Part 2

A trapped expression grew on Rex's face. "It _won't_ happen!" he shouted. He screamed, "Let me alone! Stop badgering me! You can't change anything. I didn't know if it'd hurt Worta or not. I didn't care any more. I came back to Worta to get you, just in case something happened I didn't figure on. All I cared about was getting home. I want to go home!"

He dropped his head, drawing in great tearing sobs, his broad shoulders quaking.

Carl said calmly, "Well, we're going back to Worta to get the Wortans."

Rex raised his head, his face violent with protest. "We haven't got time."

"We'll take time."

Rex cursed him viciously.

"In the meantime," Carl continued without change of tone, "sit there. Start thinking. Think about M'hort and the other Wortans. Think of how they saved our lives and accepted us as if we're part of them. Think of all the hospitality you accepted at their _yee_."

Carl's voice was rising. "Think of their dead cities. Think of all the dead men who built those cities and the artists who made those cities beautiful with their statues and paints. Then think how you will have destroyed all that."

Rex said nothing. Color was flooding from his face, his lips thinning until they formed one pale slash across his face. Carl looked at him with wordless contempt, then swung about to maneuver the ship for the final thousand miles to a landing.

A gong sounded from the instrument board.

* * * * *

It came so suddenly that Carl jumped halfway from the bucket-seat. He gripped the edge of the board, eyes forced open so wide they hurt. He waiting, knowing he had misheard. The gong came again.

Behind him, Rex made an insane gurgling noise. "They've come! They've come!"

Carl's hands were shaking violently as he adjusted the teleview, snapped in the audio. In the teleview gray clouds formed, took on shape, and that shape became the head and shoulders of a man in the trim, pale blue uniform of the Stellar Survey Institution.

Small muscles around the man's eyes and mouth contracted as he saw Carl. He frowned. He said, "You are Carl Wyant and Rex Oberling?"

"Yes, sir," Carl said humbly.

"You will stay where you are. We will pick you up in seven hours. You may consider that a command."

"Yes, sir," replied Carl. "But we can't obey it. I'd advise you, sir, not to come within ten billion miles of the dwarf-red star. It's a potential super-nova. We will meet you at--"

The officer's glance sharpened. "You're talking nonsense. Why is Oberling bound in that chair?"

Carl said wearily, "It's a long story, sir. May I ask your present position?"

The Stellar Survey man's image grew a little in the plate as he leaned forward, as if to get a better look at Carl's face. He drew back. He said, "We are at present roughly twenty-two light-days distant, viewing you by instantaneous fifth-order reception."

"That's even better than ten billion miles, sir. If you stay where you are and keep your beam on, we can signal you when we get a billion miles from Worta. Then you can come forward and pick us up."

Before the officer could say what was starting on his lips, Carl banged his hand excitedly on the instrument board and shouted hysterically, "I'm warning you, sir. I'm warning you!"

The man looked unsettled. His glance wavered. "Very well, Wyant. It's a strange proceeding, but I trust you. We will expect you." The screen blanked.

Fifteen minutes later Carl landed the ship. He got up stiffly. Rex sat motionless, eyes turned straight ahead, unblinking, unseeing.

"I'm leaving you here until I get the Wortans," Carl told him. "Don't try anything silly."

Rex moved his head until his eyes rested on Carl's. He said quietly, "Carl, for your own good, don't bother. Do you think for a minute the Wortans are going to leave their planet at this stage of the game? They're done for anyway. You wouldn't expect a bunch of corpses to get out of their coffins and try a different coffin, would you? That's the way it is with the Wortans."

When Carl said nothing, Rex said, in that same quiet voice, "Carl, I _know_."

Carl turned uncertainly away, moved to the instrument board. His own voice sounded far away. "I'll convince them," he said. "I'll bring them back. They've _got_ to come."

Carl took all the keys out of the instrument board. Without the keys, the ship was inoperable. He left the ship, stumbled as in a dream across the dreary wastes of lifeless snow. Then, as the cold struck deep at his lungs, his thoughts clarified, and he went with quick, driven panic.

How soon the merbohydrate would strike the red star he had no idea. But it would be soon. He made a break-neck descent. He burst into that small section of one of the underground cities where the Wortans lived, went straight to the _meegan_ of M'hort.

He told M'hort the whole story.

M'hort sat cross-legged. A resigned sadness lidded his eyes. Carl knew his answer. He dropped to his knees. "No! You can't speak for the rest of your people. They want to live. And the Wortans can still be great. Why--why, we'll give you a planet in our own system!"

M'hort smiled as if at a secret, foolish thought, his eyes averted. Then he arose and drew Carl up with him. His eyes glittered with the reflected fluorescence of the underground. Carl was held rigid.

M'hort said, "You are youth, and you answer as youth would answer. I am age, Carl, and I answer as only age can answer. We will stay.

"What is there to fear? What is there to grieve for? It is a great providence that sent you here to us. You see! Soon we would all have died, but lingeringly. Now there is glory to dying, for there will be no ugly pain. And we will not be unknown to the other peoples of the universe, Carl, for you will carry our immortality."

"That," said Carl, bitterly, "is a hell of an immortality."

M'hort laughed. "It is better than we expected. Now go."

And Carl went, blindly.

He reached the ship in less than an hour. He entered, dogged the airlocks shut, went slowly toward the transparent door of the control room. He threw open the door and stood looking at the empty chair and the tattered strands of rope which had held Rex. He was drained of emotion, though, and he leaned weakly against the door jamb. Finally he moved, left the ship, and spent another hour looking for Rex.

He didn't find him. Rex had consciously obscured his tracks. He went back to the ship, smiling without mirth. That was funny. Rex drove himself crazy figuring out a way to get back to Earth for four years. Then he backed out. He had chosen the same path as the Wortans, and maybe for as good a reason....

* * * * *

He drove straight away from the dying red sun. A billion miles out, he was picked up by the stately ship of the Stellar Survey. He was ushered into the presence of the officer who had appeared in the teleview plate. That individual was cold in his welcome.

"You've cost the tax-payers a mint of money," he growled. "They've had ships on the lookout for you for four years. Where's the other young fellow?"

Carl told the story while the officer slowly tensed. Then he looked annoyed. "It seems a little extreme for Oberling to have committed suicide."

"Maybe, sir. Except that one doesn't go around destroying solar systems without a good reason. If you hadn't shown up when you did--"

"There would have been a good reason?" The officer sat silent. "Yes, I suppose so. A classical bit of irony, that. Destroying a sun to attract rescuers--then the rescuers spoil the drama of it by showing up ahead of time. And the funny part of it is that it would have worked."

He seemed to recollect. He hastily snapped in the teleview, motioned Carl to come around to his side of the desk.

"Chances are," the officer said, consulting some figures, "We'll see a merry hell-fire in the next few minutes."

Ten minutes later, the red star exploded.

It cracked into three separate pieces. They held that position, each section racing from red to violet. That changed blindingly to magnesium white. The glare smashed at the eyeballs. The three pieces in turn shattered each other as they puffed up. Then the whole spurted into a violence that lighted all the black sky with recurring, silently throbbing sheets of shattering luminescence.

The stars were blotted out in that primeval surf of untamed energy.

The planet Worta was caught, flamed in glory for the small part of a second.

The big space-ship trembled in every beam and partition as the wave-front of exploding light reached it.

_Distress signal!_