[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination April 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X It isn't the dying itself. It's what comes before. The waiting, alone in a room without windows, trying to think. The opening of the door, the voices of the men who are going with you but not all the way, the wa

There is a time for sleep, and a time for waking. But Hyrst had slept heavily, and the waking was hard. He had slept long, and the waking was slow. Fifty years , said the dim voice of remembrance. But another part of his mind said, No, it is only tomorrow morning. Another part of his mind. That was strange. There seemed to be more parts to his mind than he remembered having had before, but they were all confused and hidden behind a veil of mist. Perhaps they were not really there at all. Perhaps

Mars roared and glittered tonight. And how was a man to stand the faces and lights and sounds, when he had come back from the silence of eternity? Hyrst walked through the flaring streets of Syrtis City with slow and dragging steps. It was like being back on Earth. For this city was not really part of the old dead planet, of the dark barrens that rolled away beneath the night. This was the place of the rocket-men, the miners, the schemers, the workers, who had come from another, younger world. T

All space was before him, hung with the many-colored lights of the stars, intensely brilliant in the black nothing. It was incredibly splendid, but it was too much like what he had looked at with his cold unseeing eyes for fifty years. He looked down—down being relative to where he was standing in the blister-window—and saw the whole Belt swarming by under him like a drift of fireflies. He quivered inwardly with a chill vertigo, and turned away. Vernon was talking aloud. He had been talking for

It did not stay lost for long. Shearing was at the controls. The chronometer showed fourteen hours and twenty-seven minutes since they left the Happy Dream . Shearing had spent eight of those hours in a species of comatose slumber, from which he had roused out practically normal. Now Hyrst was heavily asleep in the pneumo-chair beside him. Shearing punched him. "Wake up." After several more punches Hyrst groaned and opened his eyes. He mumbled a question, and Shearing pointed out the wide curved

The minutes slid past, sections of eternity arbitrarily measured by the standards of another planet and having no relevance at all on this tiny whirling rock. The beam of light from the small aperture moved visibly across the opposite wall. Hyrst watched it, blinking. Outside, Bellaver's men were drawn up in a wide crescent across the hill in front of the catafalque. They waited. "No mercy," said Hyrst softly. "No mercy, is it?" He bent over and began to loosen the clamps that held the lead weig

The old zodiacal rhyme was running through Hyrst's mind, and that was the only thing that was in his mind. The Virgin and the Scales. Yes. And she's very beautiful, too, thought Hyrst. But she shouldn't be holding the Scales. That's all wrong. The Scales come next, and then the Scorpion—Scorpio—and the Archer—Sagittarius— And anyway they aren't scales, they're a pair of big golden stars, and she's putting them down, and they're melting together. There's only one of them, and it's not a star at a

There was Christina, and there was Shearing, and there were two more he did not know, leaning over him. The drug was wearing off a little, and Hyrst could see them more clearly, see the bitter disappointment in their eyes. "Is that all?" Christina said. "Are you sure? Go back again—" They took him back again, and it was the same. "That's all MacDonald said? Then we're no closer to the Titanite than we were before." Hyrst was not interested in the Titanite. "Vernon," he said. Something red and wi

Titan lay below them in the Saturn-glow, under the fantastic glory of the Rings. A bitter, repellent world of jagged peaks and glimmering plains of poison snow. The tiny life-raft dropped toward it, skittering nervously as it hit the thin atmosphere. Hyrst clung hard to the handholds, trying not to retch. He was not habituated to space anyway, and the skiff had been bad enough. Now, without any hull around him and nothing but a curved shield in front of him, he felt like an ant on a flying leaf.

It was cold and dark and infinitely sad. Hyrst wandered through the rooms, feeling like a ghost, thinking like one. Everything had been removed from the buildings. The living quarters were now mere cubicular tombs for a lot of memories, absolutely bare of any human or familiar touch. It felt very strange to Hyrst. He kept telling himself that fifty years had passed, but he could not believe it. It seemed only a few months since MacDonald's death, months occupied by investigation and trial and th

On the bridge of his yacht, Bellaver turned to Hyrst and said, "I've done what you wanted. Now find me that starship." Hyrst nodded. "Take off." The rockets roared and thundered, and the swift yacht leaped quivering into the sky. Hyrst sat quietly in his recoil chair. He felt a different man, changed entirely in the last few days. Much had happened in those days. Bellaver had got busy on the radio even before his yacht left Titan, and the story of the Lazarites had burst like a nova upon the Sol