During all that time a lonely guard-ship hung drearily about, watching lest someone try to rescue a man doomed to hopeless exile, and return him to happier scenes. And finally the guard-ship had gone away, because the space-ways were no longer used by anybody, and there were no ships in the void save those of the Patrol itself. Accordingly the Patrol was disbanded. For hundreds of years nothing happened at all. And then Kim Rendell came in the _Starshine_, and shortly thereafter tiny ships began to take off from Ades, and they fought valorously on distant star-systems, and at last a squadron of war-craft came to subjugate Ades for the beastly Empire of Sinab. Finally there was a battle in the bright beams of the lonely sun itself. And after that, for a time, little space-ships swam up from the planet and darted away, and darted back, and darted away, and back. But never before had there been any such situation as now. The sun, which had kept company with Ades for so long, now shone in lonely splendor, amid emptiness, devoid of its companion. And that emptiness was bewildering to a small ship--sister to the _Starshine_--which flicked suddenly into being nearby. The ship had come back from a journey among the virgin stars of the Second Galaxy with honorable scars upon its hull and a zestful young crew who wished to boast of their journeying. They had come back to Ades--so they thought--direct, not even stopping at Terranova. And there was no Ades. The little ship flashed here and there about the bereft sun in bewilderment. It searched desperately for a planet some seven thousand miles in diameter, which had apparently been misplaced. And as it hunted, a second ship whisked into sight from faster-than-light drive. The detectors of the two ships told them of each other's presence, and they met and hung in space together. Then they searched in unison, but in vain. At long last they set out in company for one of the planets of the former Sinabian Empire, on which there must be some news of what had happened to Ades. On transmitter-drive they inevitably separated and one was much closer to the chosen planet when they came out of stressed space. One drove down into atmosphere while the other was still thousands of miles away. The leading ship went down at landing-speed, toward a city. The other ship watched by electron telescope and prepared to duplicate its course. But the man of the second ship saw--and there could be no doubt about it--that suddenly the landing ship vanished from its place as if it had gone into intergalactic drive in atmosphere. There was a flash of intolerable, unbearable light. And then there was an explosion of such monstrous violence that half of the planet's capital city vanished or was laid in ruins.