They were all men, Bernard thought.
He was glad to have known them.
The moment had come to leave now. “Mr. Bernard, sir?” Naylor called.
“So long,” Bernard said.
“God go with you,” Havig called after him.
Bernard smiled and stepped through the transmat, emerging in his own flat, four thousand miles away in London. Everything was as he left it; everything seemed to be waiting for him. Even the air smelled fresh, not at all as though he had left the apartment for so long a span as he had. It was all there—the books, the pipe, the music, the brandy—waiting for him to slip back into his comfortable life at the point where he had stepped out of it.
But it would never be the same again, Bernard thought.
Never the same again for any of us.
He walked to the window, looking out past the foggy London night to the faint glimmering stars that managed to make their way through the haze.
Never the same again. But, somehow, deep within his soul, he felt that everything was going to work out for the best; that—though neither he nor the unhappy Technarch nor any man now walking the Earth would live to see it—mankind would someday be taking its rightful place in the stars.