The lifeboat came gently to rest. The hatch swung open and he stepped out and walked a few paces up the beach. He turned and waited while the two spacemen who had guided the craft brought his chest out and carried it across the beach and to the corrugated-tin shack just at the edge of the trees. That shack had once been a space-radar relay station. Now the equipment it had held was long gone, the antenna mast taken down. But the shack still stood. It would be his home for a while. A long while. The two men returned to the lifeboat preparatory to leaving. And now the captain stood facing him, and the captain's face was a rigid mask. It seemed with an effort that the captain's right arm remained at his side, but that effort had been ordered. No salute. The captain's voice, too, was rigid with unemotion. "Number One ..." "Silence!" And then, less bitterly. "Come further from the boat before you again let your tongue run loose. Here." They had reached the shack. "You are right, Number ..." "No. I am no longer Number One. You must continue to think of me as _Mister_ Smith, your cousin, whom you brought here for the reasons you explained to the under-officers, before you surrender your ship. If you _think_ of me so, you will be less likely to slip in your speech." "There is nothing further I can do--Mister Smith?" "Nothing. Go now." "And I am ordered to surrender the--" "There are no orders. The war is over, lost. I would suggest thought as to what spaceport you put into. In some you may receive humane treatment. In others--" The captain nodded. "In others, there is great hatred. Yes. That is all?" "That is all. And, Captain, your running of the blockade, your securing of fuel _en route_, have constituted a deed of high valor. All I can give you in reward is my thanks. But now go. Goodbye." "Not goodbye," the captain blurted impulsively, "but _hasta la vista_, _auf Wiedersehen_, _until the day_ ... you will permit me, for the last time to address you and salute?" The man in the greatcoat shrugged. "As you will." Click of heels and a salute that once greeted the Caesars, and later the pseudo-Aryan of the 20th Century, and, but yesterday, he who was now known as _the last of the dictators_. "Farewell, Number One!" "Farewell," he answered emotionlessly. * * * * * Mr. Smith, a black dot on the dazzling white sand, watched the lifeboat disappear up into the blue, finally into the haze of the upper atmosphere of Venus. That eternal haze that would always be there to mock his failure and his bitter solitude. The slow days snarled by, and the sun shone dimly, and the _marigees_ screamed in the early dawn and all day and at sunset, and sometimes there were the six-legged _baroons_, monkey-like in the trees, that gibbered at him. And the rains came and went away again.