The cruisers about us had massed into two great divisions, since here
at the galaxy's edge Gor Han and Jurt Tul were to leave me, taking
up once more their duties in the ceaseless watch of the Interstellar
Patrol, with for me my work as Chief in the headquarters at Canopus.
The frantic joy that would be shaking the galaxy's peoples to see the
shadow of doom thus lifted from them, the frantic gratitude that we
might claim--in these we had no interest now, wanting only to take up
once more the great Patrol's endless work. So now the cruisers of my
two friends hung waiting beneath my own, as we paused in silence at the
moment of parting.
Gor Han's deep voice broke the silence at last. "The end of the
journey, for us," he said. "And for Najus Nar----?"
"For Najus Nar, too," I said. "He dared and died, for the
galaxy--pretending to join the comet-creatures that he might thwart
their plans at the last--and he would have wished no other end."
Jurt Tul nodded slowly. "Najus Nar would have wished it," he said. "Yet
strange it seems, that we four of the Patrol are three, at last."
Silent we stood again, at that, and then Gor Han and Jurt Tul reached
forth, Betelgeusan and Aldebaranian and earth-man clasping hands in
a moment's grip. Then they had turned, had saluted sharply, and were
striding down through the cruiser toward their own ships, which with a
clang of metal moved away from beneath my own. Gor Han's to the right,
Jurt Tul's to the left, they moved, heading each the massed cruisers
there, and then those cruisers were moving away, to right and left
along the galaxy's edge, passing and vanishing. My single cruiser hung
alone in the void, the pilot beside me with hands on its controls,
but for a moment I paused still, gazing back through the blackness of
the great void toward a far, faint-shining cloud that glimmered in the
blackness. A long moment I gazed toward it, then turned. And then our
cruiser too was moving, in over the galaxy's edge, in toward great
Canopus through its gathered, flaming suns.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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