Venus—we're on the edge of the greatest era of exploration and discovery the earth has ever known, Bart. We have the ships to take us to our own planets now, we need only the men with courage and strength enough to leave their homes and go. And with the new work on induced warp that Dillon's laboratories have been doing, it may not be long before we can go farther than our system—on to the stars. You belong out there, Bart—you don't belong anywhere, else. And against a challenge like that, no woman is worth it. Men like you can't stay, Bart."

And then I saw the old light coming back into his eyes, the light I knew I would see, the light that always appeared in his eyes when he talked about the stars. I knew the key was turned now, that he could never change, that he knew he had to go. "There's no end to the possibilities," he said softly. "There's simply no end."

He set down his coffee cup, and the light was still in his eyes. But there was something else in his eyes, too, that hadn't been there before. Call it pain, if you want, or disappointment. "I'll have to think, Ben. I'll just have to think. But thanks for making me think."

I drained my cup, and sat back with a sigh, and felt the music sing through me. I knew the answer, now. "You won't be sorry," I said.

The rest of the story is history, of course. Probably he never fully realized the part I had played in his decision. Possibly he wouldn't have cared. He went through Dillon's screening at the top of the list, and shipped on the little exploratory ship Dillon's Dream, and headed out for Mars, with a little crew around him, driving into the blackness of space as though he couldn't leave too soon. The landing was good, and the work began. What he did there everybody knows, the gruelling, dangerous work of opening the frontier, of exploring and mapping. Every child today has seen the pictures he made, and sent back, working on Mars until the first wave of colonists came, and then he was on his way again, to Venus, working in the dust and horrible wind to open it up for observation and study, working with a frenzied vitality, a fierce urgent unity of purpose that turned into legend around him as his crews came back. The staggering courage of the man, the fearlessness, the eagerness to be first, to push farther and farther into the limitless challenge of interplanetary exploration. Pictures came back, messages came back, and later the colonists came back, telling tales of the man that grew and expanded month after month. And then, amazingly, the Dillon Warp was perfected in the laboratory, and Bart Witton 

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