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I tell you, you'll all be dead if you don't believe me! Get the men into the ship! Get them behind shielding and then check my story! I'm not " he had gone this far, he might as well go the whole way "I'm not a Lhari!" "What?" One of the crewmen came dashing up, his crest sweat-streaked. "Captain! Rugel has collapsed! We don't know what's wrong with him."

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.

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.

"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.

"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.

Bare, burning sand, strewn with curiously colored rocks, lay piled in strange chaos; then he realized there was an odd, but perceptible geometry to their arrangement. They showed alternate crystal and opaque faces. Old Rugel noted his look of surprise. "Never been here before? That's right, you've always worked on the Polaris run. Well, those aren't true rocks, but living creatures of a sort.

You're Rupert Steele's son, and you're here to carry on what your father left undone, aren't you? If you fail now, there may not be another chance for years maybe not in our lifetimes." Bart dropped his head in his hands. Kill a whole shipload of Lhari innocent traders? Bald, funny old Rugel, stern Vorongil, Ringg "I don't know what to do!" It was a cry of despair.

Tell me who's going to be opening the panels in here anyhow?" "No, no," Rugel said patiently, "I'm not accusing you of anything, only being careless, young Ringg. You poke with those buzzing instruments and things, maybe once you tear loose some wires." Bart remembered he wasn't supposed to know what was going on. "What's this all about?" It was Rugel who answered.

Don Quixote no sooner heard a book of chivalry mentioned, than he said: "Had your worship told me at the beginning of your story that the Lady Luscinda was fond of books of chivalry, no other laudation would have been requisite to impress upon me the superiority of her understanding, for it could not have been of the excellence you describe had a taste for such delightful reading been wanting; so, as far as I am concerned, you need waste no more words in describing her beauty, worth, and intelligence; for, on merely hearing what her taste was, I declare her to be the most beautiful and the most intelligent woman in the world; and I wish your worship had, along with Amadis of Gaul, sent her the worthy Don Rugel of Greece, for I know the Lady Luscinda would greatly relish Daraida and Garaya, and the shrewd sayings of the shepherd Darinel, and the admirable verses of his bucolics, sung and delivered by him with such sprightliness, wit, and ease; but a time may come when this omission can be remedied, and to rectify it nothing more is needed than for your worship to be so good as to come with me to my village, for there I can give you more than three hundred books which are the delight of my soul and the entertainment of my life; though it occurs to me that I have not got one of them now, thanks to the spite of wicked and envious enchanters; but pardon me for having broken the promise we made not to interrupt your discourse; for when I hear chivalry or knights-errant mentioned, I can no more help talking about them than the rays of the sun can help giving heat, or those of the moon moisture; pardon me, therefore, and proceed, for that is more to the purpose now."

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.