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,thatwas 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 hecouldtolerate—he'd never been on Mentor—but hehadinherited 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.