The Colors of Space

  CHAPTER SIX

  For a moment Bart stared, frozen, unable to move, his very ears refusingthe words he heard. Had this all been another cruel trick, then, a trap,a betrayal? He rose and looked wildly around the room, as if the glasswalls were a cage closing in on him.

  "Murderer!" he flung at Raynor, and took a step toward him, his clenchedfists coming up. He'd been shoved around too long, but here he had oneof them right in front of him, and for once he'd hit back! He'd start bytaking Raynor Three apart--in small pieces! "You--you rotten murderer!"

  Raynor Three made no move to defend himself. "Bart," he saidcompassionately, "sit down and listen to me. No, I'm no murderer. I--Ishouldn't have put it that way."

  Bart's hands dropped to his sides, but he heard his voice crack withpain and grief: "I suppose you'll tell me he was a spy or a traitor andyou _had_ to kill him!"

  "Not even that. I tried to save your father, I did everything I could.I'm no murderer, Bart. I killed him, yes--God forgive me, because I'llnever forgive myself!"

  Bart's fists unclenched and he stared down at Raynor Three, shaking hishead in bewilderment and pain. "I knew he was dead! I knew it all along!I was trying not to believe it, but I knew!"

  "I liked your father. I admired him. He took a long chance, and itkilled him. I could have stopped him, I should have stopped him, but howcould I? Where did I have the right to stop him, after what I didto--" he stopped, almost in mid-word, as if a switch had been turned.

  But Bart was not listening. He swung away, striding to the wall as if hewould kick it in, striking it with his two clenched fists, his wholebeing in revolt. _Dad, oh, Dad! I kept going, I thought at the end of ityou'd be here and it would all be over. But here I am at the end of itall, and you're not here, you won't ever be here again._

  Dimly, he knew when Raynor Three rose and left him alone. He leaned hishead on his clenched fists, and cried.

  After a long time he raised his head and blew his nose, his face settingitself in new, hard, unaccustomed lines, slowly coming to terms with thehard, painful reality. His father was dead. His dangerous,dead-in-earnest game of escape had no happy ending of reunion with hisfather. They couldn't sit together and laugh about how scared he hadbeen. His father was _dead_, and he, Bart, was alone and in danger. Hisface looked very grim indeed, and years older than he was.

  After a long time Raynor Three opened the door quietly. "Come and havesomething to eat, Bart."

  "I'm not hungry."

  "Well, I am," Raynor Three said, "and you ought to be. You'll need it."He pulled knobs and the appropriate tables and chairs extrudedthemselves from the walls. Raynor unsealed hot cartons and spread themon the table, saying lightly, "Looks good--not that I can claim anycredit, I subscribe to a food service that delivers them hot bypneumatic tube."

  Bart felt sickened by the thought of eating, but when he put a politefork in the food, he discovered that he was famished and ate upeverything in sight. When they had finished, Raynor dumped the cartonsinto a disposal chute, went to a small portable bar and put a glass intohis hand.

  "Drink this."

  Bart touched his lips to the glass, made a face and put it away."Thanks, but I don't drink."

  "Call it medicine, you'll need something," Raynor Three said crossly."I've got a lot to tell you, and I don't want you going off half-primedin the middle of a sentence. If you'd rather have a shot oftranquilizer, all right; otherwise, I prescribe that you drink what Igave you." He gave Bart a quick, wry grin. "I really am a medic, youknow."

  Feeling like a scolded child, Bart drank. It burned his mouth, but afterit was down, he felt a sort of warm burning in his insides thatgradually spread a sense of well-being all through him. It wasn'talcohol, but whatever it was, it had quite a kick.

  "Thanks," he muttered. "Why are you taking this trouble, Raynor? Theremust be danger--"

  "Don't you know--" Raynor broke off. "Obviously, you don't. Your mothernever said much about your Mentorian family tree, I suppose? She was aRaynor." He smiled at Bart, a little ruefully. "I won't claim akinsman's privileges until you decide how much to trust me."

  Raynor Three settled back.

