EPILOGUE
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.