Just then, the rats paused. Sure enough, Ugh was coming. He was reeling. He had apparently made the rounds, as is the custom of spacemen, swilling vast quantities of airplane dope, and he was high as a kite. Brad glommed him glumly in the gloaming, with more than a glimmer of gloomy foreboding. It was wrong, he thought, all wrong. If only it hadn't been too late to turn back. But it wasn't. They hadn't even started yet. If anything, it was too early. There was no way out. He entered the spaceship with a Si. Si, whose whole name was Silas Mariner, shook his hand weakly, muttered: "Remember the _Albatross_!" and tottered out. It was an omen.... Presently, Brad and Ugh were blasting off. As the cigar-shaped vessel rose to the starry void, spacemen, their visages lined and tanned like cigars, held their cigars aloft in silent salute and gently flicked their ashes, while softly, a cigar band played "_Maracas, Why You No Love Me No More?_" Two days out, Brad summoned Ugh. "How fast are we going?" "Oh, say ... 30,000 miles an hour?" Brad calculated rapidly and put down his abacus. "At this rate it'll take us 14 years just to get out of our own lousy solar system!" he barked. "Faster!" Ugh said Yes, Sir, and vice versa. Then he upped the speed to 186,000 miles per second and came back and shyly told Brad. Brad said "Bah! We'll be 70 years reaching the Big Dipper! Faster!" "But _nothing_ can't _go_ any faster!" protested Ugh. "According to Einstein--" "To hell with Einstein!" roared Brad. "Is he paying your salary?" So they went faster. The ship sped onward--unless it was upward--to fulfill its Mission. Again and again Brad found himself wondering where he was going. The Mission was a real stiff. He knew only that since there was practically no life anywhere in the solar system, except for good, kind, old Earth--Earth had seen to that--anyone attacking Earth--or not doing so--was obviously somewhere in outer space! But here the trail ended. Courage, he told himself, courage! After all, was he not the grandson of Pierre Fromage, inventor of the rubberband motor? With a start, he realized he was not. His own heritage, while covered with peculiar glory, was a more tragic one--the spacemen's heritage. The Broadshoulders were brave, but things happened to them. His grandfather, a traffic officer, had chased a comet for speeding, and had, unfortunately, overtaken it. His father had been spared the fire, but one day, aboard his spaceship, someone spilled a glass of water. The gravity was off at the time, and the water just hung there in mid-air until Brad's father walked into it and drowned.