Then came the end, the dramatic fireworks. The Orthist party arranged an escape for their leader. They helped him get his ship away. They saw him off into the dark void beyond the sky, and they thought that after all he would be victorious. But by this time the new Vardda race had begun to flourish, and some of them were old enough, just barely, to fly. They went out after Orthis, believing intensely in their own right, as he believed in his. Orthis himself was undoubtedly able to endure ultra-speeds, for it was a long and bitter chase. The new young Vardda partially disabled his ship, but even so he managed to elude them. There was no ultra-wave radar or radio in those days, and after all, the old man had cut his teeth on the stars. They lost him, and that was the end, of Orthis and his ship--all except the message in the drifting life-skiff that was picked up more than a century later. And Trehearne thought, "Whether he was right or not, Orthis was the hell and all of a man!" He could understand why Orthis had hung on stubbornly all these centuries. Certainly a more noble dream had never been dreamed. For himself, though, he was rather glad it was only a dream. He liked being a Vardda. He liked things the way they were. It had worked pretty well for everybody, and looking back, he could think of an awful lot of people he would have hated to see entrusted with the power to get at their neighbors on other stars. Orthis, that solitary, space-born man, had seen only the ideal, the abstraction. The Council had extrapolated a reality. He did not discuss the question with anybody. That night in the pleasure-garden had impressed upon him the fact that the whole subject was unhealthy, and especially for him. The thought of Kerrel arose sometimes like a dark shadow in his mind, and linked with it was a gnawing anxiety about Edri, whom he had not seen before he left--not for any reasons of caution, which he would have been ashamed of, but because Edri had gone away somewhere and was not to be reached. He had sent Trehearne a brief message wishing him luck, and that was all. About Shairn he thought as little as possible. He didn't want to know what she was doing. He preferred to remember the two weeks he had spent at the Silver Tower as ending against a blank wall.