And then, while the World President and the World Congress stood silent before us, beneath the brilliant lights, Marlin was speaking slowly to them, was speaking in short, halting words of our flight outward, our escape from the great ambush at Saturn, our wild pursuit onward to Neptune and the colossal battle that had ended there with our halting of the other ray, with our hurling of Triton and all the Neptunians on it out into the void forever. In a hushed, strained silence the crowd before us was listening, and as the speech-apparatus beside us took Marlin's slow words out to all the crowds in all the vast city about us, and beyond, they, too, were listening in that same tense stillness. Then, when he had finished, that stillness continued unbroken for moments. "Marlin--Whitely--Hunt--Randall--!" he was saying, again. "There is no way in which we can tell, there is no need for us to tell, what gratitude Earth's peoples have now for you and for your men, who saved Earth and all the solar system from a dreadful death." Marlin slowly shook his head. "That gratitude is not for us alone who came back," he said, "but for those others of us who did not come back--who went to death out there for Earth." "We of Earth know that," the World President said, "and our gratitude is for them as for you--our silence now for them as for you. But you who came back--you four who dared first of all men out through the void, and who came back to lead Earth's forces out to the terrific struggle that saved us--is it gratitude only that Earth can give you?" Marlin half-turned, his eyes meeting our own. "There is nothing Earth can give us, more," he said, "for we have that which never men have had before, have the space-fliers and have now all the solar system's worlds before us! For to us four could be no greater gift, no greater thing, than that--to be space-rovers once more together!" And as Marlin's eyes met ours, standing there on the great building's brilliant-lit roof with all about us the assembled masses of the World Congress, silent, with those other vast silent throngs in all the mighty city around us, we were looking together upward. Marlin with his brilliant eyes; Whitely with his calm, strong upturned face; Randall with a new light flaming into his tired eyes; I with a strange new eagerness clutching at my heart; we all were looking upward. Upward past the brilliant lights around us toward the constellations and toward the planets that shone among them, crimson Mars and yellow Saturn and white Jupiter! Upward with a sudden strange tenseness, forgetful for the moment of the hushed world around us that we had helped to save from doom, upward across the immensities of space where we four had roved toward the great planets that moved there across the star-sown summer sky! The End