ad run his string out, and he knew it. When no
intra-Mercurial satellite showed up, physically or on detector-screens,
there was no further lie to tell. He drove his mind out and away, to the
cold planets wheeling on the fringes of Sol's light, and he sweated, and
prayed, and hoped that nothing had gone wrong. And suddenly the cloak
was dropped, and he saw a lonesome chip of rock beyond Pluto, all
hollowed out for shops and living quarters, and the great ship standing
in the mile-long plain, with the stars all drifted overhead. And the
ship lifted from the plain, circled upward, and suddenly was not.

Hyrst was bitterly sorry that he was not aboard. But he told Bellaver,
"You can stop looking now. They've got away."

He watched Bellaver die, standing erect on his feet, still breathing,
but dying inside with the last outgoing of hope.

"I thought you were lying," he said, "but it was the only chance I had."
He nodded, looking toward the shuttered port with the insufferable blaze
outside. He said, in a flat, dead voice, "If you were put out here,
bound, in a lifeboat, headed toward the Sun--Yes. I could make up a
story to fit that."

In the same toneless voice, he called his men. And suddenly the yacht
lurched over shuddering in the backwash of some tremendous energy. Hyrst
and the others were flung scattering against the bulk-heads, and the
lights went out, and the instruments went dead.

Beyond the port, on the unshuttered side away from the Sun, a vast dark
shape had materialized out of nothing, to hang close in space beside the
yacht.

Hyrst heard in his mind, strong and clear, the voice of Shearing saying,
"Didn't I tell you the brotherhood stands by its own? Besides, we
couldn't make a liar out of you, now could we?"

Hyrst began to laugh, just a little bit hysterically. He told Bellaver,
"There's your starship. And Shearing says if I'm not alive when he comes
aboard to get me, that they won't be as careful about warping space when
they go away as they were when they came."

Bellaver did not say anything. He sat on the deck where the shock had
thrown him, not speaking. He was still sitting there when Hyrst passed
through the airlock into the starship's boat, and he did not move even
when the great ship vanished silently into whatever mysterious
ultra-space the minds of the Lazarites had unlocked, outbound for the
limitless freedom of the universe, where the wheeling galaxies thunder
on forever across infini