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....

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