The erstwhile overlord and his wife sat upon an ordinary davenport in
their own home, facing a fireplace built by human labor, within which
nature-grown logs burned cracklingly. Dorothy wriggled luxuriously,
fitting her gorgeous auburn head even more snugly into the curve of
Seaton's mighty shoulder, her supple body even more closely into the
embrace of his brawny arm.
"It's funny, isn't it, lover, the way things turn out? Space ships
and ordinary projectors and forces and things are all right, but I'm
awfully glad that you turned that horrible Brain over to the Galactic
Council in Norlamin and said you'd never build another. Maybe I
shouldn't say it, but it's ever so much nicer to have you just a man
again, instead of a--well, a kind of a god or something."
"I'm glad of it, too, Dorothy mine--I couldn't hold the pose. When I
got so mad at DuQuesne that I had to throw away the headset I realized
that I never could get good enough to be trusted with that much
dynamite."
"We're both really human, and I'm glad of it. It's funny, too," she
went on dreamily, "the way we jumped around and how much we missed.
From here across thousands of Solar Systems to Osnome, and from
Norlamin across thousands of Galaxies to Valeron. And yet we haven't
seen either Mars or Venus, our next-door neighbors, and there are lots
of places on Earth, right in our own back yard, that we haven't seen
yet, either."
"Well, since we're going to stick around here for a while, maybe we can
catch up on our local visitings."
"I'm glad that you are getting reconciled to the idea; because where
you go I go, and if I can't go you can't, either, so you've _got_ to
stay on Earth for a while, because Richard Ballinger Seaton the Second
is going to be born right here, and not off in space somewhere!"
"Sure he is, sweetheart. I'm with you, all the way--you're a blinding
flash and a deafening report, dear little girl friend, and, as I may
have intimated previously, I love you."
"Just as I love you--it's wonderful, isn't it, how supremely happy you
and I are? I wish more people could be like us--more of them will be,
too, won't they, after this new planetary government has shown them
what coöperation can do?"
"They're bound to, dear. It'll take time, of course--racial hates and
fears cannot be overcome in a day--but the people of our old Earth are
not too dumb to learn."
Auburn head close to brown, they stared into the flickering flames in
silence; the wonderfully satisfying silence of perfect comradeship,
perfect sympathy, perfect understanding, perfect and perfected love.
For these two the problems of life were few and small.