The cosmic vampire that had threatened the life of our universe was gone forever! The comet-drivers had driven their comet and its worlds, at last, to death!
V
Sweeping in toward the galaxy's gathered suns, days later, our great cruiser fleet slowed, halted, hung motionless outside the galaxy's edge once more. Before us flamed great white Rigel, as it had flamed-how long it seemed before! — when Gor Han and Jurt Tul and Najus Nar had gathered in the control room of my cruiser, at the start of our mad journey toward the comet. Now that comet was but a vast, faint cloud of radiance far in the void behind us. And now, too, it was Gor Han and Jurt Tul that stood before me, in the cruiser's silent control room.
The cruisers about us had massed into two great divisions, since here at the galaxy's edge Gor Han and Jurt Tul were to leave me, taking up once more their duties in the ceaseless watch of the Interstellar Patrol, with for me my work as Chief in the headquarters at Canopus. The frantic joy that would be shaking the galaxy's people to see the shadow of doom thus lifted from them, the frantic gratitude that we might claim-in these we had no interest now, wanting only to take up once more the great Patrol's endless work. So now the cruisers of my two friends hung waiting beneath my own, as we paused in silence at the moment of parting.
Gor Han's deep voice broke the silence at last. "The end of the journey, for us," he said. "And for Najus Nar-?"
"For Najus Nar, too," I said. "He dared and died, for the galaxy-pretending to join the comet-creatures that he might thwart their plans at the last-and he would have wished no other end."
Jurt Tul nodded slowly. "Najus Nar would have wished it," he said. "Yet strange it seems, that we four of the Patrol are three, at last."
Silent we stood again, at that, and then Gor Han and Jurt Tul reached forth, Betelgeusan and Aldebaranian and Earth-man clasping hands in a moment's grip. They had turned, had saluted sharply, and were striding down through the cruiser toward their own ships, which with a clang of metal moved away from beneath my own. Gor Han's to the right, Jurt Tul's to the left, they moved, heading each the massed cruisers there, and then those cruisers were moving away, to right and left along the galaxy's edge, passing and vanishing. My single cruiser hung alone in the void, the pilot beside me with hand on its controls, but for a moment I paused still, gazing back through the blackness of the great void toward a far, faint-shining cloud that glimmered in the blackness. A long moment I gazed toward it, then turned. And then our cruiser too was moving, in over the galaxy's edge, in toward great Canopus through its gathered, flaming suns.