"Tom, you're sure your figures are right?" the other Guetschow twin asked. "Much as I hate to say it, yes. Only a few hundred miles and we're finished." Tom licked his puffed lips. It was quiet there in the cubby as the atomic motor drove the ship at tremendous speed through the void. "Can't we coast in?" Parman asked. "We've got tremendous acceleration." "But not enough," Bairn said, "with the moon's gravitation field to reckon with." All their hearts must have stopped then, when the steady thrum became a staccato beat. "This is it," Bairn said. The staccato turned to a broken rhythm, hesitated, and finally halted. "God," said Herd, the co-pilot apologetically, "if the moon weren't around to hold us back." But it was there, looming huge and ugly off the starboard side. Parman said: "I can feel it pulling." The strain made two or three of them giggle. Bairn said as if to a naughty child: "It isn't that strong, Ed." Bairn's hand moved to click off the firing lever when the motors suddenly broke into thrumming life. The inertia of new flight came to the ship again. * * * * * They made a frozen tableau, those men standing in the pilot's cubby. Ed Parman was the first to break the tableau. He slumped to the floor, and lay there, his shoulders shaking convulsively. "Herd," Bairn said suddenly, "Take over. Come on, Tom. Whatever did this is in the power room." "Joe?" Herd asked. "I don't know." The two of them fled, leaving behind them, Parman on his knees staring at the void, the others half-crying, half-laughing. Bairn and Black Tom Morrissey came into the power room. They stood awed at what they saw. Joe was there. Bairn said finally, voice as soft as the night wind over earth: "Joe was right. He was good for something after all." Tenderly, he and Black Tom lifted Joe's dead body down from the tank, laid him gently on the floor. "The only thing we forgot, Tom," Bairn said. "_Blood._" Crimson still oozed slowly from Joe Wilding's cut wrists. There was a smile on his dead lips. For it was a man named Joe who was the first to reach the stars--and the roaring rockets had scattered his eternal life across the star trails. End of Project Gutenberg's One Against the Stars, by Vaseleos Garson