It was more than two weeks later that with all the thousands of the
great Council of Suns we passed out of the mighty tower into the
starlit night. They were still shouting, those thousands, for it was
but hours before that our battered cruiser had swung down toward the
tower out of the void of space, to meet such a reception as never
yet had been equaled in this universe. And now that the Council's
tumultuous meeting had closed at last, and each of its members made
ready to depart for his own sun, the shouting applause about us was
redoubled.
At last from out of the darkness a great star-cruiser swept toward us,
paused, and then the member from Antares had entered it and it was
speeding up into the darkness. Another drew up before us, entered by
the strange representative from Rigel, and then it too had vanished and
still others were sweeping toward us. Out of the darkness they came,
star-cruiser after star-cruiser, and into each went one of the members,
flashing out to his own star once more. One by one, we watched them
go, watched the great ships lift into the darkness, starting out to
Polaris and Fomalhaut and Algol, starting out on long journeys to suns
far out at the Galaxy's edge. One by one they went, until at last there
remained only we three of all the members, with the three cruisers
waiting before us that would carry us back to our own stars.
We paused, then, with a common impulse gazing upward. Across the
heavens gleamed the hosts of suns, points of brilliant light in a
field of deepest black. Moments we gazed up toward them, and toward
three among them that were far distant from each other across the
heavens--the magnificent golden splendor of great Capella, to the left,
and the fiery red brilliance of Arcturus, to the right, and above us
and between them a smaller star of deep yellow, that little spark of
light toward which the eyes and hearts of men shall turn until the
end of time, though they roam the limits of the universe. A moment we
gazed up, up toward the three orbs, and then Jor Dahat raised his hand,
pointing to another star low above the horizon, a great, soft-glowing
one that was like a little ball of misty light.
"Look," he said softly. "The nebula!"
Silently we gazed out toward it for a long moment, a moment in which
our thoughts leapt out across the gulf toward the glowing thing at
which we gazed, toward that mighty realm of fire where we had struggled
for our universe, in the strange world inside it which we three had
plunged to its doom. Then, silent still, we gripped hands, and turned
toward our waiting cruisers.
Then they, too, were driving up into the darkness, out from Canopus
once more into the gulf of space, into the eternal silence of the
changeless void, each toward its star.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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