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THE COLORS OF SPACE By
Marion Zimmer Bradley
CHAPTER ONE
The Lhari spaceport didn't belong on Earth.
Bart Steele had thought that, a long time ago, when he first saw it. He
had been just a kid then; twelve years old, and all excited about seeing
Earth for the first time--Earth, the legendary home of mankind before
the Age of Space, the planet of Bart's far-back ancestors. And the first
thing he'd seen on Earth, when he got off the starship, was the Lhari
spaceport.
And he'd thought, right then, _It doesn't belong on Earth._
He'd said so to his father, and his father's face had gone strange,
bitter and remote.
"A lot of people would agree with you, Son," Captain Rupert Steele had
said softly. "The trouble is, if the Lhari spaceport wasn't on Earth, we
wouldn't be on Earth either. Remember that."
Bart remembered it, five years later, as he got off the strip of moving
sidewalk. He turned to wait for Tommy Kendron, who was getting his
baggage off the center strip of the moving roadway. Bart Steele and
Tommy Kendron had graduated together, the day before, from the Space
Academy of Earth. Now Tommy, who had been born on the ninth planet of
the star Capella, was taking the Lhari starship to his faraway home, and
Bart's father was coming back to Earth, on the same starship, to meet
his son.
_Five years,_ Bart thought. _That's a long time. I wonder if Dad will
know me?_
"Let me give you a hand with that stuff, Tommy."
"I can manage," Tommy chuckled, hefting the plastic cases. "They don't
allow you much baggage weight on the Lhari ships. Certainly not more
than I can handle."
The two lads stood in front of the spaceport gate for a minute. Over the
gate, which was high and pointed and made of some clear colorless
material like glass, was a jagged symbol resembling a flash of
lightning; the sign, in Lhari language, for the home world of the Lhari.
They walked through the pointed glass gate, and stood for a moment, by
mutual consent, looking down over the vast expanse of the Lhari
spaceport.
This had once been a great desert. Now it was all floored in with some
strange substance that was neither glass, metal nor concrete; it looked
like gleaming crystal--though it felt soft underfoot--and in the glare
of the noonday sun, it gave back the glare in a million rainbow flashes.
Tommy put his hands up to his eyes to shield them. "The Lhari must have
funny eyes, if they can stand all this glare!"
Inside the glass gate, a man in a guard's uniform gave them each a pair
of dark glasses. "Put them on now, boys. And don't look directly at the
ship when it lands."
Tommy hooked the earpieces of the dark glasses over his ears, and sighed
with relief. Bart frowned, but finally put them on. Bart's mother had
been a Mentorian--from the planet Mentor, of the star Deneb, a hundred
times brighter than the sun. Bart had her eyes. But Mentorians weren't
popular on Earth, and Bart had learned to be quiet about his mother.
Through the dark lenses, the glare was only a pale gleam. Far out in the
very center of the spaceport, a high, clear-glass skyscraper rose,
catching the sunlight in a million colors. Around the building, small
copters and robotcabs veered, discharging passengers; and the moving
sidewalks were crowded with people coming and going. Here and there in
the crowd, standing out because of their height and the silvery metallic
cloaks they wore, were the strange tall figures of the Lhari.
"Well, how about going down?" Tommy glanced impatiently at his
timepiece. "Less than half an hour before the starship touches down."
"All right. We can get a sidewalk over here." Reluctantly, Bart tore his
eyes from the fascinating spectacle, and followed Tommy, stepping onto
one of the sidewalks. It bore them down a long, sloping ramp toward the
floor of the spaceport, then sped toward the glass skyscraper; came to
rest at the wide pointed doors, depositing them in the midst of the
crowd. The jagged lightning flash was there over the doors of the
building, and the words:
HERE, BY THE GRACE OF THE LHARI, IS THE DOORWAY TO ALL THE STARS.
Bart remembered, as if it were yesterday, how he and his father had
first passed through this doorway. And his father, looking up, had said
under his breath "Not for always, Son. Someday men will have a doorway
to the stars, and the Lhari won't be standing in the door."
Inside the building, it was searingly bright. The high open rotunda was
filled with immense mirrors, and glass ramps running up and down, moving
staircases, confusing signs and flashing lights on tall oddly shaped
pillars. The place was crowded with men from all over the planet, but
the dark glasses they all wore gave them a strange sort of family
resemblance.
Tommy said, "I'd better check my reservations."
Bart nodded. "Meet you on the upper level later," he said, and got on a
moving staircase that soared slowly upward, past level after level,
toward the information desk located on the topmost mezzanine.
The staircase moved slowly, and Bart had plenty of time to see
everything. On the step immediately in front of him, two Lhari were
standing; with their backs turned, they might almost have been men.
Unusually tall, unusually thin, but men. Then Bart amended that
mentally. The Lhari had two arms, two legs and a head apiece--they were
that much like men. Their faces had two eyes, two ears, and a nose and
mouth, all in the right places. But the similarity ended there.
They had skin of a curious pale silvery gray, and pale, pure-white hair
rising in what looked like a feathery crest. The eyes were long and
slanting, the forehead high and narrow, the nose delicately thin and
chiseled with long vertically slit nostrils, the ears long, pointed and
lobeless. The mouth looked almost human, though the chin was abnormally
pointed. The hands would almost have passed inspection as human
hands--except for the long, triangular nails curved over the fingertips
like the claws of a cat. They wore skin-tight clothes of some metallic
silky stuff, and long flowing gleaming silvery capes. They looked
unearthly, elfin and strange, and in their own way they were beautiful.
The two Lhari in front of Bart had been talking softly, in their fast
twittering speech; but as the hum of the crowds on the upper levels grew
louder, they raised their voices, and Bart could hear what they were
saying. He was a little surprised to find that he could still understand
the Lhari language. He hadn't heard a word of it in years--not since his
Mentorian mother died. The Lhari would never guess that he could
understand their speech. Not one human in a million could speak or
understand a dozen words of Lhari, except the Mentorians.
"Do you really think that _human_--" the first Lhari spoke the word as
if it were a filthy insult--"will have the temerity to come in by this
ship?"
"No reasonable being can tell what _humans_ will do," said the second
Lhari. "But then, no reasonable being can tell what our own Port
Authorities will do either! If the message had only reached us sooner,
it would have been easier. Now I suppose it will have to clear through a
dozen officials and a dozen different kinds of formalities."
The younger Lhari sounded angry. "And we have only a description--no
name, nothing! How do they expect us to do anything under those
conditions? What I can't understand is how it ever happened, or how the
man managed to get away. What worries me is the possibility that he may
have communicated with others we don't know about. Those bungling fools
who let the first man get away can't even be sure--"
"Do not speak of it here," said the old Lhari sharply. "There are
Mentorians in the crowd who might understand us." He turned and looked
straight at Bart, and Bart felt as if the slanted strange eyes were
looking right through to his bones. The Lhari said, in Universal, "Who
are you, boy? What iss your businesssses here?"
Bart replied in the same language, politely, "My father's coming in on
this ship. I'm looking for the information desk."
"Up there," said the old Lhari, pointing with a clawed hand, and lost
interest in Bart. He said to his companion, in their own language,
"Always, I regret these episodes. I have no malice against humans. I
suppose even this Vegan that we are seeking has young, and a mate, who
will regret his loss."
"Then he should not have pried into Lhari matters," said the younger
Lhari fiercely. "If they'd killed him right away--"
The soaring staircase swooped up to the top level; the two Lhari stepped
off and mingled swiftly with the crowd, being lost to sight. Bart
whistled in dismay as he got off and turned toward the information desk.
A Vegan! Some poor guy from his own planet was in trouble with the
Lhari. He felt a cold, crawling chill down his insides. The Lhari had
spoken regretfully, but the way they'd speak of a fly they couldn't
manage to swat fast enough. Sooner or later you had to get down to it,
they just weren't human!
Here on Earth, nothing much could happen, of course. They wouldn't let
the Lhari hurt anyone--then Bart remembered his course in Universal Law.
The Lhari spaceport in every system, by treaty, was Lhari territory.
Once you walked beneath the lightning-flash sign, the authority of the
planet ceased to function; you might as well be on that unbelievably
remote world in another galaxy that was the Lhari home planet--that
world no human had ever seen. On a Lhari spaceport, or on a Lhari ship,
you were under the jurisdiction of Lhari law.
Tommy stepped off a moving stair and joined him. "The ship's on time--it
reported past Luna City a few minutes ago. I'm thirsty--how about a
drink?"
There was a refreshment stand on this level; they debated briefly
between orange juice and a drink with a Lhari name that meant simply
_cold sweet_, and finally decided to try it. The name proved
descriptive; it was very cold, very sweet and indescribably delicious.
"Does this come from the Lhari world, I wonder?"
"I imagine it's synthetic," Bart said.
"I suppose it won't _hurt_ us?"
Bart laughed. "They wouldn't serve it to us if it would. No, men and
Lhari are alike in a lot of ways. They breathe the same air. Eat about
the same food." Their bodies were adjusted to about the same gravity.
They had the same body chemistry--in fact, you couldn't tell Lhari blood
from human, even under a microscope. And in the terrible Orion Spaceport
wreck sixty years ago, doctors had found that blood plasma from humans
could be used for wounded Lhari, and vice versa, though it wasn't safe
to transfuse whole blood. But then, even among humans there were five
blood types.
And yet, for all their likeness, they were _different_.
Bart sipped the cold Lhari drink, seeing himself in the mirror behind
the refreshment stand; a tall teen-ager, looking older than his
seventeen years. He was lithe and well muscled from five years of sports
and acrobatics at the Space Academy, he had curling red hair and gray
eyes, and he was almost as tall as a Lhari.
_Will Dad know me? I was just a little kid when he left me here, and now
I'm grown-up._
Tommy grinned at him in the mirror. "What are you going to do, now we've
finished our so-called education?"
"What do you think? Go back to Vega with Dad, by Lhari ship, and help
him run Vega Interplanet. Why else would I bother with all that
astrogation and math?"
"You're the lucky one, with your father owning a dozen ships! He must be
almost as rich as the Lhari."
Bart shook his head. "It's not that easy. Space travel inside a system
these days is small stuff; all the real travel and shipping goes to the
Lhari ships."
It was a sore point with everyone. Thousands of years ago, men had
spread out from Earth--first to the planets, then to the nearer stars,
crawling in ships that could travel no faster than the speed of light.
They had even believed that was an absolute limit--that nothing in the
universe could exceed the speed of light. It took years to go from Earth
to the nearest star.
But they'd done it. From the nearer stars, they had sent out colonizing
ships all through the galaxy. Some vanished and were never heard from
again, but some made it, and in a few centuries man had spread all over
hundreds of star-systems.
And then man met the people of the Lhari.
It was a big universe, with measureless millions of stars, and plenty of
room for more than two intelligent civilizations. It wasn't surprising
that the Lhari, who had only been traveling space for a couple of
thousand years themselves, had never come across humans before. But they
had been delighted to meet another intelligent race--and it was
extremely profitable.
Because men were still held, mostly, to the planets of their own
star-systems. Ships traveling between the stars by light-drive were rare
and ruinously expensive. But the Lhari had the warp-drive, and almost
overnight the whole picture changed. By warp-drive, hundreds of times
faster than light at peak, the years-long trip between Vega and Earth,
for instance, was reduced to about three months, at a price anyone could
pay. Mankind could trade and travel all over their galaxy, but they did
it on Lhari ships. The Lhari had an absolute, unbreakable monopoly on
star travel.
"That's what hurts," Tommy said. "It wouldn't do us any good to have the
star-drive. Humans can't stand faster-than-light travel, except in
cold-sleep."
Bart nodded. The Lhari ships traveled at normal speeds, like the regular
planetary ships, inside each star-system. Then, at the borders of the
vast gulf of emptiness between stars, they went into warp-drive; but
first, every human on board was given the cold-sleep treatment that
placed them in suspended animation, allowing their bodies to endure the
warp-drive.
He finished his drink. The increasing bustle in the crowds below them
told him that time must be getting short. A tall, impressive-looking
Lhari strode through the crowd, followed at a respectful distance by two
Mentorians, tall, redheaded humans wearing metallic cloaks like those of
the Lhari. Tommy nudged Bart, his face bitter.
"Look at those lousy Mentorians! How can they do it? Fawning upon the
Lhari that way, yet they're as human as we are! _Slaves_ of the Lhari!"
Bart felt the involuntary surge of anger, instantly controlled. "It's
not that way at all. My mother was a Mentorian, remember. She made five
cruises on a Lhari ship before she married my father."
Tommy sighed. "I guess I'm just jealous--to think the Mentorians can
sign on the Lhari ship as crew, while you and I will never pilot a ship
between the stars. What did she do?"
"She was a mathematician. Before the Lhari met up with men, they used a
system of mathematics as clumsy as the old Roman numerals. You have to
admire them, when you realize that they learned stellar navigation with
their old system, though most ships use human math now. And of course,
you know their eyes aren't like ours. Among other things, they're
color-blind. They see everything in shades of black or white or gray.
"So they found out that humans aboard their ships were useful. You
remember how humans, in the early days in space, used certain birds, who
were more sensitive to impure air than they were. When the birds keeled
over, they could tell it was time for humans to start looking over the
air systems! The Lhari use Mentorians to identify colors for them. And,
since Mentor was the first planet of humans that the Lhari had contact
with, they've always been closer to them."
Tommy looked after the two Mentorians enviously. "The fact is, I'd ship
out with the Lhari myself if I could. Wouldn't you?"
Bart's mouth twisted in a wry smile. "No," he said. "I could--I'm half
Mentorian, I can even speak Lhari."
"Why don't you? I would."
"Oh, no, you wouldn't," Bart said softly. "Not even very many Mentorians
will. You see, the Lhari don't trust humans too much. In the early days,
men were always planting spies on Lhari ships, to try and steal the
secret of warp-drive. They never managed it, but nowadays the Lhari give
all the Mentorians what amounts to a brainwashing--deep hypnosis, before
and after every voyage, so that they can neither look for anything that
might threaten the Lhari monopoly of space, nor reveal it--even under a
truth drug--if they find it out.
"You have to be pretty fanatical about space travel to go through that.
