Bart nodded. "Meet you on the upper level later," he said, and got on a
moving staircase that soared slowly upward, past level after level,
toward the information desk located on the topmost mezzanine.
The staircase moved slowly, and Bart had plenty of time to see
everything. On the step immediately in front of him, two Lhari were
standing; with their backs turned, they might almost have been men.
Unusually tall, unusually thin, but men. Then Bart amended that
mentally. The Lhari had two arms, two legs and a head apiece--they were
that much like men. Their faces had two eyes, two ears, and a nose and
mouth, all in the right places. But the similarity ended there.
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.
The two Lhari in front of Bart had been talking softly, in their fast
twittering speech; but as the hum of the crowds on the upper levels grew
louder, they raised their voices, and Bart could hear what they were
saying. He was a little surprised to find that he could still understand
the Lhari language. He hadn't heard a word of it in years--not since his
Mentorian mother died. The Lhari would never guess that he could
understand their speech. Not one human in a million could speak or
understand a dozen words of Lhari, except the Mentorians.
"Do you really think that _human_--" the first Lhari spoke the word as
if it were a filthy insult--"will have the temerity to come in by this
ship?"
"No reasonable being can tell what _humans_ will do," said the second
Lhari. "But then, no reasonable being can tell what our own Port
Authorities will do either! If the message had only reached us sooner,
it would have been easier. Now I suppose it will have to clear through a
dozen officials and a dozen different kinds of formalities."
The younger Lhari sounded angry. "And we have only a description--no
name, nothing! How do they expect us to do anything under those
conditions? What I can't understand is how it ever happened, or how the
man managed to get away. What worries me is the possibility that he may
have communicated with others we don't know about. Those bungling fools
who let the first man get away can't even be sure--"
"Do not speak of it here," said the old Lhari sharply. "There are
Mentorians in the crowd who might understand us." He turned and looked
straight at Bart, and Bart felt as if the slanted strange eyes were
looking right through to his bones. The Lhari said, in Universal, "Who
are you, boy? What iss your businesssses here?"
Bart replied in the same language, politely, "My father's coming in on
this ship. I'm looking for the information desk."
"Up there," said the old Lhari, pointing with a clawed hand, and lost
interest in Bart. He said to his companion, in their own language,
"Always, I regret these episodes. I have no malice against humans. I
suppose even this Vegan that we are seeking has young, and a mate, who
will regret his loss."
"Then he should not have pried into Lhari matters," said the younger
Lhari fiercely. "If they'd killed him right away--"
The soaring staircase swooped up to the top level; the two Lhari stepped
off and mingled swiftly with the crowd, being lost to sight. Bart
whistled in dismay as he got off and turned toward the information desk.
A Vegan! Some poor guy from his own planet was in trouble with the
Lhari. He felt a cold, crawling chill down his insides. The Lhari had
spoken regretfully, but the way they'd speak of a fly they couldn't
manage to swat fast enough. Sooner or later you had to get down to it,
they just weren't human!
Here on Earth, nothing much could happen, of course. They wouldn't let
the Lhari hurt anyone--then Bart remembered his course in Universal Law.
The Lhari spaceport in every system, by treaty, was Lhari territory.
Once you walked beneath the lightning-flash sign, the authority of the
planet ceased to function; you might as well be on that unbelievably
remote world in another galaxy that was the Lhari home planet--that
world no human had ever seen. On a Lhari spaceport, or on a Lhari ship,
you were under the jurisdiction of Lhari law.
Tommy stepped off a moving stair and joined him. "The ship's on time--it
reported past Luna City a few minutes ago. I'm thirsty--how about a
drink?"
There was a refreshment stand on this level; they debated briefly
between orange juice and a drink with a Lhari name that meant simply
_cold sweet_, and finally decided to try it. The name proved
descriptive; it was very cold, very sweet and indescribably delicious.
"Does this come from the Lhari world, I wonder?"
"I imagine it's synthetic," Bart said.
"I suppose it won't _hurt_ us?"
Bart laughed. "They wouldn't serve it to us if it would. No, men and
Lhari are alike in a lot of ways. They breathe the same air. Eat about
the same food." Their bodies were adjusted to about the same gravity.
They had the same body chemistry--in fact, you couldn't tell Lhari blood
from human, even under a microscope. And in the terrible Orion Spaceport
wreck sixty years ago, doctors had found that blood plasma from humans
could be used for wounded Lhari, and vice versa, though it wasn't safe
to transfuse whole blood. But then, even among humans there were five
blood types.
And yet, for all their likeness, they were _different_.
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.
_Will Dad know me? I was just a little kid when he left me here, and now
I'm grown-up._
Tommy grinned at him in the mirror. "What are you going to do, now we've
finished our so-called education?"
"What do you think? Go back to Vega with Dad, by Lhari ship, and help
him run Vega Interplanet. Why else would I bother with all that
astrogation and math?"
"You're the lucky one, with your father owning a dozen ships! He must be
almost as rich as the Lhari."
Bart shook his head. "It's not that easy. Space travel inside a system
these days is small stuff; all the real travel and shipping goes to the
Lhari ships."
It was a sore point with everyone. Thousands of years ago, men had
spread out from Earth--first to the planets, then to the nearer stars,
crawling in ships that could travel no faster than the speed of light.
They had even believed that was an absolute limit--that nothing in the
universe could exceed the speed of light. It took years to go from Earth
to the nearest star.
