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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
As he stepped back, Bart saw his eyes. In the chubby, good-natured red
face, the stranger's eyes were half-mad with fear.
"The fuel catalyst—it's a strange color, a color you never saw
anywhere. Can youthinkof 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."
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.
"I don't know any more than I've told you," Briscoe said. Abruptly the
robotcab came to a halt, swaying a little. Briscoe jerked 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 spelledTO 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The cold gray stare never altered. "On what business?"
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 theMultiphase."
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.
"If they had the same efficiency with red tape that we humans have, he'd
never have made it this far."
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."
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.
"Bart, no," Raynor Three said. "You'd never get away with it. It's too
dangerous." But his gold eyes glinted.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 roughlyhome away from home: meals served, spacemen welcome,
reasonable.
"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.
There was Lhari, in the black-banded officer's cloak, at the doorway. He
glanced at Ringg's papers.
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?"
"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.
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 couldseethe 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.
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 thatnoeyes had
seen, human or otherwise, for the Lhari could not see it....
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.
"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.
It was the first time that Bart, unaided, had had the responsibility of
plotting a warp-drive shift. He checked the coordinates of the small
green star three times before passing them along to Vorongil. Even so,
when they went into Acceleration Two, he felt stinging fear.If I
plotted wrong, we could shift into that crazy space and come out
billions of miles away....
But when the stars steadied and took on their own colors, the blaze of a
small green sun was steady in the viewport.
Bart, feeling the minute, unsteady trembling somewhere in the
ship—Imagination, he told himself,you can't feel metal-fatigue
somewhere in the hull lining—echoed the wish. He did not know that he
had already had the best luck of his unique voyage, or realize the
fantastic luck that had brought him to the small green star Meristem.
Bart had a sort of ship-induced claustrophobia. It was good to feel
solid ground under his feet and the rays of a sun, even a green sun, on
his back. Even more, it was good to get away from the constant presence
of his shipmates. During this enforced idleness, their presence
oppressed him unendurably—so many tall forms, gray skins, feathery
crests. He was always alone; for a change, he felt that he'd like to be
alone without Lhari all around him.
The sun overhead was a clear greenish-gold, the sky strewn with soft
pale clouds that cast racing shadows on the soft grass underfoot,
fragrant pinkish-yellow stuff strewn with bright vermilion puff-balls.
Bart wished he were alone to enjoy it.
They had reached a line of tall cliffs, where a steep rock-fall divided
off the plain from the edge of the mountains. A few slender, drooping,
gold-leaved trees bent graceful branches over a pool. Bart stood
fascinated by the play of green sunlight on the emerald ripples, but
Ringg flung himself down full length on the soft grass and sighed
comfortably. "Feels good."
Bart wondered, suddenly and worriedly, about the effects of green
sunburn on his chemically altered skin tone.
For the back wall of the cave was an exquisite fall of crystal! Minerals
glowed there, giant crystals, like jewels, crusted with strange
lichen-like growths and colors. There were pale blues and greens and,
shimmering among them, a strangely colored crystalline mineral that he
had never seen before. It was blue—No, Bart thought,that's just the
light, it's more like red—no, it can't be likebothof them at once,
and it isn't really like either. In this light—
The hail had stopped, and the piled heaps were already melting, but it
was bitterly cold. Bart wrapped himself in the silvery cloak, glad of
its warmth, and struggled back across the slushy, ice-strewn meadow that
had been so pink and flowery in the sunshine. TheSwiftwing, a
monstrous dark egg looming in the twilight, seemed like home. Bart felt
the heavenly warmth close around him with a sigh of pure relief, but the
Second Officer, coming up the hatchway, stopped in consternation:
"It wasn't hailing when we left," Bart said wearily. "The sun was as
nice and green as it could be." He bit the words off, realizing he had
made a slip, but the girl seemed not to hear, fastening a strip of
plastic over a cut. She picked up his wrist. Bart flinched in spite of
himself, and Meta nodded. "I was afraid of that; it may be broken.
Better let me X-ray it."
Bart set his teeth against a cry. "It's all right, I tell you. Just
because it's black and blue—"
Bart felt himself slip sidewise; he thought for a moment that he would
faint where he sat. Terrified, he looked up at Meta. Their eyes met, and
she said, hardly moving her pale lips, "Your eyes—they're like mine.
Your eyelashes—dark, not white.You're not a Lhari!"
Her gray eyes blazed at him for a moment; then, gently, she laid his
wrist on the table, went to the infirmary door and locked it on the
inside. She turned around, her face white; even her lips had lost their
color. "Who are you?" she whispered.