Oh, my mother could tell us a lot of things about her cruises with the
Lhari. The Lhari can't tell a diamond from a ruby, except by
spectrographic analysis, for instance. And she--"
A high gong note sounded somewhere, touching off an explosion of warning
bells and buzzers all over the enormous building. Bart looked up.
"The ship must be coming in to land."
"I'd better check into the passenger side," Tommy said. He stuck out his
hand. "Well, Bart, I guess this is where we say good-bye."
They shook hands, their eyes meeting for a moment in honest grief. In
some indefinable way, this parting marked the end of their boyhood.
"Good luck, Tom. I'm going to miss you."
They wrung each other's hands again, hard. Then Tommy picked up his
luggage and started down a sloping ramp toward an enclosure marked TO
PASSENGER ENTRANCE.
Warning bells rang again. The glare intensified until the glow in the
sky was unendurable, but Bart looked anyhow, making out the strange
shape of the Lhari ship from the stars.
It was huge and strange, glowing with colors Bart had never seen before.
It settled down slowly, softly: enormous, silent, vibrating, glowing;
then swiftly faded to white-hot, gleaming blue, dulling down through the
visible spectrum to red. At last it was just gleaming glassy Lhari-metal
color again. High up in the ship's side a yawning gap slid open,
extruding stairsteps, and men and Lhari began to descend.
Bart ran down a ramp and surged out on the field with the crowd. His
eyes, alert for his father's tall figure, noted with surprise that the
ship's stairs were guarded by four cloaked Lhari, each with a Mentorian
interpreter. They were stopping each person who got off the starship,
asking for identity papers. Bart realized he was seeing another segment
of the same drama he had overheard discussed, and wished he knew what it
was all about.
The crowd was thinning now. Robotcabs were swerving in, hovering above
the ground to pick up passengers, then veering away. The gap in the
starship's side was closing, and still Bart had not seen the tall, slim,
flame-haired figure of his father. The port on the other side of the
ship, he knew, was for loading passengers. Bart moved carefully through
the thinning crowd, almost to the foot of the stairs. One of the Lhari
checking papers stopped and fixed him with an inscrutable gray stare,
but finally turned away again.
Bart began really to worry. Captain Steele would never miss his ship!
But he saw only one disembarking passenger who had not yet been
surrounded by a group of welcoming relatives, or summoned a robotcab and
gone. The man was wearing Vegan clothes, but he wasn't Bart's father. He
was a fat little man, with ruddy cheeks and a fringe of curling gray
hair all around his bald dome. _Maybe he'd know if there was another
Vegan on the ship._
Then Bart realized that the little fat man was staring straight at him.
He returned the man's smile, rather hesitantly; then blinked, for the
fat man was coming straight toward him.
"Hello, Son," the fat man said loudly. Then, as two of the Lhari started
toward him, the strange man did an incredible thing. He reached out his
two hands and grabbed Bart.
"Well, boy, you've sure grown," he said, in a loud, cheerful voice, "but
you're not too grown-up to give your old Dad a good hug, are you?" He
pulled Bart roughly into his arms. Bart started to pull away and stammer
that the fat man had made a mistake, but the pudgy hand gripped his
wrist with unexpected strength.
"Bart, listen to me," the stranger whispered, in a harsh fast voice. "Go
along with this or we're both dead. See those two Lhari watching us?
Call me Dad, good and loud, if you want to live. Because, believe me,
your life's in danger--right now!"
CHAPTER TWO
For a moment, pulled off balance in the fat stranger's hug, Bart
remained perfectly still, while the man repeated in that loud, jovial
voice, "How you've grown!" He let him go, stepping away a pace or two,
and whispered urgently, "Say something. And take that stupid look off
your face."
As he stepped back, Bart saw his eyes. In the chubby, good-natured red
face, the stranger's eyes were half-mad with fear.
In a split second, Bart remembered the two Lhari and their talk of a
fugitive. In that moment, Bart Steele grew up.
He stepped toward the man and took him quickly by the shoulders.
"Dad, you sure surprised me," he said, trying to keep his voice from
shaking. "Been such a long time, I'd--half forgotten what you looked
like. Have a good trip?"
"About like always." The fat man was breathing hard, but his voice
sounded firm and cheerful. "Can't compare with a trip on the old
_Asterion_ though." The _Asterion_ was the flagship of Vega Interplanet,
Rupert Steele's own ship. "How's everything?"
Beads of sweat were standing out on the man's ruddy forehead, and his
grip on Bart's wrist was so hard it hurt. Bart, grasping at random for
something to say, gabbled, "Too bad you couldn't get to my graduation. I
made th-third in a class of four hundred--"
The Lhari had surrounded them and were closing in.
The fat man took a deep breath or two, said, "Just a minute, Son," and
turned around. "You want something?"
The tallest of the Lhari--the old one, whom Bart had seen on the
escalator--looked long and hard at him. When they spoke Universal, their
voices were sibilant, but not nearly so inhuman.
"Could we trrrouble you to sssshow us your paperrrssss?"
"Certainly." Nonchalantly, the fat man dug them out and handed them
over. Bart saw his father's name printed across the top.
The Lhari gestured to a Mentorian interpreter: "What colorrr isss thisss
man's hairrr?"
The Mentorian said in the Lhari language, "His hair is _gray_." He used
the Universal word; there were, of course, no words for colors in the
Lhari speech.
"The man we sssseek has hair of _red_," said the Lhari. "And he isss
tall, not fat."
"The boy is tall and with _red_ hair," the Mentorian volunteered, and
the old Lhari made a gesture of disdain.
"This boy is twenty years younger than the man whose description came to
us. Why did they not give us a picture or at least a name?" He turned to
the other Lhari and said in their own shrill speech, "I suspected this
man because he was alone. And I had seen this boy on the upper mezzanine
and spoken with him. We watched him, knowing sooner or later the father
would seek him. Ask him." He gestured and the Mentorian said, "Who is
this man, you?"
Bart gulped. For the first time he noted the energon-ray shockers at the
belts of the four Lhari. He'd heard about those. They could stun--or
they could kill, and quite horribly. He said, "This is my father. You
want my cards, too?" He hauled out his identity papers. "My name's Bart
Steele."
The Lhari, with a gesture of disgust, handed them back. "Go, then,
father and son," he said, not unkindly.
"Let's get going, Son," said the little bald man. His hand shook on
Bart's, and Bart thought, _If we're lucky, we can get out of the port
before he faints dead away._ He said "I'll get a copter," and then,
feeling sorry for the stranger, gave him his arm to lean on. He didn't
know whether he was worried or scared. _Where was his father?_ Why did
this man have his dad's papers? Was his father hiding inside the Lhari
ship? He wanted to run, to burst away from the imposter, but the guy was
shaking so hard Bart couldn't just leave him standing there. If the
Lhari got him, he was a dead duck.
A copter swooped down, the pilot signaling. The little man said
hoarsely, "No. Robotcab."
Bart waved the copter away, getting a dirty look from the pilot, and
punched a button at the stand for one of the unmanned robotcabs. It
swung down, hovered motionless. Bart boosted the fat man in. Inside, the
man collapsed on the seat, leaning back, puffing, his hand pressed hard
to his chest.
"Punch a combo for Denver," he said hoarsely.
Bart obeyed, automatically. Then he turned on the man.
"It's your game, mister! Now tell me what's going on? _Where's my
father?_"
The man's eyes were half-shut. He said, gasping, "Don't ask me any
questions for a minute." He thumbed a tablet into his mouth, and
presently his breathing quieted.
"We're safe--for the minute. Those Lhari would have cut us down."
"You, maybe. I haven't done anything. Look, you," Bart said in sudden
rage, "you owe me some explanations. For all I know, you're a criminal
and the Lhari have every right to chase you! Why have you got my
father's papers? Did you steal them to get away from the Lhari? _Where's
my father?_"
"It's your father they were looking for, you young fool," said the man,
gasping hard. "Lucky they had only a description and not a name--but
they've probably got that by now, uncoded. We've only confused them for
a little while. But if you hadn't played along, they'd have had you
watched, and when they get hold of the name Steele--they will, sooner or
later, the people in the Procyon system--"
_"Where is my father?"_
"I hope I don't know," the fat man said. "If he's still where I left
him, he's dead. My name is Briscoe. Edmund Briscoe. Your father saved my
life years ago, never mind how. The less you know, the safer you'll be
for a while. His major worry just now is about you. He was afraid, if he
didn't turn up here, you'd take the first ship back to Vega. So he gave
me his papers and sent me to warn you--"
Bart shook his head. "It all sounds phony as can be. How do I know
whether to believe you or not?" His hand hovered over the robotcab
controls. "We're going straight to the police. If you're okay, they
won't turn you over to the Lhari. If you're not--"
"You young fool," said the fat man, with feeble violence, "there's no
_time_ for all that! Ask me questions--I can prove I know your father!"
"What was my mother's name?"
"Oh, God," Briscoe said, "I never saw her. I knew your father long
before you were born. Until he told me, I never knew he'd married or
had a son. I'd never have known you, except that you're the living
image--" He shook his head helplessly, and his breathing sounded hoarse.
"Bart, I'm a sick man, I'm going to die. I want to do what I came here
to do, because your father saved my life once when I was young and
healthy, and gave me twenty good years before I got old and fat and
sick. Win or lose, I won't live to see you hunted down like a dog, like
my own son--"
"Don't talk like that," Bart said, a creepy feeling coming over him. "If
you're sick, let me take you to a doctor."
Briscoe did not even hear. "Wait, there is something else. Your father
said, 'Tell Bart I've gone looking for the Eighth Color. Bart will know
what I mean.'"
"That's crazy. I don't know--"
He broke off, for the memory had come, full-blown:
_He was very young: five, six, seven. His mother, tall and slender and
very fair, was bending over a blueprint, pointing with a delicate finger
at something, straightening, saying in her light musical voice:_
_"The fuel catalyst--it's a strange color, a color you never saw
anywhere. Can you_ think _of a color that isn't red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, violet, indigo or some combination of them? It isn't any of
the colors of the spectrum at all. The fuel is a real eighth color."_
_And his father had used the phrase, almost adopted it. "When we know
what the eighth color is, we'll have the secret of the star-drive,
too!"_
Briscoe saw his face change, nodded weakly. "I see it means something to
you. Now will you do as I tell you? Within a couple of hours, they'll be
combing the planet for you, but by that time the ship I came in on will
have taken off again. They only stop a short time here, for mail,
passengers--no cargo. They may get under way again before all messages
are cleared and decoded." He stopped and breathed hard. "The Earth
authorities might protect you, but you would never be able to board a
Lhari ship again--and that would mean staying on Earth for the rest of
your life. You've got to get away before they start comparing notes.
Here." His hand went into his pockets. "For your hair. It's a dye--a
spray."
He pressed a button on the bulb in his hand; Bart gasped, feeling cold
wetness on his head. His own hand came away stained black.
"Keep still." Briscoe said irritably. "You'll need it at the Procyon end
of the run. Here." He stuck some papers into Bart's hand, then punched
some buttons on the robotcab's control. It wheeled and swerved so
rapidly that Bart fell against the fat man's shoulder.
"Are you crazy? What are you going to do?"
Briscoe looked straight into Bart's eyes. In his hoarse, sick voice, he
said, "Bart, don't worry about me. It's all over for me, whatever
happens. Just remember this. What your father is doing is _worth_ doing,
and if you start stalling, arguing, demanding explanations, you can foul
up a hundred people--and kill about half of them."
He closed Bart's fingers roughly over the papers. The robotcab hovered
over the spaceport. "Now listen to me, very carefully. When I stop the
cab, down below, jump out. Don't stop to say good-bye, or ask questions,
or anything else. Just get out, walk straight through the passenger door
and straight up the ramp of the ship. Show them that ticket, and get on.
Whatever happens, don't let anything stop you. Bart!" Briscoe shook his
shoulder. "Promise! Whatever happens, you'll _get on that ship_!"
Bart swallowed, feeling as if he'd been shoved into a silly
cops-and-robbers game. But Briscoe's urgency had convinced him. "Where
am I going?"
"All I have is a name--Raynor Three," Briscoe said, "and the message
about the Eighth Color. That's all I know." His mouth twisted again in
that painful gasp.
The cab swooped down. Bart found his voice. "But what then? Is Dad
there? Will I know--"
"I don't know any more than I've told you," Briscoe said. Abruptly the
robotcab came to a halt, swaying a little. Briscoe *** the door open,
gave Bart a push, and Bart found himself stumbling out on the ramp
beside the spaceport building. He caught his balance, looked around, and
realized that the robotcab was already climbing the sky again.
Immediately before him, neon letters spelled TO PASSENGER ENTRANCE
ONLY. Bart stumbled forward. The Lhari by the gate thrust out a
disinterested claw. Bart held up what Briscoe had shoved into his hand,
only now seeing that it was a thin wallet, a set of identity papers and a
strip of pink tickets.
"Procyon Alpha. Corridor B, straight through." The Lhari gestured, and
Bart went through the narrow passageway, came out at the other end, and
found himself at the very base of a curving stair that led up and up
toward a door in the side of the huge Lhari ship. Bart hesitated. In
another minute he'd be on his way to a strange sun and a strange world,
on what might well be the wild-goose chase of all time.
Passengers were crowding the steps behind him. Someone shouted suddenly,
"Look at that!" and someone else yelled, "Is that guy crazy?"
Bart looked up. A robotcab was swooping over the spaceport in wild,
crazy circles, dipping down, suddenly making a dart like an enraged wasp
at a little nest of Lhari. They ducked and scattered; the robotcab
swerved away, hovered, swooped back. This time it struck one of the
Lhari grazingly with landing gear and knocked him sprawling. Bart stood
with his mouth open, as if paralyzed.
_Briscoe! What was he doing?_
The fallen Lhari lay without moving. The robotcab moved in again, as if
for the kill, buzzing viciously overhead.
Then a beam of light arced from one of the drawn energon-ray tubes. The
robotcab glowed briefly red, then seemed to sag, sink together; then
puddled, a slag heap of molten metal, on the glassy floor of the port. A
little moan of horror came from the crowd, and Bart felt a sudden,
wrenching sickness. It had been like a game, a silly game of cops and
robbers, and suddenly it was as serious as melted death lying there on
the spaceport. _Briscoe!_
Someone shoved him and said, "Come on, quit gawking, kid. They won't
hold the ship all day just because some nut finds a new way to commit
suicide."