But they'd done it. From the nearer stars, they had sent out colonizing
ships all through the galaxy. Some vanished and were never heard from
again, but some made it, and in a few centuries man had spread all over
hundreds of star-systems.
And then man met the people of the Lhari.
It was a big universe, with measureless millions of stars, and plenty of
room for more than two intelligent civilizations. It wasn't surprising
that the Lhari, who had only been traveling space for a couple of
thousand years themselves, had never come across humans before. But they
had been delighted to meet another intelligent race--and it was
extremely profitable.
Because men were still held, mostly, to the planets of their own
star-systems. Ships traveling between the stars by light-drive were rare
and ruinously expensive. But the Lhari had the warp-drive, and almost
overnight the whole picture changed. By warp-drive, hundreds of times
faster than light at peak, the years-long trip between Vega and Earth,
for instance, was reduced to about three months, at a price anyone could
pay. Mankind could trade and travel all over their galaxy, but they did
it on Lhari ships. The Lhari had an absolute, unbreakable monopoly on
star travel.
"That's what hurts," Tommy said. "It wouldn't do us any good to have the
star-drive. Humans can't stand faster-than-light travel, except in
cold-sleep."
Bart nodded. The Lhari ships traveled at normal speeds, like the regular
planetary ships, inside each star-system. Then, at the borders of the
vast gulf of emptiness between stars, they went into warp-drive; but
first, every human on board was given the cold-sleep treatment that
placed them in suspended animation, allowing their bodies to endure the
warp-drive.
He finished his drink. The increasing bustle in the crowds below them
told him that time must be getting short. A tall, impressive-looking
Lhari strode through the crowd, followed at a respectful distance by two
Mentorians, tall, redheaded humans wearing metallic cloaks like those of
the Lhari. Tommy nudged Bart, his face bitter.
"Look at those lousy Mentorians! How can they do it? Fawning upon the
Lhari that way, yet they're as human as we are! _Slaves_ of the Lhari!"
Bart felt the involuntary surge of anger, instantly controlled. "It's
not that way at all. My mother was a Mentorian, remember. She made five
cruises on a Lhari ship before she married my father."
Tommy sighed. "I guess I'm just jealous--to think the Mentorians can
sign on the Lhari ship as crew, while you and I will never pilot a ship
between the stars. What did she do?"
"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.
"So they found out that humans aboard their ships were useful. You
remember how humans, in the early days in space, used certain birds, who
were more sensitive to impure air than they were. When the birds keeled
over, they could tell it was time for humans to start looking over the
air systems! The Lhari use Mentorians to identify colors for them. And,
since Mentor was the first planet of humans that the Lhari had contact
with, they've always been closer to them."
Tommy looked after the two Mentorians enviously. "The fact is, I'd ship
out with the Lhari myself if I could. Wouldn't you?"
Bart's mouth twisted in a wry smile. "No," he said. "I could--I'm half
Mentorian, I can even speak Lhari."
"Why don't you? I would."
"Oh, no, you wouldn't," Bart said softly. "Not even very many Mentorians
will. You see, the Lhari don't trust humans too much. In the early days,
men were always planting spies on Lhari ships, to try and steal the
secret of warp-drive. They never managed it, but nowadays the Lhari give
all the Mentorians what amounts to a brainwashing--deep hypnosis, before
and after every voyage, so that they can neither look for anything that
might threaten the Lhari monopoly of space, nor reveal it--even under a
truth drug--if they find it out.
"You have to be pretty fanatical about space travel to go through that.
Oh, my mother could tell us a lot of things about her cruises with the
Lhari. The Lhari can't tell a diamond from a ruby, except by
spectrographic analysis, for instance. And she--"
A high gong note sounded somewhere, touching off an explosion of warning
bells and buzzers all over the enormous building. Bart looked up.
"The ship must be coming in to land."
"I'd better check into the passenger side," Tommy said. He stuck out his
hand. "Well, Bart, I guess this is where we say good-bye."
They shook hands, their eyes meeting for a moment in honest grief. In
some indefinable way, this parting marked the end of their boyhood.
"Good luck, Tom. I'm going to miss you."
They wrung each other's hands again, hard. Then Tommy picked up his
luggage and started down a sloping ramp toward an enclosure marked TO
PASSENGER ENTRANCE.
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.
Bart ran down a ramp and surged out on the field with the crowd. His
eyes, alert for his father's tall figure, noted with surprise that the
ship's stairs were guarded by four cloaked Lhari, each with a Mentorian
interpreter. They were stopping each person who got off the starship,
asking for identity papers. Bart realized he was seeing another segment
of the same drama he had overheard discussed, and wished he knew what it
was all about.
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._
Then Bart realized that the little fat man was staring straight at him.
He returned the man's smile, rather hesitantly; then blinked, for the
fat man was coming straight toward him.
"Hello, Son," the fat man said loudly. Then, as two of the Lhari started
toward him, the strange man did an incredible thing. He reached out his
two hands and grabbed Bart.
"Well, boy, you've sure grown," he said, in a loud, cheerful voice, "but
you're not too grown-up to give your old Dad a good hug, are you?" He
pulled Bart roughly into his arms. Bart started to pull away and stammer
that the fat man had made a mistake, but the pudgy hand gripped his
wrist with unexpected strength.
"Bart, listen to me," the stranger whispered, in a harsh fast voice. "Go
along with this or we're both dead. See those two Lhari watching us?
Call me Dad, good and loud, if you want to live. Because, believe me,
your life's in danger--right now!"