He sat in a metal chair behind the table. His head was lifted, looking toward the port in the outer wall that showed the black sky slashed across with the mighty fires of the Galaxy. The hard light showed him clearly. He was an old man. The years of his life had been many and unkind. They had shaped his face as though from iron, gouging the lines deep, hammering the ridges hard, driving out all traces of youth and hope and whatever laughter there might have been to forge a mask of bitter anger, and reproach, and in the end, despair. It seemed to Trehearne that he could read a whole life history in that face, caught forever in the moment of death, when surely the man was crying out upon whatever gods he worshipped, demanding _Why?_ Edri began suddenly to laugh. "Orthis. It's Orthis. He's been here waiting for us to come in...." Quorn raised a hand in its heavy gauntlet and struck Edri's helmet so that Trehearne could hear the ringing in his own audio. "Shut up. Damn you, Edri. Shut up." Edri stopped laughing. After a moment he said, "For a moment I thought...." Trehearne muttered, "So did I." Here in the airless utter cold, death held no decay, no change. But there was more to it than the lack of physical corruption. The fire in this man had burned so deep that even death could not erase its scars. Where the lamp-beams caught them, his open eyes seemed still to glow with the unforgotten embers. For a long time the three men stood, not moving, grouped in the doorway. Trehearne said once, "I think he wanted whoever found him to look inside that box, there under his hand." Orthis' life-work, the future of the Galaxy, held in a little box. They knew it. But still they were not quite ready to go in and take away from Orthis the thing that he had kept so long. And it was strange, Trehearne thought, that in this moment when their emotions ought to be at the highest pitch, when they should be feeling most poignantly the weight of all the centuries of sacrifice and struggle that had led them here, and what it was all going to mean, they were too tired to feel anything very much, only the edges of awe and an instinctive reluctance to approach the dead. He wanted to get away from this funeral ship. Finally he wanted it so much that he went in and tried to move Orthis' hand from off the box. The arm was frozen rigid as a steel bar, and he gave it up, working the box carefully out from under the icy fingers, in horror lest they break. The others had come slowly in beside him. The box was not locked. He lifted up the lid, and the lamplight showed a notebook bound in cloth. On top of it lay a loose sheet of paper with a few angular lines of writing. Edri picked it up, very clumsily in his armored hands, and held it to the light, reading aloud in a queer flat voice. "I have clung to life this much longer...." Edri stopped, and coughed, and started over, and Trehearne thought that Orthis listened.