Her gray eyes were wide as a kitten's. "Why, nothing. The Lhari would
neverhurtanyone, would they?"
The green-sun Meristem lay far behind them. Karol's burns had healed;
only a faint pattern on Ringg's forehead showed where six stitches had
closed the ugly wound in his skull. Bart's wrist, after a few days of
nightmarish pain when he tried to pick up anything heavy, had healed.
Two more warp-drive shifts through space had taken theSwiftwingfar,
far out to the rim of the known galaxy, and now the great crimson coal
of Antares burned in their viewports.
Small as it was, it was blazingly blue-white brilliant, and had a tiny
planet of its own. After their stop on Antares Seven—the largest of the
inhabited planets in this system, where the Lhari spaceport was
located—they would make a careful orbit around the great red primary,
and land on the tiny worldlet of the blue-white secondary before leaving
the Antares system.
"Good luck, Bart." There were tears in her gray eyes.
The address he had been given was a lavish estate, not far from the
spaceport, across a little gleaming lake that shimmered red, indigo,
violet in the crimson sunset, surrounded by a low wall of what looked
like purple glass. Bart, moving slowly through the gate, felt that eyes
were watching him, and forced himself to walk with slow dignity.
Up the path. Up a low flight of black-marble stairs. A door swung open
and shut again, closing out the red sunset, letting him into a room that
seemed dim after the months of Lhari lights. There were three men in the
room, but his eyes were drawn instantly to one, standing against an
old-fashioned fireplace.
He was very tall and quite thin, and his hair was snow-white, though he
did not look old. Bart's first incongruous thought was,He'd make a
better Lhari than I would.His firm, commanding voice told Bart at once
that this was the man in charge. "You are Bartol?" He extended his hand.
"Green."
"Darker green, with gold and red figures."
The men released him, and the white-haired man smiled.
"Your next stop. The planetoid of the captive sun. That little hunk of
bare rock out there is the first spot the Lhari visited in this
galaxy—even before Mentor. It's an inferno of light from that little
blue-white sun, so of course they love it—it's just like home to them.
When they found that the inner planets of Antares were inhabited, they
built their spaceport here, so they'd have a better chance at trade."
Montano scowled fiercely.
Montano's face was perfectly calm. "No. We won't even try." He handed
Bart a small strip of pale-yellow plastic.
"Radiation-exposure film. It's exactly as sensitive to radiation as you
are. When it starts to turn orange, it's picking up radiation. If you're
aboard the ship, get into the drive chambers—they're lead-lined—and
you'll be safe. If you're out on the surface, you'll be all right inside
one of the concrete bunkers. But get under cover before it turns red,
because by that time every Lhari of them will be stone-cold dead."
Ringg took a step backward. Then he said, very softly, "Suit yourself,
Bartol. Sorry." And noiselessly, his white crest held high, he glided
away.
He lay in his bunk brooding, thinking of death, staring at the yellow
radiation badge.If you fail, it won't be in our lifetime.He'd have
to go back to little things, to the little ships that hauled piddling
cargo between little planets, while all the grandeur of the stars
belonged to the Lhari. And if he succeeded, Vega Interplanet could
spread from star to star, a mighty memorial to Rupert Steele.
Bart set his teeth, steadying his breathing, as Ringg turned hopefully
to him. "Bartol, did you—by mistake, maybe? Because if you did, it
won't count against your rating, but it means a black mark against
mine!"
"Listen, you!" Ringg's pent-up rage exploded. He seized Bart by the
shoulder and Bart moved to throw him off, so that Ringg's outthrust
claws raked only his forearm. In pure reflex he felt his own claws flick
out; they clinched, closed, scuffled, and he felt his claws rake flesh;
half incredulous, saw the thin red line of blood welling from Ringg's
cheek.
Then Rugel's arms were flung restrainingly around him, and the Second
Officer was wrestling with a furious, struggling Ringg. Bart looked at
his red-tipped claws in ill-concealed horror, but it was lost in a
general gasp of consternation, for Vorongil had flung the drive room
door open, taking in the scene in one blistering glance.
When the intercom ordered all crew members to the hatchway, Bart
lingered a minute, pinning the yellow radiation badge in a fold of his
cloak. A spasm of fear threatened to overwhelm him again, and
nightmarish loneliness. He felt agonizingly homesick for his own
familiar face. It seemed almost more than he could manage, to step out
into the corridor full of Lhari.
The hatch opened. Even accustomed, as he was, to Lhari lights, Bart
squeezed his eyes shut at the blue-white brilliance that assaulted him
now. Then, opening slitted lids cautiously, he found that he could see.