Bart, his legs numb, walked up the ramp. Briscoe had died to give him
this chance. Now it was up to him to make it worth having.
CHAPTER THREE
At the top of the ramp, a Lhari glanced briefly at his papers, motioned
him through. Bart passed through the airlock, and into a brightly lit
corridor half full of passengers. The line was moving slowly, and for
the first time Bart had a chance to think.
He had never seen violent death before. In this civilized world, you
didn't. He knew if he thought about Briscoe, he'd start bawling like a
baby, so he swallowed hard a couple of times, set his chin, and
concentrated on the trip to Procyon Alpha. That meant this ship was
outbound on the Aldebaran run--Proxima Centauri, Sirius, Pollux,
Procyon, Capella and Aldebaran.
The line of passengers was disappearing through a doorway. A woman ahead
of Bart turned and said nervously, "We won't be put into cold-sleep
right away, will we?"
He reassured her, remembering his inbound trip five years ago. "No, no.
The ship won't go into warp-drive until we're well past Pluto. It will
be several days, at least."
Beyond the doorway the lights dwindled, and a Mentorian interpreter took
his dark glasses, saying, "Kindly remove your belt, shoes and other
accessories of leather or metal before stepping into the decontamination
chamber. They will be separately decontaminated and returned to you.
Papers, please."
With a small twinge of fright, Bart surrendered them. Would the
Mentorian ask why he was carrying two wallets? Inside the other one, he
still had his Academy ID card which identified him as Bart Steele, and
if the Mentorian looked through them to check, and found out he was
carrying two sets of identity papers....
But the Mentorian merely dumped all his pocket paraphernalia, without
looking at it, into a sack. "Just step through here."
Holding up his trousers with both hands, Bart stepped inside the
indicated cubicle. It was filled with faint bluish light. Bart felt a
strong tingling and a faint electrical smell, and along his forearms
there was a slight prickling where the small hairs were all standing on
end. He knew that the invisible R-rays were killing all the
microorganisms in his body, so that no disease germ or stray fungus
would be carried from planet to planet.
The bluish light died. Outside, the Mentorian gave him back his shoes
and belt, handed him the paper sack of his belongings, and a paper cup
full of greenish fluid.
"Drink this."
"What is it?"
The medic said patiently, "Remember, the R-rays killed _all_ the
microorganisms in your body, including the good ones--the antibodies
that protect you against disease, and the small yeasts and bacteria that
live in your intestines and help in the digestion of your food. So we
have to replace those you need to stay healthy. See?"
The green stuff tasted a little brackish, but Bart got it down all
right. He didn't much like the idea of drinking a solution of "germs,"
but he knew that was silly. There was a big difference between disease
germs and helpful bacteria.
Another Mentorian official, this one a young woman, gave him a key with
a numbered tag, and a small booklet with WELCOME ABOARD printed
on the cover.
The tag was numbered 246-B, which made Bart raise his eyebrows. B class
was normally too expensive for Bart's father's modest purse. It wasn't
quite the luxury class A, reserved for planetary governors and
ambassadors, but it was plenty luxurious. Briscoe had certainly sent him
traveling in style!
B Deck was a long corridor with oval doors; Bart found one numbered 246,
and, not surprisingly, the key opened it. It was a pleasant little
cabin, measuring at least six feet by eight, and he would evidently have
it to himself. There was a comfortably big bunk, a light that could be
turned on and off instead of the permanent glow-walls of the cheaper
class, a private shower and toilet, and a placard on the walls informing
him that passengers in B class had the freedom of the Observation Dome
and the Recreation Lounge. There was even a row of buttons dispensing
synthetic foods, in case a passenger preferred privacy or didn't want to
wait for meals in the dining hall.
A buzzer sounded and a Mentorian voice announced, "Five minutes to Room
Check. Passengers will please remove all metal in their clothing, and
deposit in the lead drawers. Passengers will please recline in their
bunks and fasten the retaining straps before the steward arrives.
Repeat, passengers will please...."
Bart took off his belt, stuck it and his cuff links in the drawer and
lay down. Then, in a sudden panic, he got up again. His papers as Bart
Steele were still in the sack. He got them out, and with a feeling as if
he were crossing a bridge and burning it after him, tore up every scrap
of paper that identified him as Bart Steele of Vega Four, graduate of
the Space Academy of Earth. Now, for better or worse, he was--who _was_
he? He hadn't even looked at the new papers Briscoe had given him!
He glanced through them quickly. They were made out to David Warren
Briscoe, of Aldebaran Four. According to them, David Briscoe was twenty
years old, hair black, eyes hazel, height six foot one inch. Bart
wondered, painfully, if Briscoe had a son and if David Briscoe knew
where his father was. There was also a license, validated with four runs
on the Aldebaran Intrasatellite Cargo Company--planetary ships--with the
rank of Apprentice Astrogator; and a considerable sum of money.
Bart put the papers in his pants pocket and the torn-up scraps of his
old ones into the trashbin before he realized that they looked exactly
like what they were--torn-up legal identity papers and a broken plastic
card. _Nobody_ destroyed identity papers for any good reason. What could
he do?
Then he remembered something from the Academy. Starships were
closed-system cycles, no waste was discarded, but everything was
collected in big chemical tanks, broken down to separate elements,
purified and built up again into new materials. He threw the paper into
the toilet, worked the plastic card back and forth, back and forth until
he had wrenched it into inch-wide bits, and threw it after them.
The cabin door opened and a Mentorian said irritably, "Please lie down
and fasten your straps. I haven't all day."
Hastily Bart flushed the toilet and went to the bunk. Now everything
that could identify him as Bart Steele was on its way to the breakdown
tanks. Before long, the complex hydrocarbons and cellulose would all be
innocent little molecules of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen; they might turn
up in new combinations as sugar on the table!
The Mentorian grumbled, "You young people think the rules mean everybody
but you," and strapped him far too tightly into the bunk. Bart felt
resentful; just because Mentorians could work on Lhari ships, did they
have to act as if they owned everybody?
When the man had gone, Bart drew a deep breath. Was he really doing the
right thing?
If he'd refused to get out of the robotcab--
If he'd driven Briscoe straight to the police--
Then maybe Briscoe would still be alive. And now it was too late.
A warning siren went off in the ship, rising to hysterical intensity.
Bart thought, incredulously, _this is really happening_. It felt like a
nightmare. His father a fugitive from the Lhari. Briscoe dead. He
himself traveling, with forged papers, to a star he'd never seen.
He braced himself, knowing the siren was the last warning before
takeoff. First there would be the hum of great turbines deep in the
ship, then the crushing surge of acceleration. He had made a dozen trips
inside the solar system, but no matter how often he did it, there was
the strange excitement, the little pinpoint of fear, like an exotic
taste, that was almost pleasant.
The door opened and Bart grabbed a fistful of bed-ticking as two Lhari
came into the room.
One of them said, in their strange shrill speech, "This boy is the right
age."
Bart froze.
"You're seeing spies in every corner, Ransell," said the other, then in
Universal, "Could we trrouble you for your paperesses, sirr?"
Bart, strapped down and helpless, moved his head toward the drawer,
hoping his face did not betray his fear. He watched the two Lhari riffle
through his papers with their odd pointed claws.
"What isss your planet?"
Bart bit his lip, hard--he had almost said, "Vega Four."
"Aldebaran Four."
The Lhari said in his own language, "We should have Margil in here. He
actually saw them."
The other replied, "But I saw the machine that disintegrated. I still
say there was enough protoplasm residue for two bodies."
Bart fought to keep his face perfectly straight.
"Did anyone come into your cabin?" The Lhari asked in Universal.
"Only the steward. Why? Is something wrong?"
"There iss some thought that a stowaway might be on boarrd. Of courrrse
we could not allow that, anyone not prrroperly prrotected would die in
the first shift into warp-drive."
"Just the steward," Bart said again. "A Mentorian."
The Lhari said, eying him keenly, "You are ill? Or discommoded?"
Bart grasped at random for an excuse. "That--that stuff the medic made
me drink made me feel--sort of sick."
"You may send for a medical officer after acceleration," said the Lhari
expressionlessly. "The summoning bell is at your left."
They turned and went out and Bart gulped. Lhari, in person, checking the
passenger decks! Normally you never saw one on board; just Mentorians.
The Lhari treated humans as if they were too dumb to bother about. Well,
at least for once someone was acting as if humans were worthy
antagonists. _We'll show them--someday!_
But he felt very alone, and scared....
A low hum rose, somewhere in the ship, and Bart grabbed ticking as he
felt the slow surge. Then a violent sense of pressure popped his ear
drums, weight crowded down on him like an elephant sitting on his chest,
and there was a horrible squashed sensation dragging his limbs out of
shape. It grew and grew. Bart lay still and sweated, trying to ease his
uncomfortable position, unable to move so much as a finger. The Lhari
ships hit 12 gravities in the first surge of acceleration. Bart felt as
if he were spreading out, under the weight, into a puddle of
flesh--_melted flesh like Briscoe's_--
Bart writhed and bit his lip till he could taste blood, wishing he were
young enough to bawl out loud.
Abruptly, it eased, and the blood started to flow again in his numbed
limbs. Bart loosened his straps, took a few deep breaths, wiped his
face--wringing wet, whether with sweat or tears he wasn't sure--and sat
up in his bunk. The loudspeaker announced, "Acceleration One is
completed. Passengers on A and B Decks are invited to witness the
passing of the Satellites from the Observation Lounge in half an hour."
Bart got up and washed his face, remembering that he had no luggage with
him, not so much as a toothbrush.
At the back of his mind, packed up in a corner, was the continuing worry
about his father, the horror at Briscoe's ghastly death, the fear of the
Lhari; but he slammed the lid firmly on them all. For the moment he was
safe. They might be looking for Bart Steele by now, but they weren't
looking for David Briscoe of Aldebaran. He might just as well relax and
enjoy the trip. He went down to the Observation Lounge.
It had been darkened, and one whole wall of the room was made of clear
quartzite. Bart drew a deep breath as the vast panorama of space opened
out before him.
They were receding from the sun at some thousands of miles a minute.
Swirling past the ship, gleaming in the reflected sunlight like iron
filings moving to the motion of a magnet, were the waves upon waves of
cosmic dust--tiny free electrons, ions, particles of gas; free of the
heavier atmosphere, themselves invisible, they formed in their billions
into bright clouds around the ship; pale, swirling veils of mist. And
through their dim shine, the brilliant flares of the fixed stars burned
clear and steady, so far away that even the hurling motion of the ship
could not change their positions.
One by one he picked out the constellations. Aldebaran swung on the
pendant chain of Taurus like a giant ruby. Orion strode across the sky,
a swirling nebula at his belt. Vega burned, cobalt blue, in the heart of
the Lyre.
Colors, colors! Inside the atmosphere of Earth's night, the stars had
been pale white sparks against black. Here, against the misty-pale
swirls of cosmic dust, they burned with color heaped on color; the
bloody burning crimson of Antares, the metallic gold of Capella, the
sullen pulsing of Betelgeuse. They burned, each with its own inward
flame and light, like handfuls of burning jewels flung by some giant
hand upon the swirling darkness. It was a sight Bart felt he could watch
forever and still be hungry to see; the never-changing, ever-changing
colors of space.
Behind him in the darkness, after a long time, someone said softly,
"Imagine being a Lhari and not being able to see anything out there but
bright or brighter light."
A bell rang melodiously in the ship and the passengers in the lounge
began to stir and move toward the door, to stretch limbs cramped like
Bart's by tranced watching, to talk quickly of ordinary things.
"I suppose that bell means dinner," said a vaguely familiar voice at
Bart's elbow. "Synthetics, I suppose, but at least we can all get
acquainted."
The light from the undarkened hall fell on their faces as they moved
toward the door. "Bart! Why, it can't be!"
In utter dismay, Bart looked down into the face of Tommy Kendron.
In the rush of danger, he had absolutely forgotten that Tommy Kendron
was on this ship--to make his alias useless; Tommy was looking at him in
surprise and delight.
"Why didn't you tell me, or did you and your father decide at the last
minute? Hey, it's great that we can go part way together, at least!"
Bart knew he must cut this short very quickly. He stepped out into the
full corridor light so that Tommy could see his black hair.
"I'm sorry, you're confusing me with someone else."
"Bart, come off it--" Tommy's voice died out. "Sorry, I'd have sworn you
were a friend of mine."
Bart wondered suddenly, had he done the wrong thing? He had a feeling he
might need a friend. Badly.
Well, it was too late now. He stared Tommy in the eye and said, "I've
never seen you before in my life."
Tommy looked deflated. He stepped back slightly, shaking his head.
"Never saw such a resemblance. Are you a Vegan?"
"No," Bart lied flatly. "Aldebaran. David Briscoe."
"Glad to know you, Dave." With undiscourageable friendliness, Tommy
stuck out a hand. "Say, that bell means dinner, why don't we go down
together? I don't know a soul on the ship, and it looks like
luck--running into a fellow who could be my best friend's twin brother."
Bart felt warmed and drawn, but sensibly he knew he could not keep up
the pretense. Sooner or later, he'd give himself away, use some habitual
phrase or gesture Tommy would recognize.
Should he take a chance--reveal himself to Tommy and ask him to keep
quiet? No. This wasn't a game. One man was already dead. He didn't want
Tommy to be next.
There was only one way out. He said coldly, "thank you, but I have other
things to attend to. I intend to be very busy all through the voyage."
He spun on his heel and walked away before he could see Tommy's eager,
friendly smile turn hurt and defensive.
Back in his cabin, he gloomily dialed some synthetic jellies, thinking
with annoyance of the anticipated good food of the dining room. He knew
he couldn't risk meeting Tommy again, and drearily resigned himself to
staying in his cabin. It looked like an awfully boring trip ahead.
It was. It was a week before the Lhari ship went into warp-drive, and
all that time Bart stayed in his cabin, not daring to go to the
observation Lounge or dining hall. He got tired of eating synthetics
(oh, they were nourishing enough, but they were altogether
uninteresting) and tired of listening to the tapes the room steward got
him from the ship's library. By the time they had been in space a week,
he was so bored with his own company that even the Mentorian medic was a
welcome sight when he came in to prepare him for cold-sleep.
