A rapid health check at the Station Hospital revealed that the weakness of Holt and his companions was of a nature which only time and slow, careful exercise of the muscular faculties could cure. The doctors in each case decided that home influences would soonest overcome the psychic handicaps imposed upon their patients' mental and spiritual functionings. Oddly enough, Svetla, the Martian, had withstood the ordeal with less disturbance than his Earthling companions. This was attributed to his lifetime having been passed under weaker gravity conditions than they, as well as to the enormous inner resources of his highly developed brain and spirit. The notes he had made of his observations of the actions and behavior of his companions were for many months thereafter a fruitful source of psychological data concerning maturity coefficients as affected by the most stressful conditions.
Gary Holt, in the capacious quarters occupied by Braden, began towards evening to recover his spirits and energies enough to relate to Catherine some of the details of the journey of his lone ship back towards her home planet.
As they coasted through the solar system, it had become apparent to the navigator, Royer, that the original track had not been followed with sufficient accuracy to bring them to their vital goal. Three corrective maneuvers had been necessary, largely straining their scanty reserves of propellants. When it came to the maneuver of adaptation to the Earth orbit, it had been essential to jettison everything not absolutely necessary to sustain life within the desperate Polaris. This had included much food, books, instruments, pressure suits, water, radio equipment, and even much of reserve oxygen supply. Even then, they lacked enough propellant to put them back into the bi-hourly orbit around Earth, which had so ideally served for the departure. They had to choose the cheapest maneuver possible and this.proved to be an entry into a satellite orbit some 30,000 kilometers distant. The velocity change required for this maneuver was some 500 meters per second lower than that which would have put her into the original orbit of departure. With radio equipment jettisoned, Polaris' despairing crew was reduced to employing their solar reflector, ordinarily used for electric current generation, as a heliograph. It had been largely a matter of luck that Lunetta had intercepted the blinker signals. The most dreadful hours of his life, Gary said, were the three days they had spent on reduced rations and with their oxygen supply dwindling while they circled helplessly the home planet for which they longed so intensely.
Gradually recovering his energies under his wife's tender ministrations, Holt stubbornly resisted all reporters and other influences which would have beguiled him from the restful solitude of Christmas Island until Knight and his five Mars vessels reentered the orbit from which Sinus rockets would ferry their crews and Martian guests back to the base. For Catherine, the 43 restful days were all too short, although much of the time, her husband's thoughts remained with the space crews in their lonely nacelles. When, a day or so before the increasingly strong radio signals from Knight's squadron set the exact day and hour of their entrance into the orbit, four Sirius ships climbed aloft for the joyous task of picking up the spacefarers, Holt's strength of both body and spirit had so far returned that he insisted upon a last voyage with one of the vessels into the outer marches of Earth's gravitational influence and to bid a final adieu to the interstellar void which had been the fateful arbiter of his life. With his own eyes, he witnessed Knight's five Mars ships sweep into their Earth orbit in a neat squadron maneuver of about a minute's duration.
No sooner did the busy bees from the four Sirius vessels snap into the guide rails of the returning squadron than busy and enthusiastic hands loaded the various Martian mementos into them. Immediately thereafter, and with their two Martian guests in the lead, the homesick but cheerful men were urging the captains of the ferries to make all haste to the Christmas Island landing strip.
Once aground, ovation after ovation, celebration after celebration was their log. Soon Holt was on the road with his Martian passengers, but as the wife of a VIP, Katy was urged to taste his triumph with him, and uncomplainingly and gaily did so.
Triumphal entry after triumphal entry to towns and cities, banquet after banquet overwhelmed Braden, Spencer, Holt, and their companions.
It was during one of the more festive of the banquets that it happened.
Spencer, cigar in hand, had just responded to the conventional toast to the future of interplanetary commerce. He slumped, rather than seated himself. His bald skull fell forward upon the table. The last of his villainous cigars dropped from his failing fingers, for the fighting heart which had borne him through the interplanetary battle had stopped.
The spark was extinguished which had lit the fire of enthusiasm for space travel more than a generation ago.
A few days later, Spencer was buried in the National Cemetery at Arlington. Holt stood with Catherine beside the open grave, his now grizzled locks shaken by the Autumn wind. Again he paid a tribute to a coworker in space, this time to the man who had also been a paternal friend: "Brace Spencer's restless spirit and his life of combat opened the reaches of Heaven to mankind. It was he who forged those wondrous tools which bore us safely among the stars. It was his vision which opened our eyes to life in the universe.
"His restless spirit has now returned to the God who inspired Bruce Spencer's creations.
"His ships will sail on through space and their bridge with our outer brethren will become strong and great. A new community of fate will overcome space and we and our outer brethren will become one.
"Bruce Spencer's ships carried us safely to the Moon's dead landscapes, where we saw a heavenly body which cannot support life. They bore us to the fervid culture of Mars, where we learned the full capabilities of man to survive when his planet ages and he can no longer enjoy a life in nature. There we saw the declining glory of a setting civilization.
"Eons from today, Bruce Spencer's ships will carry our descendants from an aging Earth, no longer capable of sheltering them, to a young, new home star where they may found a new future.
"His immortal creations will have given mortal man an immortal future."
SCIENTIFIC APPENDIX
Acknowledgements are due
Mr. Krafft Ehricke Dr. Hans Friedrich
Dr. Josef Jenissen Dr. Joachim Muehlner
Dr. Adolf Thiel Dr. Carl Wagner
for their valuable contribution to the preparation of the following pages.