He paused, and Bart said through a catch of breath. "Quite an
achievement." His badge still looked reassuringly yellow.
When it's red, you're dead.
Well, Montano would be safe here in the bunker. Hastily, Bart looked at
his timepiece. Half an hour before the radiation was lethal—for the
Lhari. Was it already, for him? Shakily, he unfastened the door. He ran
out into the glare, seeing as he ran that his badge was tinged with an
ever-darkening, gold, orange....
Montano had said there was a safety margin, but maybe he was wrong,
maybe all Bart would accomplish would be his own death! He ran back
along the line of bunkers, his heart pounding with his racing feet. Two
crewmen came along the line, young white-crested Lhari from the other
watch. He gasped, "Where is the captain?"
At first he thought it was his ears ringing; then he made out the
rising, shrieking wail and fall of the emergency siren, steps running,
shouting voices, the slow clang of the doors. Someone was pushing at
him, babbling words in Lhari, but he heard them through an
ever-increasing distance: Vorongil's face bent over his, only a blurred
crimson blob that flashed away like a vanishing star in the viewport. It
flamed out into green darkness, vanished, and Bart fell through what
seemed to be a bottomless chasm of starless night.
"As much as any Mentorian." Bart found he could move his right arm, and
twitched the bandage away. Vorongil and the medic stood over him; in the
other infirmary bunk a form was lying, covered with a white sheet.
Sickly, Bart wondered if they had found Montano. Vorongil followed the
direction of his eyes.
"Shift to warp," he said without thinking, and her face went deathly
white. "So that's it," she whispered. "Vorongil—no wonder he wasn't
worried about what I would find out from you or what you knew." She drew
herself together in her chair, a miserable, shrunken, terrified little
figure, bravely trying to control her terror.
The screaming whine in the ship gripped them with the strange, clawing
lassitude and discomfort. Bart, gasping under it, heard the girl moan,
saw her slump lax in her chair, half fainting. Her face was so deathly
white that he began seriously to be afraid she would die of her fear.
Fighting his own agonizing weakness, he pulled himself upright. He
reached the girl, dug his claws cruelly into her.
Bart felt his hold on himself breaking. He whispered hoarsely, "That's
the girl—don't be scared if I—black out for a minute." He held on to
consciousness with his last courage, afraid if he fainted, the girl
would collapse again.
She reached for him, and Bart, starved for some human touch, drew her
into his arms. They clung together, and he felt her wet face against his
own, the softness of her trembling hands. She was still crying a little.
Then the blackness closed on him, as if endless, and the gray blur of
warp-drive peak blotted his brain into nothingness.
"Different," Bart finished for her. "At first I was repelled—physically
repelled by myself, and by them. It was like living among weird animals,
and being one of the animals. And then, one day, Ringg was just another
kid. He had gray skin and long claws and white hair, just the way I once
had pinkish skin and short fingernails and reddish hair, but the
difference wasn't that I was human inside and he wasn't. If you skinned
Ringg, and skinned me, we'd be almost identical. And all of a sudden
then, Ringg and Vorongil and all the rest were men to me. Just people. I
thought you Mentorians, after living with the Lhari all these years,
would feel that."
Years later—he never knew whether it was memory or imagination—it
seemed to him that he could reach into that patch of gray and dreamless
time and fish out questions and answers whole, the faces of Lhari
swelling up suddenly in his eyes and shrinking back into interstellar
distance, the sting-smell of drugs, the sound of unexpected voices, odd
reflex pains, cobwebs of patchy memories that fitted nowhere else into
his life so that he supposed they must go here.
He only knew that there was a time he did not remember and then a time
when he began to think there was such a thing as memory, and then a time
when he floated without a body, and then another time when the path of
every separate nerve in his body seemed to be outlined, a shimmering web
in the gray murk. There was a mirror and a face. There were blotchy
worms of light like the star-trails of peaking warp-drive through the
viewport, colors shifting and receding, a green star, the red eye of
Antares.
The liquid felt cool on his tongue, evaporating almost before he could
swallow; the fumes seemed to mount inside the root of his nose,
expanding tremendously inside his head and brain. Abruptly his head was
clear, the last traces of gray fuzz gone.
Inside a room rose, high, domed, vaulted above his head, whitish
opalescent, washed with green. For a moment, while his eyes adjusted to
the light, he wondered how the Lhari saw it.
Beyond an expanse of black, glassy floor, he saw a low semicircular
table, behind which sat eight Lhari. All wore pale robes with high
collars that rose stiffly behind their domed heads; all were old, their
faces lined with many wrinkles, and seven of the eight were as bald as
the hull of theSwiftwing. Under their eyes he hesitated; then,
unexpectedly, pride stiffened his back.
