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Updated: May 15, 2025
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.
And in his hand a drawn blaster was held level trained straight at Bart's heart. After the first moment of panic, Bart realized Montano could not tell him from a Lhari. He remained motionless. "It's me, Montano Bart Steele." The man lowered the weapon and put it away. "You nearly got yourself cut down," he said. "Did you make it all right?"
Every time a Lhari ship comes through this system they stop there, even though there's nothing on Lharillis except a landing field and some concrete bunkers filled with robot mining machinery. They'll stop there on the way out of this system and that's where you come in. We need you on board, to put the radiation counter out of commission."
"You don't think I'd tell them," she whispered. "I heard talk, in the Procyon port, of a spy that had managed to get through on a Lhari ship." Her face twisted. "You you must know about the man on the Multiphase, you know they'll make sure I can't hide anything dangerous to the Lhari at the end of the voyage."
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.
Ringg laughed and gave him a rough, affectionate shove. "You're Bartol, all right!" Even his sense of defeat vanished in wonder as they came out into the great spaceport. He saw, now, that the Lhari spaceports in human worlds were built to create, for the spacemen so far from their native worlds, some feeling of home. But everything here was so vast as to stagger the imagination.
He thought of the death of the elder Briscoe, and as always he shivered with the horror of it, but for the first time it came to him: Briscoe had provoked his own death. He had physically attacked the Lhari threatened them, goaded them to shoot him down in self-defense! "I've been on shipboard with them for months. They're not wanton murderers." Raynor Two made a derisive sound.
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.
Bart had an absurd, painful impulse to blurt out the incredible truth to Vorongil, and try to get the old Lhari to understand what he was doing. But fear held him silent. He was alone, one small human in a ship of Lhari. Vorongil was frowning at him, and Bart mumbled, "It's nothing, rieko mori." "I suppose you're pining for home," Vorongil said kindly. "Well, it won't be long now."
The more scared you are, the worse it's going to be!" She was rigid, trembling, in a trance of terror. "You rotten little coward," he yelled at her, "snap out of it! Or are all you Mentorians so gutless that you believe any half-baked folk tale the Lhari pass off on you? You and your fine talk about earning the star-drive!
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