"But I love her, Ben—"
"And she'll tear your heart out for it! You don't belong down here, Bart. You belong with Dillon. You have the mind, the build, the potential that Dillon needs. Think of it! Out of all the thousands who want to go to space, you have the chance. You'll get to Mars, you'll work to open the frontier, on Mars, on Venus—we're on the edge of the greatest era of exploration and discovery the earth has ever known, Bart. We have the ships to take us to our own planets now, we need only the men with courage and strength enough to leave their homes and go. And with the new work on induced warp that Dillon's laboratories have been doing, it may not be long before we can go farther than our system—on to the stars. You belong out there, Bart—you don't belong anywhere, else. And against a challenge like that, no woman is worth it. Men like you can't stay, Bart."
And then I saw the old light coming back into his eyes, the light I knew I would see, the light that always appeared in his eyes when he talked about the stars. I knew the key was turned now, that he could never change, that he knew he had to go. "There's no end to the possibilities," he said softly. "There's simply no end."
He set down his coffee cup, and the light was still in his eyes. But there was something else in his eyes, too, that hadn't been there before. Call it pain, if you want, or disappointment. "I'll have to think, Ben. I'll just have to think. But thanks for making me think."
I drained my cup, and sat back with a sigh, and felt the music sing through me. I knew the answer, now. "You won't be sorry," I said.
The rest of the story is history, of course. Probably he never fully realized the part I had played in his decision. Possibly he wouldn't have cared. He went through Dillon's screening at the top of the list, and shipped on the little exploratory ship Dillon's Dream, and headed out for Mars, with a little crew around him, driving into the blackness of space as though he couldn't leave too soon. The landing was good, and the work began. What he did there everybody knows, the gruelling, dangerous work of opening the frontier, of exploring and mapping. Every child today has seen the pictures he made, and sent back, working on Mars until the first wave of colonists came, and then he was on his way again, to Venus, working in the dust and horrible wind to open it up for observation and study, working with a frenzied vitality, a fierce urgent unity of purpose that turned into legend around him as his crews came back. The staggering courage of the man, the fearlessness, the eagerness to be first, to push farther and farther into the limitless challenge of interplanetary exploration. Pictures came back, messages came back, and later the colonists came back, telling tales of the man that grew and expanded month after month. And then, amazingly, the Dillon Warp was perfected in the laboratory, and Bart Witton was the first to petition for a ship, waiting eagerly for word from the home offices that he could command the first ship to make a star-jump. The world listened, and cheered, never quite understanding why, with all the fame, he never returned to the planet from which he came, but at every chance turned his back on quiet Earth, and his face toward the stormy stars—
So the Star-jump Station went up under his direction, the most colossal task ever undertaken in space, prelude to another infinitely more colossal task, the establishment of a Warp receiver big enough to handle a ship. Bart was the man the eyes of the world were watching when he closed the last port on the new little ship, waved a rakish farewell to the engineers and friends crowded near the ship, and then, with a burst of brilliant purple, threw in the Warp, and flashed into the hyperspace men had dreamed of but never before seen, jumping for the stars—
He didn't make it, of course. The ship was an impossible, audacious experiment, he didn't really have a chance. They brought him back, his body wrenched and broken from the shock, the little ship torn almost into ribbons. And from the wreckage they found the flaw, the vital information to make safe Warp passage possible. They brought his body back to Star-jump Station, and placed it with reverence in the pitted little ship with which he had started his fabulous career. They knew that the brilliant life was gone, like the last ashes of a dying nova. And they knew that he had lead the way to the greatest era in the history of Man—
I knew the whole story, of course. I knew the force that drove him, I knew why he never came home. I knew the truth of the last night he had seen Marny, the bitterness in his eyes and voice as he left. I knew the depth of the love he had carried with him to the stars, and the horrible dread he held in his heart of ever again coming back to the earth he left, the dread of ever again seeing the girl he had loved. I knew the depth of that personal battle that drove him closer to the stars that were his, and ever away from the Earth which dealt him his greatest bitterness—