ets up then. This was for Hal Barlow. The isolation pressed
in, pressed him faster, throwing him crazily over the dust toward the
rocket. Then they'd know the truth, send up other rockets, ... not
this way, with no more sounds, voices, any moving thing. No way for a
man to die....

It wasn't death; it was the way of dying. No one should die this
way--so alone. Especially Barlow, who feared loneliness more than
anything else.

He fell. One foot slid into a crack filled with pumice dust fine as
powder. He hooked the big steel hooks on the ends of his arms at the
rock, and clung there, his helmet barely pushing up through the dust.
He struggled for a while, desperately with his mind filling with
visions of the rocket. He wanted to live now, make up for all the
living he'd missed for so long.

He looked around, still struggling. Light gravity, little weight, but
he was so weak now, and still the rocket wasn't in sight. He crawled
on his stomach, dragging the bulbous suit over the rock. He could get
around the rock. He had to. Out of sight, but so near, was the warm
human rocket.

He ran into the rock and collapsed with a long wet sigh. He gasped.
Pain throbbed damply over his chest. He moved ... just enough to turn
over on his back. He slid up a little so that he was sitting there
staring at the frigid, barren, naked emptiness of utter silence and
desolation. What had the man said? "_No man is alone who has learned
the secret of oneness with the world...?_"

He thought about the Brotherhood, seriously now, for the first time.
Many men before him had died for it. An entirely new approach to
society and the individual. Working from the inside out, there would
be more than a mere deflection of evil. There would be suppression at
the source, in the individual will.

An end of national idolatry that threatened the existence of
civilization. Man was superhuman in power and glory, subhuman in
morality. After the spiritual revolution, never again the monstrous
evils arising when remote abstractions like "nation" and "state" are
regarded as realities more concrete and significant than human beings.

And no man is an island unto himself....

Unity....

He looked up. He saw the Earth then.

It shone down upon him through the Lunar night, twenty times brighter
than moonlight. He felt warmth. There were faces in the shadows,
hopeful women's faces and the eager innocent faces of children who had
not yet learned hopelessness