Part 3

"Joe was right. He was good for something after all."

Tenderly, he and Black Tom lifted Joe's dead body down from the tank, laid him gently on the floor.

"The only thing we forgot, Tom," Bairn said. "_Blood._"

Crimson still oozed slowly from Joe Wilding's cut wrists. There was a smile on his dead lips. For it was a man named Joe who was the first to reach the stars--and the roaring rockets had scattered his eternal life across the star trails.

End of Project Gutenberg's One Against the Stars, by Vaseleos Garson