Bart had had the best education on Earth, but he didn't know precisely
how the Lhari warp-drive worked. He'd been told that only a few of the
Lhari understood it, just as the man who flew a copter didn't need to
understand Newton's Three Laws of Motion in order to get himself back
and forth to work.
But he knew this much; when the ship generated the frequencies which
accelerated it beyond the speed of light, in effect the ship went into a
sort of fourth dimension, and came out of it a good many light-years
away. As far as Bart knew, no human being had ever survived warp-drive
except in the suspended animation which they called cold-sleep. While
the medic was professionally reassuring him and strapping him in his
bunk, Bart wondered what humans would do with the Lhari star-drive if
they had it. Well, he supposed they could use automation in their ships.
The Mentorian paused, needle in hand. "Do you wish to be wakened for the
week we shall spend in each of the Proxima, Sirius and Pollux systems,
sir? You can, of course, be given enough drug to keep you in cold-sleep
until we reach the Procyon system."
Bart wondered if the room steward had mentioned the passenger so bored
with the trip that he didn't even visit the Observation Lounge. He felt
tempted--he was getting awfully tired of staring at the walls. On the
other hand, he wanted very much to see the other star-systems. When he
passed through them on the trip to Earth, he'd been too young to pay
much attention.
Firmly he put the temptation aside. Better not to risk meeting other
passengers, Tommy especially, if he decided he couldn't take the
boredom.
The needle went into his arm. He felt himself sinking into sleep, and,
in sudden panic, realized that he was helpless. The ship would touch
down on three worlds, and on any of them the Lhari might have his
description, or his alias! He could be taken off, drugged and
unconscious, and might never wake up! He tried to move, to protest, to
tell them he was changing his mind, but already he was unable to speak.
There was a freezing moment of intense, painful cold. Then he was
floating in what felt like waves of cosmic dust, swirling many-colored
before his eyes. And then there was nothing, no color, nothing at all
except the nowhere night of sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bart felt cold. He stirred, moved his head in drowsy protest; then
memory came flooding back, and in sudden panic he sat up, flinging out
his arms as if to ward away anyone who would lay hands on him.
"Easy!" said a soothing voice. A Mentorian--not the same Mentorian--bent
over him. "We have just entered the gravitational field of Procyon
planet Alpha, Mr. Briscoe. Touchdown in four hours."
Bart mumbled an apology.
"Think nothing of it. Quite a number of people who aren't used to the
cold-sleep drug suffer from minor lapses of memory. How do you feel
now?"
Bart's legs were numb and his hands tingled when he sat up; but his body
processes had been slowed so much by the cold-sleep that he didn't even
feel hungry; the synthetic jelly he'd eaten just before going to sleep
wasn't even digested yet.
When the Mentorian left for another cabin, Bart looked around, and
suddenly felt he would stifle if he stayed here another minute. He
wasn't likely to run into Tommy twice in a row, and if he did, well,
Tommy would probably remember the snub he'd had and stay away from Dave
Briscoe. And he wanted another sight of the stars--before he went into
worry and danger.
He went down to the Observation Lounge.
The cosmic dust was brighter out here, and the constellations looked a
little flattened. Textbook tables came back to him. He had traveled 47
light-years--he couldn't remember how many _billions_ of miles that was.
Even so, it was only the tiniest hop-skip-and-jump in the measureless
vastness of space.
The ship was streaking toward Procyon, a sol-type star, bright yellow;
the three planets, Alpha, Beta and Gamma, ringed like Saturn and veiled
in shimmering layers of cloud, swung against the night. Past them other
stars, brighter stars, faraway stars he would never see, glimmered
through the pale dust....
"Hello, Dave. Been space-sick all this time? Remember me? I met you
about six weeks ago in the lounge down here--just out from Earth."
_Oh, no!_ Bart turned, with a mental groan, to face Tommy. "I've been in
cold-sleep," he said. He _couldn't_ be rude again.
"What a dull way to face a long trip!" Tommy said cheerily. "I've
enjoyed every minute of it myself."
It was hard for Bart to realize that, for Tommy, their meeting had been
six weeks ago. It all seemed dreamlike. The closer he came to it, the
less he could realize that in a few hours he'd be getting off on a
strange world, with only the strange name _Raynor Three_ as a guide. He
felt terribly alone, and having Tommy close at hand helped, even though
Tommy didn't know he was helping.
"Maybe I should have stayed awake."
"You should," Tommy said. "I only slept for a couple of hours at each
warp-drive shift. We had a day-long stopover at Sirius Eighteen, and I
took a tour of the planet. And I've spent a lot of time down here, just
star-gazing--not that it did me much good. Which one is Antares? How do
you tell it from Aldebaran? I'm always getting them mixed up."
Bart pointed. "Aldebaran--that's the big red one there," he said. "Think
of the constellation Taurus as a necklace, with Aldebaran hanging from
it like a locket. Antares is much further down in the sky, in relation
to the arbitrary sidereal axis, and it's a deeper red. Like a burning
coal, while Aldebaran is like a ruby--"
He broke off in mid-word, realizing that Tommy was gazing at him in a
mixture of triumph and consternation. Too late, Bart realized he had
been tricked. Studying for an exam, the year before, he had explained
the difference between the two red stars in almost the same words.
"Bart," Tommy said in a whisper, "I knew it had to be you. Why didn't
you tell me, fella?"
Bart felt himself start to smile, but it only stretched his mouth. He
said, very low, "Don't say my name out loud Tom. I'm in terrible
trouble."
"Why didn't you tell me? What's a friend for?"
"We can't talk here. And all the cabins are wired for sound in case
somebody stops breathing, or has a heart attack in space," Bart said,
glancing around.
They went and stood at the very foot of the quartz window, seeming to
tread the brink of a dizzying gulf of cosmic space, and talked in low
tones while Alpha and Beta and Gamma swelled like blown-up balloons in
the port.
Tommy listened, almost incredulous. "And you're hoping to find your
father, with no more information than that? It's a big universe," he
said, waving at the gulf of stars. "The Lhari ships, according to the
little tourist pamphlet they gave me, touch down at nine hundred and
twenty-two different stars in this galaxy!"
Bart visibly winced, and Tommy urged, "Come to Capella with me. You can
stay with my family as long as you want to, and appeal to the
Interplanet authority to find your father. They'd protect him against
the Lhari, surely. You can't chase all over the galaxy playing
interplanetary spy all by yourself, Bart!"
But Briscoe had deliberately gone to his death, to give Bart the chance
to get away. He wouldn't have died to send Bart into a trap he could
easily have sprung on Earth.
"Thanks, Tommy. But I've got to play it my way."
Tommy said firmly, "Count me in then. My ticket has stopover privileges.
I'll get off at Procyon with you."
It was a temptation--to have a friend at his back. He put his hand on
Tommy's shoulder, grateful beyond words. But fresh horror seized him as
he remembered the horrible puddle of melted robotcab with Briscoe
somewhere in the residue. _Protoplasm residue enough for two bodies._ He
couldn't let Tommy face that.
"Tommy, I appreciate that, believe me. But if I did find my father and
his friends, I don't want anyone tracing me. You'd only make the danger
worse. The best thing you can do is stay out of it."
Tommy faced him squarely. "One thing's for sure. I'm not going to let
you go off and never know whether you're alive or dead."
"I'll try to get a message to you," Bart said, "if I can. But whatever
happens, Tommy, stay with the ship and go on to Capella. It's the one
thing you can do to help me."
A warning bell rang in the ship. He broke sharply away from Tommy,
saying over his shoulder, "It's all you can do to help, Tom. Do
it--please? Just stay clear?"
Tommy reached out and caught his arm. "Okay," he said reluctantly, "I
will. But you be careful," he added fiercely. "You hear me? And if I
don't hear from you in some reasonable time, I'll raise a stink from
here to Vega!"
Bart broke away and ran. He was afraid, if he didn't, he'd break up
again. He closed the cabin door behind him, trying to calm down so that
the Mentorian steward, coming to strap him in for deceleration, wouldn't
see how upset he was. He was going to need all his nerve.
He went through another decontamination chamber, and finally moved, with
a line of passengers, out of the yawning airlock, under the strange sun,
into the strange world.
At first sight it was a disappointment. It was a Lhari spaceport that
lay before him, to all appearances identical with the one on Earth:
sloping glass ramps, tall colorless pylons, a skyscraper terminus
crowded with men of all planets. But the sun overhead was brilliant and
clear gold, the shadows sharp and violet on the spaceport floor. Behind
the confines of the spaceport he could see the ridges of tall hills and
unfamiliarly colored trees. He longed to explore them, but he got a grip
on his imagination, surrendering his ticket stub and false papers to the
Lhari and Mentorian interpreter who guarded the ramp.
The Lhari said to the Mentorian, in the Lhari language, "Keep him for
questioning but don't tell him why." Bart felt a cold chill icing his
spine. _This was it._
The Mentorian said briefly, "We wish to check on the proper antibody
component for Aldebaran natives. There will be a delay of about thirty
minutes. Will you kindly wait in this room here?"
The room was comfortable, furnished with chairs and a vision-screen with
some colorful story moving on it, small bright figures in capes, curious
beasts racing across an unusual veldt; but Bart paced the floor
restlessly. There were two doors in the room. Through one of them, he
had been admitted; he could see, through the glass door, the silhouette
of the Mentorian outside. The other door was opaque, and marked in large
letters:
DANGER HUMANS MUST NOT PASS WITHOUT SPECIAL LENSES TYPE X.
ORDINARY SPACE LENSES WILL NOT SUFFICE DANGER! LHARI OPENING!
ADJUST X LENSES BEFORE OPENING!
Bart read the sign again. Well, _that_ was no way out, for sure! He had
heard that the Lhari sun was almost 500 times as bright as Earth's. The
Mentorians alone, among humans, could endure Lhari lights--he supposed
the warning was for ordinary spaceport workers.
A sudden, rather desperate plan occurred to Bart. He didn't know how
much light he _could_ tolerate--he'd never been on Mentor--but he _had_
inherited some of his mother's tolerance for light. And blindness would
be better than being burned down with an energon-gun! He went hesitantly
toward the door, and pushed it open.
His eyes exploded into pain; automatically his hands went up to shield
them. Light, light--he had never known such cruelly glowing light. Even
through the lids there was pain and red afterimages; but after a moment,
opening them a slit, he found that he could see, and made out other
doors, glass ramps, pale Lhari figures coming and going. But for the
moment he was alone in the long corridor beyond which he could see the
glass ramps.
Nearby, a door opened into a small office with glass walls; on a peg,
one of the silky metallic cloaks worn by Mentorians doing spaceport work
was hanging. On an impulse, Bart caught it up and flung it around his
shoulders.
It felt cool and soft, and the hood shielded his eyes a little. The ramp
leading down to what he hoped was street level was terribly steep and
there were no steps. Bart eased himself over the top of the ramp and let
go. He whooshed down the slick surface on the flat of his back, feeling
the metal of the cloak heat with the friction, and came to a breathless
jarring stop at the bottom. Whew, what a slide! Three stories, at least!
But there was a door, and outside the door, maybe, safety.
A voice hailed him, in Lhari. "You, there!"
Bart could see well now. He made out the form of a Lhari, only a
colorless blob in the intense light.
"You people know better than to come back here without glasses. Do you
want to be blinded, my friend?" He actually sounded kind and concerned.
Bart tensed, his heart pounding. Now that he was caught, could he bluff
his way out? He hadn't actually spoken the Lhari language in years,
though his mother had taught it to him when he was young enough to learn
it without a trace of accent.
Well, he must try. "Margil sent me to check," he improvised quickly.
"They were holding someone for questioning, and he seems to have gotten
away somehow, so I wanted to make sure he didn't come through here."
"What is the matter that one man can give us all the slip this way?" the
Lhari said curiously. "Well, one thing is sure, he's Vegan or Solarian
or Capellan, one of the dim-star people. If he comes through here, we'll
catch him easily enough while he's stumbling around half blind. You know
that you shouldn't stay long." He gestured. "Out this way--and don't
come back without special lenses."
Bart nodded, jerking the cloak around his shoulders, forcing himself not
to break into a run as he stepped through the door the Lhari indicated.
It closed behind him. Bart blinked, feeling as if he had stepped into
pitch darkness. Only slowly did his eyes adapt and he became aware that
he was standing in a city street, in the full glow of Procyon sunlight,
and apparently outside the Lhari spaceport entirely.
He'd better get to cover! He took off the Mentorian cloak, thrust it
under his arm. He raised his eyes, which were adjusting to ordinary
light again, and stopped dead.
Just across the street was a long, low, rainbow colored building. And
the letters--Bart blinked, thinking his eyes deceived him--spelled out:
EIGHT COLORS TRANSSHIPPING CORPORATION CARGO, PASSENGERS, MESSAGES, EXPRESS
A. RAYNOR ONE, MANAGER
CHAPTER FIVE
For a moment the words swirled before Bart's still-watering eyes. He
wiped them, trying to steady himself. Had he so soon reached the end of
his dangerous quest? Somehow he had expected it to lie in deep, dark
concealment.
Raynor One. The existence of Raynor _One_ presupposed a Raynor _Two_ and
probably a Raynor _Three_--for all he knew, Raynors Four, Five, Six, and
Sixty-six! The building looked solid and real. It had evidently been
there a long time.
With his hand on the door, he hesitated. Was it, after all, the _right_
Eight Colors? But it was a family saying; hardly the sort of thing you'd
be apt to hear outside. He pushed the door and went in.
The room was filled with brighter light than the Procyon sun outdoors,
the edges of the furniture rimmed with neon in the Mentorian fashion. A
prim-looking girl sat behind a desk--or what should have been a desk,
except that it looked more like a mirror, with little sparkles of
lights, different colors, in regular rows along one edge. The mirror-top
itself was blue-violet and gave her skin and her violet eyes a bluish
tinge. She was smooth and lacquered and glittering and she raised her
eyebrows at Bart as if he were some strange form of life she hadn't seen
very often.
"I'd--er--like to see Raynor One," he said.
Her dainty pointed fingernail, varnished blue, stabbed at points of
light. "On what business?" she asked, not caring.
"It's a personal matter."
"Then I suggest you see him at his home."
"It can't wait that long."
The girl studied the glassy surface and punched at some more of the
little lights. "Name, please?"
"David Briscoe."
