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.