I donned a suit and staggered, half dazed, out into the lunar night. A half-dozen men and women from the crew had survived the impact and they stood by the wreckage, faces under the plastic helmets turned skyward. They were one and all stunned and bleeding from the violence of the _Hound's_ end, but they looked neither back nor around them. Their eyes were filled with the insane glory of the drama being enacted in the sky. The _Arrow_ had returned. She lanced down out of the night like a spear of flame, vengeful and deadly. Straight into the mouth of the screaming guns she dove, death spilling from her tubes. She bathed the Moon Base in fire, searing the men within--Russian and American alike--into the brotherhood of death. Miraculously, she pulled up out of her encircling net of flame. We watched in openmouthed wonder as she reached with sobbing heart for the sky just once again--and then, failing, crippled and dying, she hung above the crater's rim, framed with deadly beams from below, but radiant in her own right--gleaming in the light of the sun. This was defeat. We knew it as we stood by the tangled pile of steelite that had been the _Hound_ and watched the _Arrow_ die. But nothing in this life that I have lived ever told me so grandly that the Wall Decade was ended--and our life of buccaneering with it--as the thing that happened next. The _Arrow's_ valve opened and a tiny figure stepped out--into space. I did not need to be told that Jaq Merril was coming to meet the men he had welded together against him. Lazily, unreally, the tiny shape twisted over and over as it fell, until at last it vanished amid the raw welter of craters and ridges beyond the razor wall of Clavius.... * * * * * I have told a true tale, though one that will not be believed. I have taken the Peacemaker of the histories and painted him _as he was_. But men are ashamed, and the chronicles of history must be rewritten to hide their weaknesses, Jaq Merril has become a legend, and the man that I knew is forgotten. Merril--pirate, fighter, grandiose dreamer. That was my captain. Not the colorless do-good creature of the legend. Merril fought for lust and greed, and these are the things that will one day take men to the stars. He knew this truth, of course, and that was the substance of his great dream. Because of it, there are no longer walls in space, and the men who united to fight the Peacemaker will one day rule the universe. Meanwhile, chroniclers will write lies about him, and Jaq Merril's laughter will echo in some ghostly Valhalla beyond the farthest star. THE END Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from _If: Worlds of Science Fiction_ January 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.