He had thought her perfect-painted face could not show any emotion
except disdain, but it did. She looked at him in open, blank
consternation. She said into the vision-screen, "He calls himself David
Briscoe. Yes, I know. Yes, sir, yes." She raised her face, and it was
controlled again, but not bored. "Raynor One will see you. Through that
door, and down to the end of the hall."
At the end of the hallway was another door. He stepped through into a
small cubicle, and the door slid shut like a closing trap. He whirled in
panic, then subsided in foolish relief as the cubicle began to rise--it
was just an automatic elevator.
It rose higher and higher, stopping with an abrupt jerk, and slid open
into a lighted room and office. A man sat behind a desk, watching Bart
step from the elevator. The man was very tall and very thin, and the
gray eyes, and the intensity of the lights, told Bart that he was a
Mentorian. _Raynor One?_
Under the steady, stern gray stare, Bart felt the slow, clutching suck
of fear again. Was this man a slave of the Lhari, who would turn him
over to them? Or someone he could trust? His own mother had been a
Mentorian.
"Who are you?" Raynor One's voice was harsh, and gave the impression of
being loud, though it was not.
"David Briscoe."
It was the wrong thing. The Mentorian's mouth was taut, forbidding. "Try
again. I happen to know that David Briscoe is dead."
"I have a message for Raynor Three."
The cold gray stare never altered. "On what business?"
On a sudden inspiration, Bart said, "I'll tell you that if you can tell
me what the Eighth Color is."
There was a glint in the grim eyes now, though the even, stern voice did
not soften. "I never knew myself. I didn't name it Eight Colors. Maybe
it's the original owner you want."
On a sudden hope, Bart asked, "Was he, by any chance, named Rupert
Steele?"
Raynor One made a suspicious movement. "I can't imagine why you think
so," he said guardedly. "Especially if you've just come in from Earth.
It was never very widely known. He only changed the name to Eight Colors
a few weeks ago. And it's for sure that your ship didn't get any
messages while the Lhari were in warp-drive. You mention entirely too
many names, but I notice you aren't giving out any further information."
"I'm looking for a man called Rupert Steele."
"I thought you were looking for Raynor Three," said Raynor One, staring
at the Mentorian cloak. "I can think of a lot of people who might want
to know how I react to certain names, and find out if I know the wrong
people, if they are the wrong people. What makes you think I'd admit it
if I did?"
Now, Bart thought, they had reached a deadlock. Somebody had to trust
somebody. This could go on all night--parry and riposte, question and
evasive answer, each of them throwing back the other's questions in a
verbal fencing-match. Raynor One wasn't giving away any information.
And, considering what was probably at stake, Bart didn't blame him much.
He flung the Mentorian cloak down on the table.
"This got me out of trouble--the hard way," he said. "I never wore one
before and I never intend to again. I want to find Rupert Steele because
he's my father!"
"Your father. And just how are you going to prove that exceptionally
interesting statement?"
Without warning, Bart lost his temper.
"I don't care whether I prove it or not! _You_ try proving something for
a change, why don't you? If you know Rupert Steele, I don't have to
prove who I am--just take a good look at me! Or so Briscoe told me--a
man who called himself Briscoe, anyway. He gave me papers to travel
under that name! I didn't ask for them, he shoved them into my hand.
_That_ Briscoe is dead." Bart struck his fist *** the desk, bending
over Raynor One angrily.
"He sent me to find a man named Raynor Three. But the only one I really
care about finding is my father. Now you know as much as I do, how about
giving _me_ some information for a change?"
He ran out of breath and stood glaring down at Raynor One, fists
clenched. Raynor One got up and said, quick, savage and quiet, "Did
anyone see you come here?"
"Only the girl downstairs."
"How did you get through the Lhari? In that?" He moved his head at the
Mentorian cloak.
Bart explained briefly, and Raynor One shook his head.
"You were lucky," he said, "you could have been blinded. You must have
inherited flash-accommodation from the Mentorian side--Rupert Steele
didn't have it. I'll tell you this much," he added, sitting down again.
"In a manner of speaking, you're my boss. Eight Colors--it used to be
Alpha Transshipping--is what they call a middleman outfit. The
interplanet cargo lines transport from planet to planet within a
system--that's free competition--and the Lhari ships transport from star
to star--that's a monopoly all over the galaxy. The middleman outfits
arrange for orderly and businesslike liaison between the two. Rupert
Steele bought into this company, a long time ago, but he left it for me
to manage, until recently."
Raynor punched a button, said to the image of the glossy girl at the
desk, "Violet, get Three for me. You may have to send a message to the
_Multiphase_."
He swung round to Bart again. "You want a lot of explanations? Well,
you'll have to get 'em from somebody else. I don't know what this is all
about. I don't _want_ to know: I have to do business with the Lhari. The
less I know, the less I'm apt to say to the wrong people. But I promised
Three that if you turned up, or if anyone came and asked for the Eighth
Color, I'd send you to him. That's all."
He motioned Bart ungraciously to a seat, and shut his mouth firmly, as
if he had already said too much. Bart sat. After a while he heard the
elevator again; the panel slid open and Raynor Three came into the room.
It had to be Raynor Three; there was no one else he could have been. He
was as like Raynor One as Tweedledum to Tweedledee: tall, stern, ascetic
and grim. He wore the full uniform of a Mentorian on Lhari ships: the
white smock of a medic, the metallic blue cloak, the low silvery
sandals.
He said, "What's doing, One? Violet--" and then he caught sight of Bart.
His eyes narrowed and he drew a quick breath, his face twisting up into
apprehension and shock.
"It must be Steele's boy," he said, and immediately Bart saw the
difference between the--were they brothers? For Raynor One's face,
controlled and stern, had not altered all during their interview, but
Raynor Three's smile was wry and kindly at once, and his voice was low
and gentle. "He's the image of Rupert. Did he come in on his own name?
How'd he manage it?"
"No. He had David Briscoe's papers."
"So the old man got through," said Raynor Three, with a low whistle.
"But that's not safe. Quick, give them to me, Bart."
"The Lhari have them."
Raynor One walked to the window and said in his deadpan voice, "It's
useless. But get the kid out of here before they come looking for me.
Look."
He pointed. Below them, the streets were alive with uniformed Lhari and
Mentorians. Bart felt sick.
"If they had the same efficiency with red tape that we humans have, he'd
never have made it this far."
Raynor Three actually smiled. "But you can count on them for that much
inefficiency," he said, and his eyes twinkled for a moment at Bart.
"That's how it was so easy to work the old double-shuffle trick on them.
They had Steele's description but not his name, so Briscoe took Steele's
papers and managed to slip through. Once they landed on Earth, they had
the Steele _names_, but by the time that cleared, you were outbound with
another set of papers. It may have confused them, because they knew
_David_ Briscoe was dead--and there was just a chance you were an
innocent bystander who could raise a real row if they pulled you in. Did
old Briscoe get away?"
"No," Bart said, harshly, "he's dead."
Raynor Three's mobile face held shocked sadness. "Two brave men," he
said softly, "Edmund Briscoe the father, David Briscoe the son. Remember
the name, Bart, because I won't remember it."
"Why not?"
Raynor Three gave him a gold-glinting, enigmatic glance. "I'm a
Mentorian, remember? I'm good at not remembering things. Just be glad I
remember Rupert Steele. If you'd been a few days later, I wouldn't have
remembered him, though I promised to wait for you."
Raynor One demanded, "Get him _out_ of here, Three!"
Raynor Three swung to Bart. "Put that on again." He indicated the
Mentorian cloak. "Pull the hood right up over your head. Now, if we meet
anyone, say a polite good afternoon in Lhari--you _can_ speak
Lhari?--and leave the rest of the talking to me."
Bart felt like cringing as they came out into the street full of Lhari;
but Raynor Three whispered, "Attack is the best defense," and went up to
one of the Lhari. "What's going on, _rieko mori_?"
"A passenger on the ship got away without going through Decontam. He may
spread disease, so of course we have alerted all authorities," the Lhari
said.
As the Lhari strode past, Raynor Three grimaced. "Clever, that. Now the
whole planet will be hunting for any stranger, worrying themselves into
fits about some unauthorized germ. We'd better get you to a safe place.
My country house is a good way off, but I have a copter."
Bart demanded, as they climbed in, "Are you taking me to my father?"
"Wait till we get to my place," Raynor Three said, taking the controls
and putting the machine in the air. "Just lean back and enjoy the trip,
huh?"
Bart relaxed against the cushions, but he still felt apprehensive. Where
was his father? If he was a fugitive from the Lhari, he might by now be
at the other end of the galaxy. But if his father couldn't travel on
Lhari ships, and if he had been here, the chances were that he was still
somewhere in the Procyon system.
They flew for a long time; across low hills, patchwork agricultural
districts, towns, and then for a long time over water. The copter had
automatic controls, but Raynor Three kept it on manual, and Bart
wondered if the Mentorian just didn't want to talk.
It began to descend, at last, toward a small green hill, bright in the
last gold rays on sunset. A small domelike pink bubble rose out of the
hill. Raynor Three set the copter neatly down on a platform that slid
shut after them, unfastened their seat belts and gave Bart a hand to
climb out.
He ushered him into a living room of glass and chrome, softly lighted,
but deserted and faintly dusty. Raynor pushed a switch; soft music came
on, and the carpets caressed his feet. He motioned Bart to a chair.
"You're safe here, for a while," Raynor Three said, "though how long,
nobody knows. But so far, I've been above suspicion."'
Bart leaned back; the chair was very comfortable, but the comfort could
not help him to relax.
"Where is my father?" he demanded.
Raynor Three stood looking down at him, his mobile face drawn and
strange. "I guess I can't put it off any longer," he said softly. Then
he covered his face with his hands. From behind them hoarse words came,
choked with emotion.
"Your father is dead, Bart. I--I killed him."
CHAPTER SIX
For a moment Bart stared, frozen, unable to move, his very ears refusing
the words he heard. Had this all been another cruel trick, then, a trap,
a betrayal? He rose and looked wildly around the room, as if the glass
walls were a cage closing in on him.
"Murderer!" he flung at Raynor, and took a step toward him, his clenched
fists coming up. He'd been shoved around too long, but here he had one
of them right in front of him, and for once he'd hit back! He'd start by
taking Raynor Three apart--in small pieces! "You--you rotten murderer!"
Raynor Three made no move to defend himself. "Bart," he said
compassionately, "sit down and listen to me. No, I'm no murderer. I--I
shouldn't have put it that way."
Bart's hands dropped to his sides, but he heard his voice crack with
pain and grief: "I suppose you'll tell me he was a spy or a traitor and
you _had_ to kill him!"
"Not even that. I tried to save your father, I did everything I could.
I'm no murderer, Bart. I killed him, yes--God forgive me, because I'll
never forgive myself!"
Bart's fists unclenched and he stared down at Raynor Three, shaking his
head in bewilderment and pain. "I knew he was dead! I knew it all along!
I was trying not to believe it, but I knew!"
"I liked your father. I admired him. He took a long chance, and it
killed him. I could have stopped him, I should have stopped him, but how
could I? Where did I have the right to stop him, after what I did
to--" he stopped, almost in mid-word, as if a switch had been turned.
But Bart was not listening. He swung away, striding to the wall as if he
would kick it in, striking it with his two clenched fists, his whole
being in revolt. _Dad, oh, Dad! I kept going, I thought at the end of it
you'd be here and it would all be over. But here I am at the end of it
all, and you're not here, you won't ever be here again._
Dimly, he knew when Raynor Three rose and left him alone. He leaned his
head on his clenched fists, and cried.
After a long time he raised his head and blew his nose, his face setting
itself in new, hard, unaccustomed lines, slowly coming to terms with the
hard, painful reality. His father was dead. His dangerous,
dead-in-earnest game of escape had no happy ending of reunion with his
father. They couldn't sit together and laugh about how scared he had
been. His father was _dead_, and he, Bart, was alone and in danger. His
face looked very grim indeed, and years older than he was.
After a long time Raynor Three opened the door quietly. "Come and have
something to eat, Bart."
"I'm not hungry."
"Well, I am," Raynor Three said, "and you ought to be. You'll need it."
He pulled knobs and the appropriate tables and chairs extruded
themselves from the walls. Raynor unsealed hot cartons and spread them
on the table, saying lightly, "Looks good--not that I can claim any
credit, I subscribe to a food service that delivers them hot by
pneumatic tube."
Bart felt sickened by the thought of eating, but when he put a polite
fork in the food, he discovered that he was famished and ate up
everything in sight. When they had finished, Raynor dumped the cartons
into a disposal chute, went to a small portable bar and put a glass into
his hand.
"Drink this."
Bart touched his lips to the glass, made a face and put it away.
"Thanks, but I don't drink."
"Call it medicine, you'll need something," Raynor Three said crossly.
"I've got a lot to tell you, and I don't want you going off half-primed
in the middle of a sentence. If you'd rather have a shot of
tranquilizer, all right; otherwise, I prescribe that you drink what I
gave you." He gave Bart a quick, wry grin. "I really am a medic, you
know."
Feeling like a scolded child, Bart drank. It burned his mouth, but after
it was down, he felt a sort of warm burning in his insides that
gradually spread a sense of well-being all through him. It wasn't
alcohol, but whatever it was, it had quite a kick.
"Thanks," he muttered. "Why are you taking this trouble, Raynor? There
must be danger--"
"Don't you know--" Raynor broke off. "Obviously, you don't. Your mother
never said much about your Mentorian family tree, I suppose? She was a
Raynor." He smiled at Bart, a little ruefully. "I won't claim a
kinsman's privileges until you decide how much to trust me."
Raynor Three settled back.
"It's a long story and I only know part of it," he began. "Our family,
the Raynors, have traded with the Lhari for more generations than I can
count. When I was a young man, I qualified as a medic on the Lhari
ships, and I've been star-hopping ever since. People call us the slaves
of the Lhari--maybe we are," he added wryly. "But I began it just
because space is where I belong, and there's nowhere else that I've ever
wanted to be. And I'll take it at any price.
"I never questioned what I was doing until a few years ago. It was your
father who made me wonder if we Mentorians were blind and selfish--this
privilege ought to belong to everyone, not just the Lhari. More and
more, the Lhari monopoly seemed wrong to me. But I was just a medic. And
if I involved myself in any conspiracy against the Lhari, they'd find it
out in the routine psych-checking.