  "It's a long story and I only know part of it," he began. "Our family,the Raynors, have traded with the Lhari for more generations than I cancount. When I was a young man, I qualified as a medic on the Lhariships, and I've been star-hopping ever since. People call us the slavesof the Lhari--maybe we are," he added wryly. "But I began it justbecause space is where I belong, and there's nowhere else that I've everwanted to be. And I'll take it at any price.

  "I never questioned what I was doing until a few years ago. It was yourfather who made me wonder if we Mentorians were blind and selfish--thisprivilege ought to belong to everyone, not just the Lhari. More andmore, the Lhari monopoly seemed wrong to me. But I was just a medic. Andif I involved myself in any conspiracy against the Lhari, they'd find itout in the routine psych-checking.

  "And then we worked out how it could be done. Before every trip, withself-hypnosis and self-suggestion, I erase my own memories--a sort ofartificial amnesia--so that the Lhari can't find out any more than Iwant them to find out. Of course, it also means that I have no memory,while I'm on the Lhari ships, of what I've agreed to while I'm--" Hisface suddenly worked, and his mouth moved without words, as if he hadrun into some powerful barrier against speech.

  It was a full minute, while Bart stared in dismay, before he found hisvoice again, saying, "So far, it was just a sort of loose network,trying to put together stray bits of information that the Lhari didn'tthink important enough to censor.

  "And then came the big breakthrough. There was a young Apprenticeastrogator named David Briscoe. He'd taken some runs in special testships, and read some extremely obscure research data from the early daysof the contact between men and Lhari, and he had a wild idea. He did thebravest thing anyone has ever done. He stripped himself of allidentifying data--so that if he died, no one would be in trouble withthe Lhari--and stowed away on a Lhari ship."

  "But--" Bart's lips were dry--"didn't he die in the warp-drive?"

  Slowly, Raynor Three shook his head.

  "No, he didn't. No drugs, no cold-sleep--but he didn't die. Don't yousee, Bart?" He leaned forward, urgently.

  "_It's all a fake!_ The Lhari have just been saying that to justifytheir refusal to give us the secret of the catalyst that generates thewarp-drive frequencies! Such a simple lie, and it's worked for all theseyears!"

  * * * * *

  "A Mentorian found him and didn't have the heart to turn him over to theLhari. So he was smuggled clear again. But when that Mentorian underwentthe routine brain-checks at the end of the voyage, the Lhari found outwhat had happened. They didn't know Briscoe's name, but they wrung thatMentorian out like a wet dishcloth and got a description that was asgood as fingerprints. They tracked down young Briscoe and killed him.They killed the first man he'd talked to. They killed the second. Thethird was your father."

  "The murdering devils!"

  Raynor sighed. "Your father and Briscoe's father were old friends.Briscoe's father was dying with incurable heart disease; _his_ son wasdead, and old Briscoe had only one thought in his mind--to make sure hedidn't die for nothing. So he took your father's papers, knowing theywere as good as a death warrant, slipped away and boarded a Lhari shipthat led roundabout to stars where the message hadn't reached yet. Heled them a good chase. Did he die or did they track him down and killhim?" Bart bowed his head and told the story.

  "Meanwhile," Raynor Three continued, "your father came to me, knowing Iwas sympathetic, knowing I was a Lhari-trained surgeon. He had just onethought in his mind: to do, again, what David Briscoe had done, and makesure the news got out this time. He cooked up a plan that was evenbraver and more desperate. He decided to sign on a Lhari ship as amember of the crew."

  "As a Mentorian?" Bart asked, but something cold, like ice watertrickling down his back, told him this was not what Raynor meant. "Thebrainwas
hing--"

  "No," said Raynor, "not as a Mentorian; he couldn't have escaped thepsych-checking. _As a Lhari._"

  Bart gasped. "How--"

  "Men and Lhari are very much alike," Raynor Three said. "A few smallthings--skin color, the shape of the ears, the hands and claws--keephumans from seeing that the Lhari are men."

