They pinned him down finally and shot enough hypnol into him to keep him unconscious for days. They left him floating limply with his belt snapped to a bulkhead ring and turned their attention to the tight-beam communicator, coddling into intelligibility the first blurred signal that reached them from Earth.
It was as well that Hanlon was not conscious, since his prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. On Earth, war had come—and gone.
They never picked up more than that single dying signal, but before it flickered out they understood that the cataclysm had been atomic, planet-wide, and final. And when that last wavering link with Earth was gone they looked at each other palely over the dead radio and felt the impossible realization of racial extinction rising up like madness behind the psycho-blocks of their carefully-conditioned sanity.
"So Hanlon was right, after all," Lowe said, and choked on the words.
They found nothing to say after that until the impressed urgency of their mission reasserted itself and they turned back to the job at hand. There was still Venus....
They did not rouse Hanlon from his hypnol stupor until the Terra IV fell into her spiral orbit for planetfall. Geddes broke the news to him then, steeling himself against Hanlon's biting irony.
"So you were right," Geddes finished baldly. "Earth is done for. Dead." He was thinking at the moment in terms of cities and governments and cultures, and the Irishman's reaction was sharply disconcerting.
"Done for?" Hanlon said, and hid his face in his hands. "God—all the little people!"
He was so quiet after that that the others, busy with the precarious business of landing, forgot him. He was still silent when the Terra IV dipped into the first milky mists of atmosphere and a sudden great blaze of white fire lashed up from the planet below and struck her with the crash of a million thunderbolts.