"And then we worked out how it could be done. Before every trip, with
self-hypnosis and self-suggestion, I erase my own memories--a sort of
artificial amnesia--so that the Lhari can't find out any more than I
want them to find out. Of course, it also means that I have no memory,
while I'm on the Lhari ships, of what I've agreed to while I'm--" His
face suddenly worked, and his mouth moved without words, as if he had
run into some powerful barrier against speech.
It was a full minute, while Bart stared in dismay, before he found his
voice again, saying, "So far, it was just a sort of loose network,
trying to put together stray bits of information that the Lhari didn't
think important enough to censor.
"And then came the big breakthrough. There was a young Apprentice
astrogator named David Briscoe. He'd taken some runs in special test
ships, and read some extremely obscure research data from the early days
of the contact between men and Lhari, and he had a wild idea. He did the
bravest thing anyone has ever done. He stripped himself of all
identifying data--so that if he died, no one would be in trouble with
the Lhari--and stowed away on a Lhari ship."
"But--" Bart's lips were dry--"didn't he die in the warp-drive?"
Slowly, Raynor Three shook his head.
"No, he didn't. No drugs, no cold-sleep--but he didn't die. Don't you
see, Bart?" He leaned forward, urgently.
"_It's all a fake!_ The Lhari have just been saying that to justify
their refusal to give us the secret of the catalyst that generates the
warp-drive frequencies! Such a simple lie, and it's worked for all these
years!"
"A Mentorian found him and didn't have the heart to turn him over to the
Lhari. So he was smuggled clear again. But when that Mentorian underwent
the routine brain-checks at the end of the voyage, the Lhari found out
what had happened. They didn't know Briscoe's name, but they wrung that
Mentorian out like a wet dishcloth and got a description that was as
good as fingerprints. They tracked down young Briscoe and killed him.
They killed the first man he'd talked to. They killed the second. The
third was your father."
"The murdering devils!"
Raynor sighed. "Your father and Briscoe's father were old friends.
Briscoe's father was dying with incurable heart disease; _his_ son was
dead, and old Briscoe had only one thought in his mind--to make sure he
didn't die for nothing. So he took your father's papers, knowing they
were as good as a death warrant, slipped away and boarded a Lhari ship
that led roundabout to stars where the message hadn't reached yet. He
led them a good chase. Did he die or did they track him down and kill
him?" Bart bowed his head and told the story.
"Meanwhile," Raynor Three continued, "your father came to me, knowing I
was sympathetic, knowing I was a Lhari-trained surgeon. He had just one
thought in his mind: to do, again, what David Briscoe had done, and make
sure the news got out this time. He cooked up a plan that was even
braver and more desperate. He decided to sign on a Lhari ship as a
member of the crew."
"As a Mentorian?" Bart asked, but something cold, like ice water
trickling down his back, told him this was not what Raynor meant. "The
brainwashing--"
"No," said Raynor, "not as a Mentorian; he couldn't have escaped the
psych-checking. _As a Lhari._"
Bart gasped. "How--"
"Men and Lhari are very much alike," Raynor Three said. "A few small
things--skin color, the shape of the ears, the hands and claws--keep
humans from seeing that the Lhari are men."
"Don't say that," Bart almost yelled. "Those filthy, murdering devils!
You call those monsters men?"
"I've lived among the Lhari all my life. They're not devils, Bart, they
have their reasons. Physiologically, the Lhari are--well, _humanoid_, if
you like that better. They're a lot more like a man than a man is like,
for instance, a gorilla. Your father convinced me that with minor
plastic and facial surgery, he could pass as a Lhari. And finally I gave
in, and did the surgery--"
"And it killed him!"
"Not really. It was a completely unforeseeable thing--a blood clot broke
loose in a vein, and lodged in his brain. He was dead in seconds. It
could have happened at any time," he said, "yet I feel responsible, even
though I keep telling myself I'm not. And I'll help you as much as I
can--for his sake, and for your mother's. The Lhari don't watch me too
closely--they figure that anything I do they'll catch in the
brainwashing. But I'm still one step ahead of them, as long as I can
erase my own memories."
Bart was sifting it all, slowly, in his mind.
"Why was Dad doing this? What could he gain?"
"You know we can build ships as good as the Lhari ships, but we don't
know anything about the rare catalyst they use for warp-drive fuel.
Captain Steele had hopes of being able to discover where they got it."
"But couldn't they find out where the Lhari ships go for fueling?"
"No. There's no way to trail a Lhari ship," he reminded Bart. "We can
follow them inside a star-system, but then they pop into warp-drive, and
we don't know where they go when they aren't running between _our_
stars.
"We've gathered together what information we _do_ have, and we know that
after a certain number of runs in our part of the galaxy, ships take off
in the direction of Antares. There's a ship, due to come in here in
about ten days, called the _Swiftwing_, which is just about due to make
the Antares run. Captain Steele had managed to arrange--I don't know
how, and I don't want to know how--for a vacancy on that ship, and
somehow he got credentials. You see, it's a very good spy system, a
network between the stars, but the weak link is this: everything, every
message, every man, has to travel back and forth by the Lhari ships
themselves."
He rose, shaking it all off impatiently. "Well, it's finished now. Your
father is dead. What are you going to do? If you want to go back to
Vega, you can probably convince the Lhari you're just an innocent
bystander. They _don't_ hurt bystanders or children, Bart. They aren't
bad people. They're just protecting their business monopoly.
"The safest way to handle it would be this: let me erase your memories
of what I've told you tonight. Then just let the Lhari capture you. They
won't kill you. They'll just give you a light psych-check. When they
find out you don't know anything, they'll send you back to Vega, and you
can spend the rest of your life in peace, running Vega Interplanet and
Eight Colors."
Bart turned on him furiously. "You mean, go home like a good little boy,
and pretend none of this ever happened? What do you think I am, anyhow?"
Bart's chin set in the new, hard line. "What I want is a chance to go on
where Dad left off!"
"It won't be easy, and it could be dangerous," Raynor Three said, "but
there's nothing else to be done. We had the arrangements all made; and
now somebody's got to take the dangerous risk of calling them off. Are
you game for a little plastic surgery--just enough to change your looks
again, with new forged papers? You can't go by the _Swiftwing_--it
doesn't carry passengers--but there's another route you can take."
Bart sprang up. "No," he said, "I know a better way. Let me go on the
_Swiftwing_--in Dad's place--_as a Lhari_!"
"Bart, no," Raynor Three said. "You'd never get away with it. It's too
dangerous." But his gold eyes glinted.
"Why not? I speak Lhari better than Dad ever did. And my eyes can stand
Lhari lights. You said yourself, it's going to be a dangerous job just
calling off all the arrangements. So let's _not_ call them off. Just let
me take Dad's place!"
"Bart, you're only a boy--"
"What was Dave Briscoe? No, Raynor. Dad left me a lot more than Vega
Interplanet, and you know it. I'll finish what he started, and then
maybe I'll begin to deserve what he left me."
Raynor Three gripped Bart's hand. He said, in a voice that shook, "All
right, Bart. You're your father's son. I can't say more than that. I
haven't any right to stop you."
CHAPTER SEVEN
"All right, Bart, today we'll let you look at yourself," Raynor Three
said.
Bart smiled under the muffling layers of bandage around his face. His
hands were bandaged, too, and he had not been permitted to look in a
mirror. But the transition had been surprisingly painless--or perhaps
his sense of well-being had been due to Raynor Three slipping him some
drug.
He'd been given injections of a chemical that would change the color of
his skin; there had been minor operations on his face, his hands, his
feet.
"Let's see you get up and walk around."
Bart obeyed awkwardly, and Raynor frowned. "Hurt?"
"Not exactly, but I feel as if I were limping."
"That's to be expected. I changed the angle of the heel tendon and the
muscle of the arch. You're using a different set of muscles when you
walk; until they harden up, you'll have some assorted Charley horses.
Have any trouble hearing me?"
"No, though I'd hear better without all these bandages," Bart said
impatiently.
"All in good time. Any trouble breathing?"
"No, except for the bandages."
"Fine. I changed the shape of your ears and nostrils, and it might have
affected your hearing or your breathing. Now, listen, Bart: I'm going to
take the bandages off your hands first. Sit down."
Bart sat across the table from him, obediently sticking out his hands.
Raynor Three said, "Shut your eyes."
Bart did as he was told and felt Raynor Three's long fingers working at
the bandages.
"Move each finger as I touch it." Bart obeyed, and Raynor said
neutrally, "Good. Now, take a deep breath and then open your eyes."
Impatiently Bart flicked his lids open. In spite of the warning, his
breath went out in a harsh, jolting gasp. His hands lay on the table
before him--but they were not his hands.
The narrow, long fingers were pearl-gray, tipped with whitish-pink claws
that curved out over the tips. Nervously Bart moved one finger, and the
long claw flicked out like a cat's, retracted. He swallowed.
"Golly!" He felt strangely wobbly.
"A beautiful job, if I do say so. Be careful not to scratch yourself,
and practice picking up small things."
Bart saw that the long grayish claws were trembling. "How did you
make--the claws?"
"Quite simple, really," Raynor beamed. "I injected protein compounds
into the nail matrix, which speeded up nail growth terrifically, and
then, as they grew, shaped them. Joining on those tiny muscles for the
retracting mechanism was the tricky part though."
Bart was moving his hands experimentally. Once over the shock, they felt
quite normal. The claws didn't get in his way half so much as he'd
expected when he picked up a pen that lay beside him and, with the blunt
tip, made a few of the strange-looking dots and wedges that were the
Lhari alphabet.
"Practice writing this," said Raynor Three, and laid a plastic-encased
folder down beside him. It was a set of ship's papers printed in Lhari.
Bart read it through, seeing that it was made out to the equivalent of
Astrogator, First Class, Bartol.
"That's your name now, the name your father would have used. Memorize
it, get used to the sound of it, practice writing it. Don't worry too
much about the rating; it's an elementary one, what we'd call Apprentice
rating, and I have a training tape for you anyhow. My brother got hold
of it, don't ask me how--and don't ask him!"
"When am I going to see my face?"
"When I think you're ready for the shock," Raynor said bluntly. "It
almost threw you when I showed you your hands."
He made Bart walk around some more briefly, slowly, he unwound the
bandages; then turned and picked up a mirror at the bottom of his
medic's case, turning it right side up. "Here. But take it easy."
But when Bart looked in the mirror he felt no unexpected shock, only an
unnerving revulsion.
His hair was bleached-white and fluffy, almost feathery to the touch.
His skin was grayish-rose, and his eyelids had been altered just enough
to make his eyes look long, narrow and slanted. His nostrils were mere
slits, and he moved his tongue over lips that felt oddly thin.
"I did as little to your teeth as I thought I could get away with-capped
the front ones," Raynor Three told him. "So if you get a toothache
you're out of luck--you won't dare go to a Lhari dentist. I could have
done more, but it would have made you look too freakish when we changed
you back to human again--if you live that long," he added grimly.
_I hadn't thought about that. And if Raynor is going to forget me, who
will do it?_ The cold knot of fear, never wholly absent, moved in him
again.
Watching his face, Raynor Three said gently, "It's a big network, Bart.
I'm not telling you much, for your own safety. But when you get to
Antares, they'll tell you all you need to know."
He lifted Bart's oddly clawed hands. "I warned you, remember--the change
isn't completely reversible. Your hands will always look--strange. The
fingers had to be lengthened, for instance. I wanted to make you as safe
as possible among the Lhari. I think you'll pass anything but an X-ray.
Just be careful not to break any bones."
He gave Bart a package. "This is the Lhari training tape. Listen to it
as often as you can, then destroy it--_completely_--before you leave
here. The _Swiftwing_ is due in port three days from now, and they stay
here a week. I don't know how we'll manage it, but I'll guarantee
there'll be a vacancy of one Astrogator, First Class, on that ship." He
rose. "And now I'm going back to town and erase the memory." He stopped,
looking intently at Bart.
"So if you see me, stay away from me and don't speak, because I won't
know you from any other Lhari. Understand? From here on, you're on your
own, Bart."
He held out his hand. "This is the rough part, Son." His face moved
strangely. "I'm part of this network between the stars, but I don't know
what I've done before, and I'll never know how it comes out. It's funny
to stand here and look at you and realize that I won't even remember
you." The gold-glinted eyes blinked rapidly. "Goodbye, Bart. And--good
luck, Son."
Bart took his hand, deeply moved, with the strange sense that this was
another death--a worse one than Briscoe's. He tried to speak and
couldn't.
"Well--" Raynor's mouth twisted into a wry grin. "Ouch! Careful with
those claws. The Lhari don't shake hands."
He turned abruptly and went out of the door and out of Bart's life,
while Bart stood at the dome-window, feeling alone as he had never felt
alone before.
* * * * *
He had to wait six days, and they felt like six eternities. He played
the training tape over and over. With his Academy background, it wasn't
nearly so difficult as he'd feared. He read and reread the set of papers
identifying him as Astrogator, First Class, Bartol. Forged, he supposed.
Or was there, somewhere, a real Bartol?
The last morning he slept uneasily late. He finished his last meal as a
human, spent part of the day removing all traces of his presence from
Raynor's home, burned the training tape, and finally got into the silky,
silvery tights and cloak that Raynor had provided. He could use his
hands now as if they belonged to him; he even found the claws handy and
useful. He could write his signature, and copy out instructions from the
training tape, without a moment's hesitation.
Toward dusk, a young Lhari slipped unobserved out of Raynor's house and
hiked unnoticed to the edges of a small city nearby, where he mingled
with the crowd and hired a skycab from an unobservant human driver to
take him to the spaceport city. The skycab driver was startled, but not,
Bart judged, unusually so, to pick up a Lhari passenger.
"Been doing a little sight-seeing on our planet, hey?"
"That's right," Bart said in Universal, not trying to fake his idea of
the Lhari accent. Raynor had told him that only a few of the Lhari had
that characteristic sibilant "r" and "s" and warned him against trying
to imitate it. _Just speak naturally; there are dialects of Lhari, just
as there are dialects of the different human languages, and they all
sound different in Universal anyhow._ "Just looking around some."
The skycab driver frowned and looked down at his controls, and Bart felt
curiously snubbed. Then he remembered. He himself had little to say to
the Lhari when they spoke to him.
