"Not without your consent, Shi-Zik."
"I have wanted to end it!" Shi-Zik cried. "For a very long time I have thought of it, but dared not speak."
"And yet," N'Zik mused, "perhaps we should search further. Search until the end. It was the will of our forebears that the race be continued. Should we end so ingloriously what they set out to achieve?"
"The will of our forebears is as nothing to the will of Praav," Shi-Zik spoke softly, gazing out to the stars. "Praav has watched safely over us all this time. If He had wanted us to find a place, we should have found it. And we need not end ingloriously. Observe, N'Zik, that we, the last of our kind, have ended here, at what is probably the last planetary system. Its sun is dying as our race is dying. Let us all go out in a final flame together, a blaze of glory!"
The bitterness had left N'Zik now. "You are right, my dear. It was meant that we should end here. I believe Praav has willed it so!"
He threw the controls over to full acceleration and locked them into place. The colossus of all spaceships piled acceleration upon acceleration with the speed of light, plunging on its unerring course toward the dying Sun. The two beings from another Galaxy stood at the forward port, proudly side by side. N'Zik looked at Shi-Zik and felt such a peace as he had never known.
And Shi-Zik murmured, "Praav, in his inscrutable wisdom...."
Curt Sanders climbed wearily up the last steep passage from the city below. Space-suited and helmeted, he emerged from the low line of cliffs and looked out upon the desolate surface of Mercury.
For the past week he had worked hard in the underground laboratories. Occasionally he came to the surface where he could see the dark sky, and the pin-points of stars, and the dying Sun once more. That alone gave him incentive to go on. He, with the several thousand others, were working out the problem which might save them from extinction. It was slow work, damnably slow and hard, and Curt knew in his heart they would not be in time.