But there was nobody.
Except him. So, it followed: therefore--ergo: logically, if there was
nobody, and if....
God, it was dark.
God, it was quiet.
And if....
If you laugh you'll go crazy.
If you don't laugh, if you don't laugh, if you--hell, only one dose
of barbiturate left in the First Aid stores ... big thing, hard to
swallow ... and if there's nobody left, then....
Sleep.
* * * * *
He hadn't touched the UHF in three months, but he'd left it on
regardless of the power drain just in case.
He had divided the hours off into sleeping and eating periods, and he
had just slept, and just eaten, and he'd shaved, and put on a fresh
uniform. He had knotted the tie perfectly; his collar insignia were
shined and pinned in place without a single wrinkle.
He had it figured out.
He could die of oxygen, if not food, starvation in five more months,
three and one-half more days. And that would be the end of it.
The hell it would! Who the hell did they think they were to do this to
him....
But he had his computers. He had his reference-tapes. He had his
refractor and his scanners, and his star-charts, and his store of fuel
for orbital correction (ninety percent of which remained, because it
had been an almost perfect shot) and he had his brains.
If you threw a stone off the rear of a moving train at a speed _less_
than the train's speed forward, the stone would of course leave the
train, but in relation to the ground would still be travelling in the
train's direction.
If you threw a satellite away from its path around Earth and directly
into Earth's wake, but at a speed less than Earth's forward speed
in its orbit, the satellite would break free, but would continue in
Earth's orbital direction. And then with a brief side-blast, you could
warp into an orbit around the Sun all your own, or--into that of the
planet Venus, if you chose....
And beneath that eternal shell of cloud--who knew?
He had his computers. He had his reference-tapes. He had his refractor
and his scanners, and his star-charts and his precious store of fuel.
(Three-score years and ten, the Good Book said. Better than five
months. Better than sitting and waiting. So he would fail--no worse
than what was Below.) And he had his brains.
* * * * *
He worked methodically. He drew schedules: four hours of work, one for
eating and relaxation; five hours more of work, and another for food
and rest; six hours more of work, then seven for sleep, and then the
cycle began again. By making a rhythm of it, he thought, rather than a
program of perfectly equal work-periods, he would avoid monotony. With
monotony would come despair, and with despair.... Despair of course
would kill him.
And there was the thing in him that would not be killed; a thing that
had been rooted as deep within his kind as Life itself, since the first
Man had shambled erect on the face of the still-steaming Earth. He
would survive.
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.