  "Don't say that," Bart almost yelled. "Those filthy, murdering devils!You call those monsters men?"

  "I've lived among the Lhari all my life. They're not devils, Bart, theyhave their reasons. Physiologically, the Lhari are--well, _humanoid_, ifyou like that better. They're a lot more like a man than a man is like,for instance, a gorilla. Your father convinced me that with minorplastic and facial surgery, he could pass as a Lhari. And finally I gavein, and did the surgery--"

  "And it killed him!"

  "Not really. It was a completely unforeseeable thing--a blood clot brokeloose in a vein, and lodged in his brain. He was dead in seconds. Itcould have happened at any time," he said, "yet I feel responsible, eventhough I keep telling myself I'm not. And I'll help you as much as Ican--for his sake, and for your mother's. The Lhari don't watch me tooclosely--they figure that anything I do they'll catch in thebrainwashing. But I'm still one step ahead of them, as long as I canerase my own memories."

  Bart was sifting it all, slowly, in his mind.

  "Why was Dad doing this? What could he gain?"

  "You know we can build ships as good as the Lhari ships, but we don'tknow anything about the rare catalyst they use for warp-drive fuel.Captain Steele had hopes of being able to discover where they got it."

  "But couldn't they find out where the Lhari ships go for fueling?"

  "No. There's no way to trail a Lhari ship," he reminded Bart. "We canfollow them inside a star-system, but then they pop into warp-drive, andwe don't know where they go when they aren't running between _our_stars.

  "We've gathered together what information we _do_ have, and we know thatafter a certain number of runs in our part of the galaxy, ships take offin the direction of Antares. There's a ship, due to come in here inabout ten days, called the _Swiftwing_, which is just about due to makethe Antares run. Captain Steele had managed to arrange--I don't knowhow, and I don't want to know how--for a vacancy on that ship, andsomehow he got credentials. You see, it's a very good spy system, anetwork between the stars, but the weak link is this: everything, everymessage, every man, has to travel back and forth by the Lhari shipsthemselves."

  He rose, shaking it all off impatiently. "Well, it's finished now. Yourfather is dead. What are you going to do? If you want to go back toVega, you can probably convince the Lhari you're just an innocentbystander. They _don't_ hurt bystanders or children, Bart. They aren'tbad people. They're just protecting their business monopoly.

  "The safest way to handle it would be this: let me erase your memoriesof what I've told you tonight. Then just let the Lhari capture you. Theywon't kill you. They'll just give you a light psych-check. When theyfind out you don't know anything, they'll send you back to Vega, and youcan spend the rest of your life in peace, running Vega Interplanet andEight Colors."

  Bart turned on him furiously. "You mean, go home like a good little boy,and pretend none of this ever happened? What do you think I am, anyhow?"Bart's chin set in the new, hard line. "What I want is a chance to go onwhere Dad left off!"

  "It won't be easy, and it could be dangerous," Raynor Three said, "butthere's nothing else to be done. We had the arrangements all made; andnow somebody's got to take the dangerous risk of calling them off. Areyou game for a little plastic surgery--just enough to change your looksagain, with new forged papers? You can't go by the _Swiftwing_--itdoesn't carry passengers--but there's another route you can take."

  Bart sprang up. "No," he said, "I know a better way. Let me go on the_Swiftwing_--in Dad's place--_as a Lhari_!"

  "Bart, no," Raynor Three said. "You'd never get away with it. It's toodangerous." But his gold eyes glinted.

  "Why not? I speak Lhari better than Dad ever did. And my eyes can standLhari lights. You said yourself, it's going to be a dangerous job justcalling off all the arrangements. So let's _not_ call them off. Just letme take Dad's place!"

  "Bart, you're only a boy--"

  "What was Dave Briscoe? No, Raynor. Dad left me a lot more than VegaInterplanet, and you know it. I'll finish what he started, and thenmaybe I'll begin to deserve what he left me."

  Raynor Three gripped Bart's hand. He said, in a voice that shook, "Allright, Bart. You're your father's son. I can't say more than that. Ihaven't any right to stop you."