Explore "The Comet-Drivers" by Edmond Hamilton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Sweeping in toward the galaxy's gathered suns, days later, our great cruiser fleet slowed, halted, hung motionless outside the galaxy's edge once more. Before us flamed great white Rigel, as it had flamed -- how long it seemed before! -- when Gor Han and Jurt Tul and Najus Nar had gathered in the control room of my cruiser, at the start of our mad journey toward the comet. Now that comet was but a vast, faint cloud of radiance far in the void behind us. And now, too, it was Gor Han and Jurt Tul that stood before me, in the cruiser's silent control room.
The cruisers about us had massed into two great divisions, since here at the galaxy's edge Gor Han and Jurt Tul were to leave me, taking up once more their duties in the ceaseless watch of the Interstellar Patrol, with for me my work as Chief in the headquarters at Canopus. The frantic joy that would be shaking the galaxy's peoples to see the shadow of doom thus lifted from them, the frantic gratitude that we might claim -- in these we had no interest now, wanting only to take up once more the great Patrol's endless work. So now the cruisers of my two friends hung waiting beneath my own, as we paused in silence at the moment of parting.