Why does Clifford D. Simak's "Construction Shack" end so abruptly?

Question

Clifford D. Simak's "Construction Shack" is a 1973 short story, available in various places online and on archive.org, covering a manned expedition to Pluto where they discover evidence that the solar system was constructed, possibly badly. In my mind, the story ends very abruptly, and I can't tell if it was supposed to be because something happened, or because Simak just wanted to leave us with a slice of life regarding the mystery.

I tried to envision it. A construction shack set down in a cloud of dust and gas. Engineers who may have worked for millennia to put together star and planets, to key into them certain factors that still would be at work, billions of years later.
Tyler said they had bungled and perhaps they had. But maybe not with Venus. Maybe Venus had been built to different specifications. Maybe it had been designed to be the way it was. Perhaps, a billion years from now, when humanity might well be gone from Earth, a new life and a new intelligence would rise on Venus.
Maybe not with Venus, maybe with none of the others, either. We could not pretend to know.
Tyler was still going through the sheets.
"Look here," he was yelling. "Look here, the bunglers—"

Was there any contemporary review, maybe with input from Simak, indicating why it ends in the middle of a statement?

DavidW · Accepted Answer

I don't read this as suggesting that something suddenly happened to the crew.  The story is clearly being related by Hunt; besides the first-person viewpoint, the part where he explains their feelings feels retrospective and doesn't really fit with a story that's taking place at the moment it is being told:

It isn't homesickness that you feel.  It's more like never having had a home.  Of never having belonged anywhere.  You get over it, of course—or come to live with it.

Further confirmation that the crew survived is that the narrator mentions events that followed the story, that must have followed the crew's return to the Moon:

On the first sheet were diagrams of some sort, drawings and what might have been specifications written into the diagrams and along the margins.  The specifications, of course, meant nothing to us (although later some were puzzled out and mathematicians and chemists were able to figure out some of the formulas and equations).

I think this is being cut off because the author is allowing us to imagine what the next blunder might have been.  It would be very hard to top the construction crew messing up the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, the biosphere of Mars and the entire 5th planet, so Simak doesn't even try.

Why does Clifford D. Simak's "Construction Shack" end so abruptly?

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