--at his scanners, his control panel. Temperature again hovering past 100, but there was no time to notice or to feel. One hundred feet ... gently....

And then Vanguard-I was down, and at rest.

Josh Thorn hesitated. Baggy-Drawers? Or not? Beneath the white, tenuous outer atmospheric shell of methane and ammonia, what? Air he could breathe? Or poison that would strangle him--

He swung the inner air-lock open.

If poison, then death would be but a matter of days; the bubble of Made-in-U.S.A. atmosphere that he'd brought thirty million miles across Space had supplied him for the nearly four months the Journey had taken. It had done its job, he could demand no more than that. Two weeks more, at best, and it would be spent forever.

Two weeks, thirty-five years, five thousand centuries--

He swung the outer air-lock open.

And breathed. And breathed. And breathed deeply again.

Joshua Thorn wanted to cry. There was a hurt in his throat, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to laugh great peals of laughter even as the unchecked salt tears streamed across the deep valleys of his cheeks.

He walked, he ran. He stopped, he turned his face to the sky, he spread his arms wide and let the great bellows of laughter roll from his lips in the lusty prayer of thanks that only the living who are full with life and amid the teeming fullness of life can know.

Thank you, God. Thank you God. Thank you....

(For this little while more, for this little while more for the race of Man; I am the last of Man, You know--)

He prayed thank you, but he did not pray for more, because this was already more than he deserved; the Almighty had been merciful, compassionate and merciful, and he could not ask for more, in no way dared ask--

The thunder seemed straight above him.

The sound of his own laughter had drowned it out at first, and then the two had mingled, and then as he stood gasping for new breath, as his hoarse voice rested, he heard it--welling as if from a great heavy throat, and now rising to a baleful cry, then falling--falling gently, and now a new thunder to drown it, a mightier thunder than the first.

Joshua Thorn stood transfixed as he watched the gleaming bullet-shape descend its pillar of fire. It could have been twin to Vanguard-I. It was descending--it was--_maneuvering_ to be near him!

From somewhere far back in his brain the words formed again, _and Mrs. Grundy here's dirt for you--you may have a new neighbor in your block but not like you at all--probably a world between you--don't take any wooden nickels...._

But Daddy-o could never know, would never comprehend--

He was running, stumbling, falling, running again toward the spot where the red-starred satellite of the Enemy (Enemy, what a madman's word now!) would land.

Running like a child, running like an idiot, arms waving, mouth laughing, throat shouting--

Thank you, oh _Thank_ you God....

He was within twenty yards of the craft when its outer lock opened. Fifteen when the uniformed figure who stepped out caught sight and sound of him, ten when the rifle was aimed at him, five before he could comprehend the mindless meaning of it--

_But we are the only two human beings left!_ his brain whimpered....

_All of the Enemy must die!_ a remembering part of his mind intoned.... But someone had trained the Enemy, too.

The scarlet insigne emblazoned on the streamlined metal shell seemed on fire in the filtered Venusian sunlight.

Thorn's plunging hands grabbed the muzzle of the weapon even as it fired, wrenched it aside without feeling the hurt where his left earlobe had been.

"Great God, you _imbecile_--"

Twisting the weapon, struggling, trigger-finger constricting to fire again, a final, sudden twist, the finger wrenched against the trigger even as the butt was swinging upward, the muzzle swinging down....

The muffled explosion.

The gaping, oozing hole in the Enemy's breast.

Joshua Thorn looked down at the crumpled figure, watched as the slow-moving shadow of a cloud eddied across it.

He tried to sob, for he could not pray again.

He turned. Back toward Vanguard-I. If only he could cry.

Behind him, the Enemy lay dead. All, now, all of the Enemy ... was dead.

Her body would soon be turning cold.