The Colors of Space - Page 97/108

"So what?" Ringg said impatiently, "What are we going to do, chatter

about light waves or see the city?"

Bart acquiesced, trying to sound eager, but a wild excitement was

gusting up in him. He dutifully pretended fascination with the towers,

the many-leveled roads, the giant dams and pylons, but his thoughts were

racing.

The eighth color! There can't be too many suns of this color, or

they'd have named it and known it! And telescopes can find it.

Could success be salvaged, then, at the very edge of failure? Maybe he

need not go empty-handed, empty-eyed, from the Lhari worlds! They had

dismissed him, scornfully, stolen cookie in hand--but maybe it would be

a bigger cookie than they dreamed!

The exhilaration lasted through the tour of the port, through the heavy

surge of acceleration which brought them up, out and way from Council

Planet. Bart, confined in Rugel's cabin, hardly felt like a prisoner,

his mind busy with schemes.

I'll study star-maps, and spectroscope reports....

It lasted almost two days of shiptime, and they were readying for

Acceleration Two, before he came, figuratively, down to earth. To pick

one star out of trillions--and not even in his own galaxy? It would take

a lifetime and he didn't even know which of the four or five spiral

nebulae in the skies of the human worlds was the Lhari Galaxy. A

lifetime? A hundred lifetimes wouldn't do it!

He might have known. If there had been one chance in the odd billion of

his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil

permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have

been returned to the Swiftwing as he had been taken from it, by closed

car, and imprisoned, maybe even drugged, until he was safely back in the

human worlds again.

He was under parole not to enter the drive chamber (and sure he would be

stopped if he attempted it anyhow), but when Acceleration One was

completed, he went to the viewport in the Recreation Lounge, and nobody

threw him out. He stood long, looking at the unfamiliar galaxy of the

Lhari stars; the unknown, forever unknowable constellations with their

strange shapes. Stars green, gold, topaz, burning blue, sullen red, and

the great strangely colored receding sun of the Lhari people, known to

them by the melodious name of the Ke Lhiro--which meant, simply, The

Sun: it was their first home.

Where had he seen that color? In that stolen glimpse of the Lhari ship

landing, long ago? Of all the colors of space, this one he would never

know.