The Colors of Space

"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.