No one moved until he stood before the semicircle of ancients. Then the
youngest, the only one of the eight with some trace of feathery crest on
his high gray head, said "Captain Vorongil, you identify this person?"
He smiled, his gnome's face breaking into a million tiny cracks like a
piece of gray-glazed pottery. "Bartol, or whatever you call yourself,
you are a brave young man. I suppose you are afraid we will block your
memories, or your ability to speak of them?"
Bart held out his arm, less gray by the day as the drug wore out of his
system. The thin line of the scar was still on it. He raised his
forefinger lightly to the fine line on Ringg's cheek. "I couldn't return
that now. So let's not get into any more fights."
"Meta, what color is this sun? I've been all around the spectrum, and
it's not red, blue, green, orange, violet—" He broke off, realizing
what he had said and what he had seen. "An eighth color," he finished,
anticlimatically.
He was under parole not to enter the drive chamber (and sure he would be
stopped if he attempted it anyhow), but when Acceleration One was
completed, he went to the viewport in the Recreation Lounge, and nobody
threw him out. He stood long, looking at the unfamiliar galaxy of the
Lhari stars; the unknown, forever unknowable constellations with their
strange shapes. Stars green, gold, topaz, burning blue, sullen red, and
the great strangely colored receding sun of the Lhari people, known to
them by the melodious name of the Ke Lhiro—which meant, simply,The
Sun: it was their first home.
He turned away from the unsolvable riddle of the strange constellations;
and went to his cabin, to dream of the green star Meristem where he had
first plotted known coordinates for a previously unknown world, and to
wander in baffling nightmares where he fed jagged, star-colored pieces
of hail into the ship's computer and watched them come out as tiny
paperdoll spaceships with the letterhead of Eight Colors printed neatly
across their sides.
Before answering, he looked out the viewport a last time. The clouds of
cosmic dust swirled and foamed around the familiar jewels of his own
sky. Blue, beloved Vega, burning in the heart of the Lyre—home—when
would he go home? He had no home now.Yet his father had left him Vega
Interplanet, as well as Eight Colors and a quest to the stars.
But a sudden, blinding light burst over Bart as Ringg moved his hand to
the scars. Once again he searched a cave beneath a green star, where
Ringg lay unconscious and bleeding, and played his Lhari light fearfully
over a waterfall of colored minerals.And there was one whose color he
could not identify—red, blue, violet, green, none of these—the color
of an unknown star in an unknown galaxy, the shimmer of a landing Lhari
ship, the color of an unknown element in an unknown fuel—
In the hearing room, four white-crested Lhari sat across from four
dignified, well-dressed men, representatives of the Federation of
Intergalactic Trade. The space beyond was wholly filled with people,
crowded together, and carrying stereo cameras, intercom equipment, the
creepie-peepie of the on-the-spot space commentator.
The effect was electric. The four Lhari sat up; their white crests
twitched. Vorongil stared, his gray eyes darkening with fear. One of the
Lhari leaned forward, shooting the question at him harshly.
"I did not," Bart said quietly. "I don't know them and I have no
intention of trying to find them. We don't need to go to the Lhari
Galaxy to find the mineral that generates the warp-frequencies, that
they call 'Catalyst A' and that the Mentorians call the 'Eighth Color.'
There is a green star called Meristem, and a spectroscopic analysis of
that star, I'm sure, will reveal what unknown elements it contains, and
perhaps locate other stars with that element. There must be others in
our galaxy, but the coordinates of the star Meristem are known to me."
"So no one but I saw the color of the mineral in the cave; you Lhari
yourselves don'tknowthat your fuel looks unlike anything else in the
universe. You never cared to find out how your world looked to your
Mentorians. So your medics never questioned my memories of an eighth
color. To you, it's just another shade of gray, but under a light strong
enough to blind any but Mentorian eyes, it takes on a special color—"
Linc Hosler was sitting in a packed football stadium when the Flying
Eyes appeared and cast their hypnotic power over half the crowd.
Thousands of people suddenly began marching zombie-like into the woods
where they vanished into a black pit.
Here is the life story of Robert F. Kennedy, the President's "chief
trouble-shooter, crisis smoother and selfless rooter" (Look); the man
who is "second only to the President in power and influence" (U.S. News
and World Report): the man who may be eyeing the White House for his
own future occupancy.
MS11 THE RED CARPET by Ezra Taft Benson A grim warning against
socialism—the royal road to communism.
K56 SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL by Edgar Black