Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net _A world had collapsed around this man--a world that would never shout his praises again. The burned-out cities were still and dead, the twisted bodies and twisted souls giving him their last salute in death. And now he was alone, alone surrounded by memories, alone and waiting ..._ happy ending _by MACK REYNOLDS and FREDRIC BROWN_ Sometimes the queerly shaped Venusian trees seemed to talk to him, but their voices were soft. They were loyal people. There were four men in the lifeboat that came down from the space-cruiser. Three of them were still in the uniform of the Galactic Guards. The fourth sat in the prow of the small craft looking down at their goal, hunched and silent, bundled up in a greatcoat against the coolness of space--a greatcoat which he would never need again after this morning. The brim of his hat was pulled down far over his forehead, and he studied the nearing shore through dark-lensed glasses. Bandages, as though for a broken jaw, covered most of the lower part of his face. He realized suddenly that the dark glasses, now that they had left the cruiser, were unnecessary. He slipped them off. After the cinematographic grays his eyes had seen through these lenses for so long, the brilliance of the color below him was almost like a blow. He blinked, and looked again. They were rapidly settling toward a shoreline, a beach. The sand was a dazzling, unbelievable white such as had never been on his home planet. Blue the sky and water, and green the edge of the fantastic jungle. There was a flash of red in the green, as they came still closer, and he realized suddenly that it must be a _marigee_, the semi-intelligent Venusian parrot once so popular as pets throughout the solar system. Throughout the system blood and steel had fallen from the sky and ravished the planets, but now it fell no more. And now this. Here in this forgotten portion of an almost completely destroyed world it had not fallen at all. Only in some place like this, alone, was safety for him. Elsewhere--anywhere--imprisonment or, more likely, death. There was danger, even here. Three of the crew of the space-cruiser knew. Perhaps, someday, one of them would talk. Then they would come for him, even here. But that was a chance he could not avoid. Nor were the odds bad, for three people out of a whole solar system knew where he was. And those three were loyal fools.