_He was an alien, a monster. He couldn't expect to be treated like a
human being any more._
When the skycab let him off before the spaceport, it felt strange to see
how the crowds edged away from him as he made a way through them. He
caught a glimpse of himself in one of the mirror-ramps, a tall thin
strange form in a metallic cloak, head crested with feathery white, and
felt overwhelmingly homesick for his own familiar face.
He was beginning to feel hungry, and realized that he could not go into
an ordinary restaurant without attracting attention. There were
refreshment stands all over the spaceport, and he briefly considered
getting a snack at one of these.
No, that was just putting it off. The time had to come when he must face
his fear and test his disguise among the Lhari themselves. Reviewing his
knowledge of the construction of spaceports, he remembered that one side
was the terminal, where humans and visitors and passengers were freely
admitted; the other side, for Lhari and their Mentorian employees only,
contained--along with business offices of many sorts--a sort of arcade
with amusement centers, shops and restaurants catering to the personnel
of the Lhari ships. With nine or ten ships docking every day, Raynor had
assured him that a strange Lhari face would be lost in the crowds very
easily.
He went to one of the doors marked DANGER, LHARI LIGHTS BEYOND, and
passed through the glaring corridor of offices and storage-warehouses,
finally coming out into a sort of wide mall. The lights were fierce, but
he could endure them without trouble now, though his head ached faintly.
Raynor, testing his light tolerance, had assured him that he could endure
anything the Lhari could, without permanent damage to his optic nerves,
though he would have headaches until he got used to them.
There were small shops and what looked like bars, and a glass-fronted
place with a sign lettered largely, in black letters, a Lhari phrase
meaning roughly HOME AWAY FROM HOME: MEALS SERVED, SPACEMEN WELCOME,
REASONABLE.
Behind him a voice said in Lhari, "Tell me, does that sign mean what it
says? Or is this one of those traps for separating the unwary spaceman
from his hard-earned credits? How's the food?"
Bart carefully took hold of himself.
"I was just wondering that myself." He turned as he spoke, finding
himself face to face with a young Lhari in the unadorned cloak of a
spaceman without official rank. He knew the Lhari was young because his
crest was still white.
The young Lhari extended his claws in the closed-fist, hidden-claw
gesture of Lhari greeting. "Shall we take a chance? Ringg son of Rahan
greets you."
"Bartol son of Berihun."
"I don't remember seeing you in the port, Bartol."
"I've mostly worked on the Polaris run."
"Way off there?" Ringg son of Rahan sounded startled and impressed. "You
really get around, don't you? Shall we sit here?"
They sat on triangular chairs at a three-cornered table. Bart waited for
Ringg to order, and ordered what he did. When it came, it was a sort of
egg-and-fish casserole which Bart found extremely tasty, and he dug into
it with pleasure. Allowing for the claws, Lhari table manners were not
so much different from human--_and remember, their customs differ as
much as ours do. If you do something differently, they'll just think
you're from another planet with a different culture._
"Have you been here long?"
"A day or so. I'm off the _Swiftwing_."
Bart decided to hazard his luck. "I was told there's a vacancy on the
_Swiftwing_."
Ringg looked at him curiously. "There is," he said, "but I'd like to
know how you found it out. Captain Vorongil said that anyone who talked
about it would be sent to Kleeto for three cycles. But what happened to
you? Miss your ship?"
"No, I've just been laying off--traveling, sight-seeing, bumming
around," Bart said. "But I'm tired of it, and now I'd like to sign out
again."
"Well, we could use another man. This is the long run we're making, out
to Antares and then home, and if everybody has to work extra shifts,
it's no fun. But if old Vorongil knows that there's been talk in the
port about Klanerol jumping ship, or whatever happened to him, we'll all
have to walk wide of his temper."
Bart was beginning to relax a little; Ringg apparently accepted him
without scrutiny. At this close range Ringg did not seem a monster, but
just a young fellow like himself, hearty, good-natured--in fact, not
unlike Tommy.
Bart chased the thought away as soon as it sneaked into his brain--one
of those _things_, like _Tommy_? Then, rather grimly, he reminded
himself, _I'm one of those things_. He said irritably, "So how do I
account for asking your captain for the place?"
Ringg cocked his fluffy crest to one side. "I know," he said, "_I_ told
you. I'll say you're an old friend of mine. You don't know what
Vorongil's like when he gets mad. But what he doesn't know, he won't
shout about." He shoved back the triangular chair. "Who _did_ tell you,
anyway?"
This was the first real hurdle, and Bart's brain raced desperately, but
Ringg was not listening for an answer. "I suppose somebody gossiped, or
one of those fool Mentorians picked it up. Got your papers? What
rating?"
"Astrogator first class."
"Klanerol was second, but you can't have everything, I suppose." Ringg
led the way through the arcades, out across a guarded sector, passing
half a dozen of the huge ships lying in their pits. Finally Ringg
stopped and pointed. "This is the old hulk."
Bart had traveled only in Lhari passenger ships, which were new and
fresh and sleek. This ship was enormous, ovoid like the egg of some
space-monster, the sides dented and discolored, thin films of chemical
discoloration lying over the glassy metallic hull.
Bart followed Ringg. This was real, it was happening. He was signing out
for his first interstellar cruise on one of the Lhari ships. Not a
Mentorian assistant, half-trusted, half-tolerated, but one of the crew
themselves. _If I'm lucky_, he reminded himself grimly.
There was Lhari, in the black-banded officer's cloak, at the doorway. He
glanced at Ringg's papers.
"Friend of mine," Ringg said, and Bart proffered his folder. The Lhari
gave it a casual glance, handed it back.
"Old Baldy on board?" Ringg asked.
"Where else?" The officer laughed. "You don't think _he'd_ relax with
cargo not loaded, do you?"
They seemed casual and normal, and Bart's confidence was growing. They
had accepted him as one of themselves. But the great ordeal still lay
before him--an interview with the Lhari captain. And the idea had Bart
sweating scared.
The corridors and decks seemed larger, wider, more spacious, but
shabbier than on the clean, bright, commercial passenger decks Bart had
seen. Dark-lensed men were rolling bales of cargo along on wheeled
dollies. The corridors seemed endless. More to hear the sound of his own
voice, and reassure himself of his ability to speak and be understood,
than because he cared, he asked Ringg, "What's your rating?"
"Well, according to the logbooks, I'm an Expert Class Two,
Metals-Fatigue," said Ringg. "That sounds very technical and
interesting. But what it means is just that I go all over the ship inch
by inch, and when I finish, start all over again at the other end. Most
of what I do is just boss around the maintenance crews and snarl at them
about spots of rust on the paint."
They got into a small round elevator and Ringg punched buttons; it began
to rise, slowly and creakily, toward the top. "This, for instance,"
Ringg said. "I've been yelling for a new cable for six months." He
turned. "Take it easy, Bartol; don't let Vorongil scare you. He likes to
hear the sound of his own voice, but we'd all walk out the lock without
spacesuits for him."
The elevator slid to a stop. The sign in Lhari letters said _Level of
Administration--Officers' Deck_. Ringg pushed at a door and said,
"Captain Vorongil?"
"I thought you were on leave," said a Lhari voice, deeper and slower
than most. "What are you doing, back here more than ten milliseconds
before strap-in checks?"
Ringg stepped back for Bart to go inside. The small cabin, with an
elliptical bunk slung from the ceiling and a triangular table, was
dwarfed by a tall, thin Lhari, in a cloak with four of the black bands
that seemed to denote rank among them. He had a deeply lined face with a
lacework of tiny wrinkles around the slanted eyes. His crest was not the
high, fluffy white of a young Lhari, but broken short near the scalp,
grayish pink showing through, the little feathery ends yellowed with
age. He growled, "Come in then, don't stand there. I suppose Ringg's
told you what a tyrant I am? What do you want, feathertop?"
Bart remembered being told that this was the Lhari equivalent of "Kid"
or "Youngster." He fumbled in the capacious folds of his cloak for his
papers. His voice sounded shrill, even to himself.
"Bartol son of Berihun in respectful greeting, _rieko mori_."
("Honorable old-bald-one," the Lhari equivalent of "sir.") "Ringg told
me there is a vacancy among the Astrogators, and I want to sign out."
Unmistakably, Vorongil's snort was laughter.
"So you've been talking, Ringg?"
Ringg retorted, "Better that I tell one man than that you have to hunt
the planet over--or run the long haul with the drive-room watches short
by one man."
"Well, well, you're right," Vorongil growled. He glared at Bart. "On the
last planet, one of our men disappeared. Jumped ship!" The creases
around his eyes deepened, troubled. "Probably just gone on the drift,
sight-seeing, but I wish he'd told me. As it is, I wonder if he's been
hurt, killed, kidnaped."
Ringg said, "Who'd dare? It would be reported."
Bart knew, with a cold chill, that the missing Klanerol had not simply
gone "on the drift." No Lhari port would ever see Klanerol, Second Class
Astrogator, again.
"Bartol," mused the captain, riffling the forged papers. "Served on the
Polaris run. Hm--you _are_ a good long way off your orbit, aren't you?
Never been out that way myself. All right, I'll take you on. You can do
system programming? Good. Rating in Second Galaxy mathematics?"
He nodded, hauled out a sheet of thin, wax-coated fabric and his claws
made rapid imprints in the surface. He passed it to Bart, pointed. Bart
hesitated, and Vorongil said impatiently, "Standard agreement, no hidden
clauses. Put your mark on it, feathertop."
Bart realized it was something like a fingerprint they wanted. _You'll
pass anything but X-rays._ He pressed the top of one claw into the wax.
Vorongil nodded, shoved it on a shelf without looking at it.
"So much for that," said Ringg, laughing, as they came out. "The Bald
One was in a good temper. I'm going to the port and celebrate, not that
this dim place is very festive. You?"
"I--I think I'll stay aboard."
"Well, if you change your mind, I'll be down there somewhere," Ringg
said. "See you later, shipmate." He raised his closed fist in farewell,
and went.
Bart stood in the corridor, feeling astounded and strange. He _belonged_
here! He had a right to be on board the ship! He wasn't quite sure what
to do next.
A Lhari, as short and fat as a Lhari could possibly be and still be a
Lhari, came or rather waddled out of the captain's office. He saw Bartol
and called, "Are you the new First Class? I'm Rugel, coordinator."
Rugel had a huge cleft darkish scar across his lip, and there were two
bands on his cloak. He was completely bald, and he puffed when he
walked. "Vorongil asked me to show you around. You'll share quarters
with Ringg--no sense shifting another man. Come down and see the chart
rooms--or do you want to leave your kit in your cabin first?"
"I don't have much," Bart said.
Rugel's seamed lip widened. "That's the way--travel light when you're on
the drift," he confirmed.
Rugel took him down to the drive rooms, and here for a moment, in wonder
and awe, Bart almost forgot his disguise. The old Lhari led him to the
huge computer which filled one wall of the room, and Bart was smitten
with the universality of mathematics. Here was something he _knew_ he
could handle.
He could do this programming, easily enough. But as he stood before the
banks of complex, yet beautifully familiar levers, the sheer exquisite
complexity of it overcame him. To compute the movements of thousands of
stars, all moving at different speeds in different directions in the
vast swirling directionless chaos of the Universe--and yet to be sure
that every separate movement would come out to within a quarter of a
mile! It was something that no finite brain--man or Lhari--could ever
accomplish, yet their limited brains had built these computers that
_could_ do it.
Rugel watched him, laughing softly. "Well, you'll have enough time down
here. I like to have youngsters who are still in the middle of a love
affair with their work. Come along, and I'll show you your cabin."
Rugel left him in a cabin amidships; small and cramped, but tidy, two of
the oval bunks slung at opposite ends, a small table between them, and
drawers filled with pamphlets and manuals and maps. Furtively, ashamed
of himself, yet driven by necessity, Bart searched Ringg's belongings,
wanting to get some idea of what possessions he ought to own. He looked
around the shower and toilet facilities with extra care--this was
something he _couldn't_ slip up on and be considered even halfway
normal. He was afraid Ringg would come in, and see him staring curiously
at something as ordinary, to a Lhari, as a cake of soap.
He decided to go down to the port again and look around the shops. He
was not afraid of being unable to handle his work. What he feared was
something subtler--that the small items of everyday living, something as
simple as a nail file, would betray him.
On his way he looked into the Recreation Lounge, filled with comfortable
seats, vision-screens, and what looked like simple pinball machines and
mechanical games of skill. There were also stacks of tapereels and
headsets for listening, not unlike those humans used. Bart felt
fascinated, and wanted to explore, but decided he could do that later.
Somehow he took the wrong turn coming out of the Recreation Lounge, and
went through a door where the sudden dimming of lights told him he was
in Mentorian quarters. The sudden darkness made him stumble, thrust out
his hands to keep from falling, and an unmistakably human voice said,
"Ouch!"
"I'm sorry," Bart said in Universal, without thinking.
"I admit the lights are dim," said the voice tartly, and Bart found
himself looking down, as his eyes adjusted to the new light level, at a
girl.
She was small and slight, in a metallic blue cloak that swept out, like
wings, around her thin shoulders; the hood framed a small, kittenlike
face. She was a Mentorian, and she was human, and Bart's eyes rested
with comfort on her face; she, on the other hand, was looking up with
anxiety and uneasy distrust. _That's right--I'm a Lhari, a nonhuman
freak!_
"I seem to have missed my way."
"What are you looking for, sir? The medical quarters are through here."
"I'm looking for the elevator down to the crew exits."
"Through here," she said, reopening the door through which he had come,
and shading her large, lovely, long-lashed eyes with a slender hand.
"You took the wrong turn. Are you new on board? I thought all ships were
laid out exactly alike."
"I've only worked on passenger ships."
"I believe they are somewhat different," said the girl in good Lhari.
"Well, that is your way, sir."
He felt as if he had been snubbed and dismissed.
"What is your name?"
She stiffened as if about to salute. "Meta of the house of Marnay Three,
sir."
Bart realized he was doing something wholly out of character for a
Lhari--chatting casually with a Mentorian. With a wistful glance at the
pretty girl, he said a stiff "Thank you" and went down the ramp she had
indicated. He felt horribly lonely. Being a freak wasn't going to be
much fun.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He saw the girl again next day, when they checked in for blastoff. She
was seated at a small desk, triangular like so much of the Lhari
furniture, checking a register as they came out of the Decontam room,
making sure they downed their greenish solution of microorganisms.
