The Comet Drivers

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"Passing Rigel on our left, sir," reported the Canopan pilot standing in the control room beside me.

I nodded. "We'll sight the Patrol's cruisers soon, then," I told him. "I ordered them to mass beyond Rigel, just outside the galaxy's edge."

Together we strained our eyes into the impenetrable blackness of space that lay before us. To the left, in that blackness, there burned the great white sun of Rigel, like a brilliant ball of diamond fire, while to our right and behind us there flamed at a greater distance red Betelgeuse, and blue-white Vega, and Castor's twin golden suns, all the galaxy's gathered suns stretching in a great mass there at our backs. Even then, though, our cruiser was flashing out over the edge of the galaxy's great disk-like swarm of stars, and as white Rigel dropped behind us to the left there lay before us only the vast, uncharted deeps of outer space.

Gazing forward into those black depths our eyes could make out, faint and inconceivably far, the few little patches of misty light that we knew were remote galaxies of suns like the one behind us, unthinkably distant universes like our own. In the blackness before us, too, there shone a single great point of crimson light, burning through the blackness of the outer void like a great red eye. It was toward this crimson point that I and the great-headed, bodiless Canopan pilot beside me were grazing, somberly and silently, as our cruiser hummed on. Then as he shifted his gaze there came from him a low exclamation, and I turned to see that a great swarm of gleaming points had appeared in the blackness close before us, resolving as we flashed on toward them into a far-flung, motionless swarm of long, gleaming cruisers like our own.

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