So I crawled to reach the engines and I left a dark death-trail behind me and I slept with the engines in my arms. And my body, my direct-intake, energy-eating body sucked the power that was needed from the flaming core of the reaction chambers.
And I am whole again.
I am back in my breath-and-blood body once again and I can go back to Earth.
He crawled out of the engine room and stood on his two feet.
Faint starlight came through the visionplates and scattered like jewel dust along the floor and walls. And there were two huddled shapes, one in the middle of the floor and another in a corner.
His mind took them in and nosed them as a dog would nose a bone and in a little while he remembered what they were. The humanity within him shivered at the black, sprawled shapes, but another part of him, a cold, hard inner core, stood calculating and undismayed in the face of death.
He moved forward on slow feet and slowly knelt beside one of the bodies. It must be Case, he thought, for Case was thin and tall. But he could not see the face and he did not wish to see the face, for in some dark corner of his mind he still remembered what the faces had been like.
His hands went down and searched, winnowing through the clothing. He made a tiny pile of things he found and finally he found the thing he was looking for.
Squatting on his heels, he opened the book to the title page and it was the same as the one he carried in his pocket. The same except for a single line of type, the tiny line at the very bottom.
And the line said: