"Don't be inquisitive," snapped the old man. "Maybe I proved to Bruno
that he didn't really exist. To hell with it!"
The rocket reached its constant speed. Douglas radioed back: "_All's
well. Sweet calculating, Pop. I'll tell the Rocket Officials back at
Marsport. They'll be glad to know about you. Sweet, sweet calculating.
Thanks. How goes it? I said--how goes it? Hey, Pop! Pop?_"
Nibley raised a trembling hand and waved it at nothing. The ship was
gone. He couldn't even see the jet-wash now, he could only feel that
hard metal movement out there among the stars, going on and on through
a course he had set for it. He couldn't speak. There was just emotion
in him. He had finally, by God, heard a compliment from a mechanic of
radar-computators!
[Illustration: _Nibley raised a trembling hand and waved it at
nothing._]
He waved his hand at nothing. He watched nothing moving on and on into
the crossed orbits of other invisible nothings. The silence was now
complete.
He put his hand down. Now he had only to chart that one last personal
orbit. The one he had wanted to finish only in space and not grounded
back on Mars.
It didn't take lightning calculation to set it out for certain.
Life and death were the parabolic ends to his trajectory. The long
life, first swinging in from darkness, arcing to the inevitable
perihelion, and now moving back out, out and away--
Into the soft, encompassing dark.
"By God," he thought weakly, quietly. "Right up to the last, my
reputation's good. Never fluked a calculation yet, and I never will...."
He didn't.