"It may be. But it doesn't matter, really."
They had each other. It was enough. Even though they could never be as
close to each other as the new race was close. They were separate, with
a gulf always between their inmost thoughts, but they could bridge that
gulf, sometimes.
He turned back to the controls and his fingers tightened. The last line
of the poem shouted in his mind, and he laughed, for he knew finally
what the poet had meant, what the old race had lived for. _We have cast
off the planets like outgrown toys, and now we want the stars...._
He pulled the lever back and the ship sprang free. A terrible weight
pressed against him, crushing him, stifling him. But still he laughed,
because he was one of the old race, and he was happy.
And the meaning of his life lay in the search itself.
* * * * *
They stood staring up at the ship until it was only a tiny speck in the
sky, and then they looked away from it, at each other. A wave of
perception swept among them, drawing them closer to each other in the
face of something they couldn't understand.
"Why did they go?" Abbot asked, in his mind.
"Why did any of the old race go?" Walden answered.
The sunlight flashed off the ship, and then it was gone.
"It's not surprising that the old race died," Abbot said. "They were
brilliant, in their way, and yet they did such strange things. Their
lives seemed so completely meaningless...."
Walden didn't answer for a moment. His eyes searched the sky for a last
glimpse of the ship, but there was nothing at all. He sighed, and he
looked at Abbot, and then past him, at all the others.
"I wonder," he said, "how long it will be before some other race says
the same thing about us."
No one answered. He turned and walked away from them, across the
trampled flowers, toward the museum and the great empty vault where the
starship had waited for so long.