He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. "Right now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would be over."
"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them."
"We'll go back out into space," he said. "It's clean out there. I'm tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation."
She spoke softly. "We've been together for a long time. I've loved you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please, Michael."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. "Milky Way to Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in."
he great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after flood waters have drained away.
The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.
A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.