The 'copter settled to ground with a whistling noise. Soames cut off the motors. Then Fran was calling joyously, and Zani squealed from a window, and Hod came tumbling out of a window and Mal popped out of nowhere and came running. There were shouts in the village. Then Gail was coming, also.
"Pile aboard!" commanded Soames. "Your families are here, kids, and they're waiting for you. And, Gail, there's going to be the most thoroughly scared gang at the UN and elsewhere that you ever saw, now that what they think's a space-fleet is actually here! We've been decent to the kids, and they think they haven't, so we'll hold out for authority to argue...."
A door slammed. Fran said happily:
"Let's go!"
Motors boomed. The helicopter lifted. It rushed over the village, bellowing. Tree-branches thrashed violently in the down draught. It swept splendidly away down a valley leading to another valley and under a precipitous cliff and down more valleys. There was a place where eight silvery spacecraft floated composedly above the Earth, with the few survivors of a great civilization peering out, waiting for dawn so they could see a new world, a fresh world healed of all scars, waiting....
Soames pulled Gail to him. "I've got to make friends with these people, Gail!" His voice trembled with excitement. "You see? They've got a wonderful science, but we've got to get to work on it! They need a modern viewpoint! That time-transposing system they've used to save their lives, it's bound to work as a space-transposer too! I've got to work it out with their engineers! We've got to get enough power together to send some sort of miniature transposer out to Centaurus and Aldebaran, and then have regular interstellar transposition routes and a spate of worlds for everybody to move to who feels like it.... Taking what these people have, and adding our stuff to it ... we'll really go places!"
They swept over the reflecting waters which were the reservoir behind the Polder Dam. Fran spoke aloud, for someone somewhere else to hear. He spoke again. He was using his own, home-made sensory communicator. Then he suddenly touched Soames' arm.
"My people say—" pause "you talk for them." He grinned. "Let's go!"
And the 'copter touched solidity and a great silvery cylinder touched very delicately close by, and the children ran, squealing, to be with people they'd feared they would never see again. And Soames and Gail walked a little bit diffidently toward the same opened, lowered door. There were some rather nice people waiting for them. They'd raised fine children. They needed Soames and Gail to help them make friends.
Somehow it did not occur to Soames that he was the occasion, if not the cause, that on this one day and within hours, the danger of atomic war on Earth was ended, and the human race was headed for the stars instead of annihilation. But it was true. The people of the Old Race, of course, would not try to rule Earth. They were too few. They wouldn't want to go to another planet and be alone. Again they were too few. They were the last survivors of a very magnificent civilization, but they could not maintain it unless they shared it with the people of Earth of now. They could only join the sprawling younger branch of the human race as citizens.
But humans, now, had a new destiny. With Gail close beside him, Soames waited for the greetings of the children and their parents to end. He looked at Gail. Her eyes were shining.
Soames felt very good. It was a perfect solution to the troubles of Earth, both past and future.
The stars were waiting.
THE END