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. * * * * *