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FINAL GLORY
The Sun was dying--and with it the System. Earth was a cold stone. Survivors huddled on a cheerless Mercury, waiting numbly. But Praav in his inscrutable wisdom--
N'Zik was a forlorn and weary figure at the forward port. He balanced his frail, bulbous body on four of his eight limbs, while the other four moved listlessly over the etheroscope, adjusting sights and lenses. N'Zik wondered dully why he bothered. Even from here he could see that the system looking ahead, the dull reddish Sun with its wild and darksome planets, was not for them.
Bitterness flooded his soul. To have come so far and searched so long, only to find this! In all this Galaxy here was the one Sun that sustained a planetary system, and that Sun was dying! The irony was more than he could bear.
Shi-Zik came to stand beside him. Only she and N'Zik were left, of all the thousands; two alone on this driving colossus which was the only world they had ever known. She sensed his bitterness now and tried to speak words of hope.
"See, N'Zik, there are inner planets! How close their orbits are! There may still be warmth and life-sustaining rays."
N'Zik's limbs sprawled outward in despair.
"This dying system is not for us, Shi-Zik. The five largest and outermost planets are but barren, frigid rock. But if you wish, we shall go inward."
His limbs flashed over the huge control-console. Gradually the ship slowed in its headlong pace. Nearly the size of a small planet, was this ship; entire generations had been born and died aboard it, during the trip between Galaxies. Somewhere deep inside, perpetual generators pounded out the power that had driven them through space faster than light.
N'Zik and Shi-Zik had never seen those generators, nor were they conscious now of the smooth threnody. They had known it always. Miles of inter-locking corridors extended behind them too, a veritable city with vast rooms of wonderful machinery--but none of this had they ever seen. For DEATH had struck suddenly there, was lurking there still.
The huge metal tomes told of it. N'Zik and Shi-Zik had read that history so often that they knew it now by heart. They knew how and why the last generations had been wiped out.
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