"No, Michael! You can still save yourself!" She caught him by the shoulders, her hands urgent on his flesh. "Leave the ship with me! Let Kerrel pick us both up!" Trehearne smiled mirthlessly. "Kerrel would like that--taking me back to a prison." "It doesn't have to be prison!" Shairn exclaimed. "You can say you pretended to join Joris and Edri only to save me. I'll back you up and not Kerrel nor anyone else can disprove it. You'll walk out free on Llyrdis." It crossed his mind that he could do that. It would all fit. It was an out. "You won't be letting your friends down, either," Shairn insisted. "They'll go on without you. You've done all you can for them." She clung to him. Her mouth begged him with a silent language of its own. He took her arms slowly from around him and thrust her back and she caught her breath at the pain of his grip. "No," he said. And again, "No, Shairn." She stood back and looked at him steadily. "You could go back to the Silver Tower with me but you won't--and for what? So that peoples you've never met on worlds you'll never see can someday fly the stars?" "There was a man named Trehearne on the world Earth who got his chance to fly the stars," he said. "I thought that others should have their chance too. I have to play it out now." She was silent and then the dropping speed of the ship told them that it was almost over. Trehearne took her down to the airlock chamber. They stood there together, not finding anything more to say, and all that had been between them came silently and mocked them with the pain of vanished days. The _Mirzim_ scraped her keel softly on a yielding surface and was still. Trehearne opened the port, looking out on the dark windy desert. Shairn spoke then. "A strange beginning for us, Michael, and now an even stranger ending." He held out his hand to help her down and the pressure of her fingers was like something tearing at his heart. She looked up at him, a small lonely figure in the vast dark. He thought her lips moved but the wind came between them and took the words away and he had none of his own for answer. The warning bell jarred harshly in his ears. He closed the port and she was gone. Joris' voice roared from the bridge, through the intercom. "Flatten out, all! This is the only start we'll get on Kerrel and I've got to pile it on!" The cruel hand of acceleration crushed Trehearne down. He lay on the scored plates of the deck and that last vision of Shairn's white face remained with him to remind him of all that he had had and lost. He said her name over and over in the silence of the empty lock and his mouth was filled with the bitter taste of dust. The _Mirzim_ leaped through space like a wild thing, driving toward the sector that was the goal of a thousand-year hope and quest, toward the Galaxy edge and the shores of outer night. NINETEEN