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.