"Papers, please?" She marked, and Bart noticed that she was using a red
pencil.
"Bartol," she said aloud. "Is that how you pronounce it?" She made small
scribbles in a sort of shorthand with the red pencil, then made other
marks with the black one in Lhari; he supposed the red marks were her
own private memoranda, unreadable by the Lhari.
"Next, please." She handed a cup of the greenish stuff to Ringg, behind
him. Bart went down toward the drive room, and to his own surprise,
found himself wishing the girl were a mathematician rather than a medic.
It would have been pleasant to watch her down there.
Old Rugel, on duty in the drive room, watched Bart strap himself in
before the computer. "Make sure you check all dials at null," he
reminded him, and Bart felt a last surge of panic.
This was his first cruise, except for practice runs at the Academy! Yet
his rating called him an experienced man on the Polaris run. He'd had
the Lhari training tape, which was supposed to condition his responses,
but would it? He tried to clench his fists, drove a claw into his palm,
winced, and commanded himself to stay calm and keep his mind on what he
was doing.
It calmed him to make the routine check of his dials.
"Strapdown check," said a Lhari with a yellowed crest and a rasping
voice. "New man, eh?" He gave Bart's straps perfunctory tugs at
shoulders and waist, tightened a buckle. "Karol son of Garin."
Bells rang in the ship, and Bart felt the odd, tonic touch of fear.
_This was it._
Vorongil strode through the door, his banded cloak sweeping behind him,
and took the control couch.
"Ready from fueling room, sir."
"Position," Vorongil snapped.
Bart heard himself reading off a string of figures in Lhari. His voice
sounded perfectly calm.
"Communication."
"Clear channels from Pylon Dispatch, sir." It was old Rugel's voice.
"Well," Vorongil said, slowly and almost reflectively, "let's take her
up then."
He touched some controls. The humming grew. Then, swift, hard and
crushing, weight mashed Bart against his couch.
"Position!" Vorongil's voice sounded harsh, and Bart fought the crushing
weight of it. Even his eyeballs ached as he struggled to turn the tiny
eye muscles from dial to dial, and his voice was a dim croak: "Fourteen
seven sidereal twelve point one one four nine...."
"Hold it to point one one four six," Vorongil said calmly.
"Point one one four six," Bart said, and his claws stabbed at dials.
Suddenly, in spite of the cold weight on his chest, the pain, the
struggle, he felt as if he were floating. He managed a long, luxurious
breath. He _could_ handle it. He knew what he was doing.
_He was an Astrogator...._
Later, when Acceleration One had reached its apex and the artificial
gravity made the ship a place of comfort again, he went down to the
dining hall with Ringg and met the crew of the _Swiftwing_. There were
twelve officers and twelve crewmen of various ratings like himself and
Ringg, but there seemed to be little social division between them, as
there would have been on a human ship; officers and crew joked and
argued without formality of any kind.
None of them gave him a second look. Later, in the Recreation Lounge,
Ringg challenged him to a game with one of the pinball machines. It
seemed fairly simple to Bart; he tried it, and to his own surprise, won.
Old Rugel touched a lever at the side of the room. With a tiny whishing
sound, shutters opened, the light of Procyon Alpha flooded them and he
looked out through a great viewport into bottomless space.
Procyon Alpha, Beta and Gamma hung at full, rings gently tilted. Beyond
them the stars burned, flaming through the shimmers of cosmic dust. The
colors, the never-ending colors of space!
And he stood here, in a room full of monsters--_he was one of the
monsters_--
"Which one of the planets was it we stopped on?" Rugel asked. "I can't
tell 'em apart from this distance."
Bartol swallowed; he had almost said _the blue one_. He pointed.
"The--the big one there, with the rings almost edge-on. I think they
call it Alpha."
"It's their planet," said Rugel. "I guess they can call it what they
want to. How about another game?"
Resolutely, Bart turned his back on the bewitching colors, and bent over
the pinball machine.
The first week in space was a nightmare of strain. He welcomed the hours
on watch in the drive room; there alone he was sure of what he was
doing. Everywhere else in the ship he was perpetually scared,
perpetually on tiptoe, perpetually afraid of making some small and
stupid mistake. Once he actually called Aldebaran a red star, but Rugel
either did not hear the slip or thought he was repeating what one of the
Mentorians--there were two aboard besides the girl--had said.
The absence of color from speech and life was the hardest thing to get
used to. Every star in the manual was listed by light-frequency waves,
to be checked against a photometer for a specific reading, and it almost
drove Bart mad to go through the ritual when the Mentorians were off
duty and could not call off the color and the equivalent frequency type
for him. Yet he did not dare skip a single step, or someone might have
guessed that he could _see_ the difference between a yellow and a green
star before checking them.
The Academy ships had had the traditional human signal system of
flashing red lights. Bart was stretched taut all the time, listening for
the small codelike buzzers and ticks that warned him of filled tanks,
leads in need of servicing, answers ready. Ringg's metal-fatigues
testing kit was a bewildering muddle of boxes, meters, rods and
earphones, each buzzing and clicking its characteristic warning.
At first he felt stretched to capacity every waking moment, his memory
aching with a million details, and lay awake nights thinking his mind
would crack under the strain. Then Alpha faded to a dim bluish shimmer,
Beta was eclipsed, Gamma was gone, Procyon dimmed to a failing spark;
and suddenly Bart's memory accustomed itself to the load, the new habits
were firmly in place, and he found himself eating, sleeping and working
in a settled routine.
He belonged to the _Swiftwing_ now.
Procyon was almost lost in the viewports when a sort of upswept tempo
began to run through the ship, an undercurrent of increased activity.
Cargo was checked, inventoried and strapped in. Ringg was given four
extra men to help him, made an extra tour of the ship, and came back
buzzing like a frantic cricket. Bart's computers told him they were
forging toward the sidereal location assigned for the first of the
warp-drive shifts, which would take them some fifteen light-years toward
Aldebaran.
On the final watch before the warp-drive shift, the medical officer came
around and relieved the Mentorians from duty. Bart watched them go, with
a curious, cold, crawling apprehension. Even the Mentorians, trusted by
the Lhari--even these were put into cold-sleep! Fear grabbed his
insides.
_No human had ever survived the shift into warp-drive_, the Lhari said.
Briscoe, his father, Raynor Three--they thought they had proved that the
Lhari lied. If they were right, if it was a Lhari trick to reinforce
their stranglehold on the human worlds and keep the warp-drive for
themselves, then Bart had nothing to fear. But he was afraid.
Why did the Mentorians endure this, never quite trusted, isolated among
aliens?
Raynor Three had said, _Because I belong in space, because I'm never
happy anywhere else_. Bart looked out the viewport at the swirl and burn
of the colors there. Now that he could never speak of the colors, it
seemed he had never been so wholly and wistfully aware of them. They
symbolized the thing he could never put into words.
_So that everyone can have this. Not just the Lhari._
Rugel watched the Mentorians go, scowling. "I wish medic would find a
way to keep them alive through warp," he said. "My Mentorian assistant
could watch that frequency-shift as we got near the bottom of the arc,
and I'll bet she could _see_ it. They can see the changes in intensity
faster than I can plot them on the photometer!"
Bart felt goosebumps break out on his skin. Rugel spoke as if the
certain death of humans, Mentorians, was a fact. Didn't the Lhari
themselves know it was a farce? _Or was it?_
Vorongil himself took the controls for the surge of Acceleration Two,
which would take them past the Light Barrier. Bart, watching his
instruments to exact position and time, saw the colors of each star
shift strangely, moment by moment. The red stars seemed hard to see. The
orange-yellow ones burned suddenly like flame; the green ones seemed
golden, the blue ones almost green. Dimly, he remembered the old story
of a "red shift" in the lights of approaching stars, but here he saw it
pure, a sight no human eyes had ever seen. A sight that _no_ eyes had
seen, human or otherwise, for the Lhari could not see it....
"Time," he said briefly to Vorongil, "Fifteen seconds...."
Rugel looked across from his couch. Bart felt that the old, scarred
Lhari could read his fear. Rugel said through a wheeze, "No matter how
old you get, Bartol, you're still scared when you make a warp-shift. But
relax, computers don't make mistakes."
"Catalyst," Vorongil snapped, "Ready--_shift!_"
At first there was no change; then Bart realized that the stars, through
the viewport, had altered abruptly in size and shade and color. They
were not sparks but strange streaks, like comets, crossing and
recrossing long tails that grew, longer and longer, moment by moment.
The dark night of space was filled with a crisscrossing blaze. They were
moving faster than light, they saw the light left by the moving Universe
as each star hurled in its own invisible orbit, while they tore
incredibly through it, faster than light itself....
Bart felt a curious, tingling discomfort, deep in his flesh; almost an
itching, a stinging in his very bones.
_Lhari flesh is no different from ours...._
Space, through the viewport, was no longer space as he had come to know
it, but a strange eerie limbo, the star-tracks lengthening, shifting
color until they filled the whole viewport with shimmering, gray,
recrossing light. The unbelievable reaction of warp-drive thrust them
through space faster than the lights of the surrounding stars, faster
than imagination could follow.
The lights in the drive chamber began to dim--or was he blacking out?
The stinging in his flesh was a clawed pain.
Briscoe lived through it....
_They say._
The whirling star-tracks fogged, coiled, turned colorless worms of
light, went into a single vast blur. Dimly Bart saw old Rugel slump
forward, moaning softly; saw the old Lhari pillow his bald head on his
veined arms. Then darkness took him; and thinking it was death, Bart
felt only numb, regretful failure. _I've failed, we'll always fail. The
Lhari were right all long._
_But we tried! By God, we tried!_
"Bartol?" A gentle hand, cat claws retracted, came down on his shoulder.
Ringg bent over him. Good-natured rebuke was in his voice. "Why didn't
you tell us you got a bad reaction, and ask to sign out for this shift?"
he demanded. "Look, poor old Rugel's passed out again. He just won't
admit he can't take it--but one idiot on a watch is enough! Some people
just feel as if the bottom's dropped out of the ship, and that's all
there is to it."
Bart hauled his head upright, fighting a surge of stinging nausea. His
bones itched inside and he was damnably uncomfortable, but he was alive.
"I'm--fine."
"You look it," Ringg said in derision. "Think you can help me get Rugel
to his cabin?"
Bart struggled to his feet, and found that when he was upright he felt
better. "Wow!" he muttered, then clamped his mouth shut. He was supposed
to be an experienced man, a Lhari hardened to space. He said woozily,
"How long was I out?"
"The usual time," Ringg said briskly, "about three seconds--just while
we hit peak warp-drive. Feels longer, so they tell me, sometimes--time's
funny, beyond light-speeds. The medic says it's purely psychological.
I'm not so sure. I _itch_, blast it!"
He moved his shoulders in a squirming way, then bent over Rugel, who was
moaning, half insensible. "Catch hold of his feet, Bartol. Here--ease
him out of his chair. No sense bothering the medics this time. Think you
can manage to help me carry him down to the deck?"
"Sure," Bart said, finding his feet and his voice. He felt better as
they moved along the hallway, the limp, muttering form of the old Lhari
insensible in their arms. They reached the officer's deck, got Rugel
into his cabin and into his bunk, hauled off his cloak and boots. Ringg
stood shaking his head.
"And they say Captain Vorongil's so tough!"
Bart made a questioning noise.
"Why, just look," said Ringg. "He knows it would make poor old Rugel
feel as if he wasn't good for much--to order him into his bunk and make
him take dope like a Mentorian for every warp-shift. So we have this to
go through at every jump!" He sounded cross and disgusted, but there was
a rough, boyish gentleness as he hauled the blanket over the bald old
Lhari. He looked up, almost shyly.
"Thanks for helping me with Old Baldy. We usually try to get him out
before Vorongil officially takes notice. Of course, he sort of keeps his
back turned," Ringg said, and they laughed together as they turned back
to the drive room. Bart found himself thinking, _Ringg's a good kid_,
before he pulled himself up, in sudden shock.
He _had_ lived through warp-drive! Then, indeed, the Lhari had been
lying all along, the vicious lie that maintained their stranglehold
monopoly of star-travel. He was their enemy again, the spy within their
gates, like Briscoe, to be hunted down and killed, but to bring the
message, loud and clear, to everyone: _The Lhari lied! The stars can
belong to us all!_
When he got back to the drive room, he saw through the viewport that the
blur had vanished, the star-trails were clear, distinct again, their
comet-tails shortening by the moment, their colors more distinct.
The Lhari were waiting, a few poised over their instruments, a few more
standing at the quartz window watching the star-trails, some squirming
and scratching and grousing about "space fleas"--the characteristic
itching reaction that seemed to be deep down inside the bones.
Bart checked his panels, noted the time when they were due to snap back
into normal space, and went to stand by the viewport. The stars were
reappearing, seeming to steady and blaze out in cloudy splendor through
the bright dust. They burned in great streamers of flame, and for the
moment he forgot his mission again, lost in the beauty of the fiery
lights. He drew a deep, shaking gasp. It was worth it all, to see this!
He turned and saw Ringg, silent, at his shoulder.
"Me, too," Ringg said, almost in a whisper. "I think every man on board
feels that way, a little, only he won't admit it." His slanted gray eyes
looked quickly at Bart and away.
"I guess we're almost down to L-point. Better check the panel and report
nulls, so medic can wake up the Mentorians."
The _Swiftwing_ moved on between the stars. Aldebaran loomed, then faded
in the viewports; another shift jumped them to a star whose human name
Bart did not know. Shift followed shift, spaceport followed spaceport,
sun followed sun; men lived on most of these worlds, and on each of them
a Lhari spaceport rose, alien and arrogant. And on each world men looked
at Lhari with resentful eyes, cursing the race who kept the stars for
their own.
Cargo amassed in the holds of the _Swiftwing_, from worlds beyond all
dreams of strangeness. Bart grew, not bored, but hardened to the
incredible. For days at a time, no word of human speech crossed his
mind.
The blackout at peak of each warp-shift persisted. Vorongil had given
him permission to report off duty, but since the blackouts did not
impair his efficiency, Bart had refused. Rugel told him that this was
the moment of equilibrium, the peak of the faster-than-light motion.
The End of the colors of space by Marion Zimmer Bradly.