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.