And he heard his dead father speaking once again, the memory of how he had spoken long ago.
"The brain and the memory will play you false, for the memory will forget a thing and twist it. But the written word will stay forever as it was written down. It does not forget and does not change its meaning. You can depend upon the written word."
"They say," said Mary, "that the End will come swiftly when we hear the Mutter. That the stars will no longer move, but will stand still in the blackness and that is a sure sign the End is near at hand."
And, he wondered, the end of what? The end of us? The end of the Ship? The end of the stars themselves? Or, perhaps, the end of everything, of the Ship and stars and the great blackness in which the stars were spinning.
He shuddered to think of the end of the Folk or of the Ship, not so much that the Ship should end or that the Folk should end, but that the beautiful, efficient, well-balanced order in which they lived should end. For it was a marvelous thing that every function should be so ordered that there always would be enough for the Folk to live on, with never any surplus. No surplus of food or water or air, or of the Folk themselves, for you could not have a child until someone assigned against the coming of that child should die.
There were footsteps running in the corridors outside the cubicles and excited shouting, and suddenly there was someone pounding on the door.
"Jon! Jon!" the voice shouted. "The stars are standing still!"
"I knew it!" Mary cried. "I told you, Jon. It is as it was spoken."
Pounding on the door!
And the door was where it should have been, where a door logically should be, where you could walk straight out of it to the corridor, instead of climbing the now-useless ladder that ran ridiculously to it from the wall-that-used-to-be-the-floor.