e safe,
routine job."

"Not back to Ragnarok," Lake said. "With metals and supplies from other
worlds they'll be able to do a lot there but the battle is already won.
There will be left only the peaceful development--building a town at the
equator for Big Winter, leveling land, planting crops. We could never be
satisfied with that kind of a life."

"No," he said, and felt his own restlessness stir in protest at the
thought of settling down in some safe and secure environment. "Not
Athena or Earth or Ragnarok--not any world we know."

"How long until we're finished with the Gerns?" Lake asked. "Ten years?
We'll still be young then. Where will we go--all of us who fought the
Gerns and all of the ones in the future who won't want to live out their
lives on Ragnarok? Where is there a place for us--a world of our own?"

"Where do we find a world of our own?" he asked, and watched the star
clouds creep toward them in the viewscreen; tumbled and blazing and
immense beyond conception.

"There's a galaxy for us to explore," he said. "There are millions of
suns and thousands of worlds waiting for us. Maybe there are races out
there like the Gerns--and maybe there are races such as we were a
hundred years ago who need our help. And maybe there are worlds out
there with things on them such as no man ever imagined.

"We'll go, to see what's there. Our women will go with us and there will
be some worlds on which some of us will want to stay. And, always, there
will be more restless ones coming from Ragnarok. Out there are the
worlds and the homes for all of us."

"Of course," Lake said. "Beyond the space frontier ... where else would
we ever belong?"

It was all settled, then, and there was a silence as the battleship
plunged through hyperspace, the cruiser running beside her and their
drives moaning and thundering as had the drives of the _Constellation_
two hundred years before.

A voyage had been interrupted then, and a new race had been born. Now
they were going on again, to Athena, to Earth, to the farthest reaches
of the Gern Empire. And on, to the wild, unknown regions of space
beyond.

There awaited their worlds and there awaited their destiny; to be a race
scattered across a hundred thousand light-years of suns, to be an empire
such as the galaxy had never known.

They, the restless ones, the unwanted and forgotten, the survivors.

THE END

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