"How about let's get some food from the rations clerk, and do some
exploring?"
The sun overhead was a clear greenish-gold, the sky strewn with soft
pale clouds that cast racing shadows on the soft grass underfoot,
fragrant pinkish-yellow stuff strewn with bright vermilion puff-balls.
Bart wished he were alone to enjoy it.
"How are the repairs coming?"
"Pretty well. But Karol got his hand half scorched off, poor fellow.
Just luck the same thing didn't happen to me." Ringg added. "You know
that Mentorian--the young one, the medic's assistant?"
"I've seen her. Her name's Meta, I think." Suddenly, Bart wished the
Mentorian girl were with him here. It would be nice to hear a human
voice.
"Oh, is it a female? Mentorians all look alike to me," Ringg said, while
Bart controlled his face with an effort. "Be that as it may, she saved
me from having the same thing happen. I was just going to lean against a
strip of sheet metal when she _screamed_ at me. Do you think they can
really _see_ heat vibrations? She called it _red_-hot."
They had reached a line of tall cliffs, where a steep rock-fall divided
off the plain from the edge of the mountains. A few slender, drooping,
gold-leaved trees bent graceful branches over a pool. Bart stood
fascinated by the play of green sunlight on the emerald ripples, but
Ringg flung himself down full length on the soft grass and sighed
comfortably. "Feels good."
"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?"
"I guess so. I never thought about doing anything else," Bart said
slowly, Ringg's story had touched him; he had never realized quite so
fully how much alike the two races were, how human the Lhari problems
and dreams could seem. _Why, of course, the Lhari aren't all spacemen.
They have hotel keepers and garbage men and dentists just as we do.
Funny, you never think of them except in space._
"My mother died when I was very young," Bart said, choosing his words
very carefully. "My father owned a fleet of interplanetary ships."
"But you wanted the real thing, deep space, the stars," Ringg said. "How
did he feel about that?"
"He would have understood," Bart said, unable to keep emotion out of his
voice, "but he's dead now. He died, not long ago."
Ringg's eyes were bright with sympathy. "While you were off on the
drift? Bad luck," he said gently. He was silent, and when he spoke again
it was in a very different tone.
"But some of the older generation--I had a professor in training school,
funny old chap, bald as the hull of the _Swiftwing_. Taught us
cosmic-ray analysis, and what he didn't know about spiral nebulae could
be engraved on my fifth toe-claw, and he'd never been off the face of
the planet. Not even to one of the moons! He was the supervisor of my
student lodge, and oh, was he a--" The phrase Ringg used meant,
literally, _a soft piece of cake_.
"His feet may have been buried in mud, but his head was off in the Great
Nebula. We had some wild times," Ringg reminisced. "We'd slip away to
the city--strictly against rules, it was an old-style school--and draw
lots for one of us to stay home and sign in for all twelve. You see,
he'd sit there reading, and when one of us came in, just shove the wax
at us, with his nose in a text on cosmic dust, never looking up. So the
one who stayed home would scrawl a name on it, walk out the back door,
come around and sign in again. When there were twelve signed in, of
course, the old chap would go up to bed, and late that night the one who
stayed in would sneak down and let us in."
Ringg sat up suddenly, touching his cheek. "Was that a drop of rain? And
the sun's gone. I suppose we ought to start back, though I hate to leave
those caves unexplored."
Bart bent to gather up the debris of their meal. He flinched as
something hard struck his arm. "Ouch! What was that?"