Requiem

By EDMOND HAMILTON
Illustrated by SUMMERS
All during its lifetime Earth had been deluged ... overwhelmed ... submerged in an endless torrent of words. Was even its death to be stripped of dignity by the cackling of the mass media?
Kellon thought sourly that he wasn't commanding a star-ship, he was running a travelling circus. He had aboard telaudio men with tons of equipment, pontifical commentators who knew the answer to anything, beautiful females who were experts on the woman's angle, pompous bureaucrats after publicity, and entertainment stars who had come along for the same reason.
He had had a good ship and crew, one of the best in the Survey. Had had. They weren't any more. They had been taken off their proper job of pushing astrographical knowledge ever further into the remote regions of the galaxy, and had been sent off with this cargo of costly people on a totally unnecessary mission.
He said bitterly to himself, Damn all sentimentalists.
He said aloud, Does its position check with your calculated orbit, Mr. Riney?
Riney, the Second, a young and serious man who had been fussing with instruments in the astrogation room, came out and said,
Yes. Right on the nose. Shall we go in and land now?
Kellon didn't answer for a moment, standing there in the front of the bridge, a middle-aged man, stocky, square-shouldered, and with his tanned, plain face showing none of the resentment he felt. He hated to give the order but he had to.
All right, take her in.
He looked gloomily through the filter-windows as they went in. In this fringe-spiral of the galaxy, stars were relatively infrequent, and there were only ragged drifts of them across the darkness. Full ahead shone a small, compact sun like a diamond. It was a white dwarf and had been so for two thousand years, giving forth so little warmth that the planets which circled it had been frozen and ice-locked all that time. They still were, all except the innermost world.