Half fainting, he activated the lock, which the Idwandanans had accidentally closed and had been unable to reopen, and pulled Isolde inside. At the forest's edge Skonsdoggugil was mustering another contingent of warriors. Swenson pulled Isolde into the ship proper, secured the outer and inner locks. With her help, he got a tourniquet on the stump of his arm. Everything was swimming before his eyes by then, but he managed to gain the control room and strap Isolde and himself onto the two acceleration couches. He had one chance, and one chance only: to reach civilization before he bled to death. Hastily he calculated the co-ordinates of the nearest civilized planet, and fed them into the automatic pilot. He activated the pilot just before he blacked out.
It was his haste that was his undoing. The planet he had wanted was Delta Bootis 11, and the NRA should have snapped out of transphotic within orbiting distance in less than three objective days. On the fourth day, however, they were still in f.t.l. drive.
Swenson knew by then that he was dying. What he did not know was that Isolde was dying, too. Constant usage had depleted her batteries long before their guarantee was due to run out, and there was very little life left in them. But she showed no signs of her approaching demise, preparing his meals in the galley each day and bringing them to the control room where he still lay upon the acceleration couch. She even fed him as he grew weaker, and once he roused briefly from a long stupor to find her darning his socks.
Co-ordinates, once fed into an automatic pilot, could not be cancelled; but automatic pilots were so constructed that whenever they received non-planetary co-ordinates, they altered them to the co-ordinates of the inhabitable planet which most closely corresponded to them. The NRA, therefore, could not end up in planetless space.
As the days passed, Swenson began wondering what kind of a world they were approaching, and whether he would ever see it or not. On the sixth day, his questions were answered when the NRA emerged from transphotic in the midst of a multiple sun system, near a gray and foreboding sphere. He pretended as long as he could that there was life on it, but when the a.p. put the ship into orbit, he could pretend no longer. Inhabitable did not always mean inhabited, and those cold gray seas and barren continents drifting past the viewport had been dead for ages. Whoever had lived on this world had long since absconded to a warmer, less hostile, milieu.
The a.p. brought them down to a gentle landing on a rocky coast near one of the seas. It was night, but in the heavens the mother sun's three distant sisters blazed in blue and beautiful splendor, drenching the sea and the land, filtering through the viewport and filling the control room with cold, unwavering light. In its radiance, Isolde's face lost all of the sycophancy the converter had superimposed upon it and became once more the classic face of the Irish-German heroine it was meant to represent.
Looking at her, Swenson knew true beauty for the first and last time in his life. He tried to sit up on the couch, sank back. The blue light faded, and red light took its place. Gradually, that faded too, and lightlessness tiptoed around him on silent feet.
Isolde knelt beside him, looked down into his tired face. Slowly, she got up, and left the room. She touched the button that opened the locks and stepped out upon the little platform Newell once had used for a pulpit. She looked up at the stars.
Perhaps it was the expression that had come over Swenson's face just before he died; perhaps it was the way he lay upon the couch. Perhaps it was the kindnesses he had shown her, and the light that had come into his eyes whenever she had brought him food, or held his hand, or darned his socks. Perhaps it was the sound of the surf upon the forlorn shore. Perhaps it was all of these things....