A little silence. Nibley felt blood pulsing down inside his suit. "Yep." he said.
"We just gave Bruno your little note to read. Whatever it was, when he finished reading it, he went insane."
Nibley said, quiet-like. "Burn that there paper. Don't let anybody else read it."
A pause. "It's burnt. What was it?"
"Don't be inquisitive," snapped the old man. "Maybe" I proved to Bruno that he didn't really exist. To hell with it!"
The rocket reached its constant speed. Douglas radioed back: "All's well. Sweet calculating, Pop. I'll tell the Rocket Officials back at Marsport. They'll be glad to know about you. Sweet, sweet calculating. Thanks. How goes it? I said— how goes it? Hey, Pop! Pop?"
Nibley raised a trembling hand and waved it at nothing. The ship was gone. He couldn't even see the jet-wash now, he could only feel that hard metal movement out there among the stars, going on and on through a course he had set for it. He couldn't speak. There was just emotion in him. He had finally, by God, heard a compliment from a mechanic of radar-computators!
He waved his hand at nothing. He watched nothing moving on and on into the crossed orbits of other invisible nothings. The silence was now complete.
He put his hand down. Now he had only to chart that one last personal orbit. The one he had wanted to finish only in space and not grounded back on Mars.
It didn't take lightning calculation to set it out for certain.
Life and death were the parabolic ends to his trajectory. The long life, first swinging in from darkness, arcing to the inevitable perihelion, and now moving back out, out and away—
Into the soft, encompassing dark.
"By God," he thought weakly, quietly. "Right up to the last, my reputation's good. Never fluked a calculation yet, and I never will…"
He didn't.