Then Carter for just a moment removed the black shroud from her face. I saw her brother gaze silently; saw him stoop and implant a kiss––and turn away. I did not want to look, but I found myself moving slowly forward.
She lay, so beautiful. Her face, white and calm and peaceful in death. My sight blurred. Words seemed to echo: “A little son, cast in the gentle image of his mother....”
“Easy, Gregg!” Snap was whispering to me. He had his arm around me. “Come on away!”
They tied the shroud over her face. I did not see them as they put her body in the tube, sent it through the exhaust-chamber, and dropped it.
But a moment later I saw it––a small black oblong bundle––hovering beside us. It was perhaps a hundred feet away, circling us. Held by the Planetara’s bulk, it had momentarily become our satellite. It swung around us like a moon. Gruesome satellite, by nature’s laws forever to follow us.
Then from another tube at the bow, Blackstone operated a small Zed-co-ray projector. Its dull light caught the floating bundle, neutralizing its metallic wrappings.
It swung off at a tangent. Speeding. Falling free in the dome of the heavens. A rotating black oblong. But in a moment distance dwindled it to a speck. A dull silver dot with the sunlight on it. A speck of human Earth-dust, falling free....
It vanished. Anita––gone. In my heart was an echo of the prayer that the Almighty might watch over her and guard her always....