Free The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF by Isaac Asimov

It seemed impossible to stand here and realize that this was defeat and that there was no defense against it! He shivered with an unnatural jerk of the shoulders.
    “All right,” Braker said caustically, “get going.”
    Tony stood where he was. Braker and everybody else except Laurette Overland faded. Her face came out of the mist, wild, tense, lovely and lovable. Tears were coming from her eyes, and her racking sobs were muted. For a long moment, he hungrily drank in that last glimpse of her.
    “Lieutenant!”
    He said dully, his eyes adding what his lips did not, “Good-bye, Laurette.”
    He turned, went toward the air lock with dragging feet, like a man who leaves the death house only to walk toward a worse fate. He stopped at the air lock. Braker’s gun prodded him.
    He stood faintly in the air lock until Braker said, “Out, copper! Get moving.”
    And then he stepped through, the night and the wild wind enclosing him, the baleful light of the invading planet washing at him.
    Faintly he heard Braker’s jeering voice, “So long, copper.” Then, with grim, ponderous finality, came the wheeze of the closing air lock.
    He wandered into the night for a hundred feet, somehow toward the vast pile that had been extracted from the ship’s interior. He seemed lost in unreality. This was the pain that went beyond all pains, and therefore numbed.
    He turned. A blast of livid flame burst from the ship’s main tube. Smaller parallels of fire suddenly ringed it. The ship moved. It slid along the plain on its runners, hugged the ground for two hundred feet, plummeting down the slope. Tony found himself tense, praying staccato curses. Another hundred feet. The escarpment loomed.
    He thrust his arms forcefully upward.
    “Lift!” he screamed. “
Lift!
”
    The ship’s nose turned up, as her short wings caught the force of the wind. Then it roared up from the plain, cleared the escarpment by a scant dozen feet. The echoes of the blast muted the very howl of the wind. The echoes died. Then there was nothing but a bright jewel of light receding. Then there was – nothing.
     
    Tony looked after it, conscious that the skin was stretched dry and tight across his cheekbones. His upflung arms dropped. A little laugh escaped his lips. He turned on his heels. The wind was so furious he could lean against it. It was night, and though the small moon this before-the-asteroids world boasted was invisible, the heavens overflowed with the baleful, pale-white glow of the invading planet.
    It was still crescent. He could clearly see the ponderous immensity the lighted horns embraced. The leftward sky was occluded a full two-fifths by the falling monster, and down in the seas the shores would be overborne by tidal waves.
    He stood motionless. He was at a loss in which direction to turn. An infinity of directions, and there could be no purpose in any. What type of mind could choose a direction?
    That thought was lost. He moved toward the last link he had with humanity – with Laurette. He stood near the trembling pile. There was a cardboard carton, addressed to Professor Henry Overland, a short chain of canceled stamps staring up at him, pointing to the nonexistence of everything that would be. America and Christmas and the post office.
    He grinned lopsidedly. The grin was lost. It was even hard to know what to do with one’s face. He was the last man on a lost world. And even though he was doomed to death in this unimaginably furious crack-up, he should have some goal, something to live for up to the very moment of death!
    He uttered a soft, trapped cry, dashed his gloves to his helmeted face. Then a thought simmered. Of course! The ring! He had to find that ring, and he would. The ring went with the skeleton. And the skeleton went with the ring. Lieutenant Tony Crow – and there could be no doubt of this whatsoever – was to be that skeleton which had grinned up at him so many years ago – no, not ago, acome.
    A useless task, of