As the others ran from Cave, Lord Karn rushed to the huge rock lying upon his son, but he had no hope. Neither Pehn nor Bidagha would ever move again.
A trickle of sand pattered to the floor, and with a last backward glance Lord Karn ran from Cave. Boulders rained from the ceiling. The Premier had just reached the outside when a huge slab of rock crashed to the floor against the entrance. On the slope nearby, Pehn's mother and sister wept silently.
Lord Karn stood motionless a long while. At last he spoke.
"Cave is sealed," he said. "Let it never be opened again. Immortals have willed that my son should rest here forever, with impious Bidagha." Turning his face to the sky, he shook his fist at the bright spark of Topaz in the paling north. "So much for new things and foreign stars!" he said between his teeth. "This day's evil is enough."
They extinguished their candles and went slowly up the valley path towards the city.
Twenty-eight years later, on Earth, an astronomer comparing recent plates taken of the constellation Lyra noticed that Vega, its brightest star, had increased in brightness by a slight amount. The event was not especially remarkable—there are on the average, twenty-five novas reported every year in our galaxy—but Vega was one of the stars to be visited during the next decade by one of the Survey ships now in mid-voyage.
"There's one place they won't have to stop, now," he said to a colleague, showing him the plates.
"I don't suppose it matters. What's one star, more or less, when they all turn out to be the same—no planets, or barren ones—no stopping place for man."
"I suppose you're right," said the astronomer, staring glumly at the waste immensity of the photograph in front of him.