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 and hate. They might never learn it now.