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.

At nights there were drums in the distance. Not the martial roll of
marching, nor yet a threatening note of savage hate. Just drums, many
miles away, throbbing rhythm for native dances or exorcising, perhaps,
the forest-night demons. He assumed these Venusians had their
superstitions, all other races had. There was no threat, for him, in
that throbbing that was like the beating of the jungle's heart.

Mr. Smith knew that, for although his choice of destinations had been a
hasty choice, yet there had been time for him to read the available
reports. The natives were harmless and friendly. A Terran missionary had
lived among them some time ago--before the outbreak of the war. They
were a simple, weak race. They seldom went far from their villages; the
space-radar operator who had once occupied the shack reported that he
had never seen one of them.

So, there would be no difficulty in avoiding the natives, nor danger if
he did encounter them.

Nothing to worry about, except the bitterness.

Not the bitterness of regret, but of defeat. Defeat at the hands of the
defeated. The damned Martians who came back after he had driven them
halfway across their damned arid planet. The Jupiter Satellite
Confederation landing endlessly on the home planet, sending their vast
armadas of spacecraft daily and nightly to turn his mighty cities into
dust. I