"Too comfortable to eat?"

They munched in companionable silence. "Look," said Ringg at last, pointing toward the cliffs, "Holes in the rocks. Caves. I'd like to explore them, wouldn't you?"

"They look pretty gloomy to me. Probably full of monsters."

Ringg patted the hilt of his energon-ray. "This will handle anything short of an armor-plated saurian."

Bart shuddered. As part of uniform, he, too, had been issued one of the energon-rays; but he had never used it and didn't intend to. "Just the same, I'd rather stay out here in the sun."

"It's better than vitamin lamps," Ringg admitted, "even if it's not very bright."

Bart wondered, suddenly and worriedly, about the effects of green sunburn on his chemically altered skin tone.

"Well, let's enjoy it while we can," Ringg said, "because it seems to be clouding over. I wouldn't be surprised if it rained." He yawned. "I'm getting bored with this voyage. And yet I don't want it to end, because then I'll have to fight it out all over again with my family. My father owns a hotel, and he wants me in the family business, not five hundred light-years away. None of our family have ever been spacemen before," he explained, "and they don't understand that living on one planet would drive me out of my mind." He sighed. "How did you explain it to your people—that you couldn't be happy in the mud? Or are you a career man?"