* * * * *
The first week in space was a nightmare of strain. He welcomed the hours on watch in the drive room; there alone he was sure of what he was doing. Everywhere else in the ship he was perpetually scared, perpetually on tiptoe, perpetually afraid of making some small and stupid mistake. Once he actually called Aldebaran a red star, but Rugel either did not hear the slip or thought he was repeating what one of the Mentorians--there were two aboard besides the girl--had said.
The absence of color from speech and life was the hardest thing to get used to. Every star in the manual was listed by light-frequency waves, to be checked against a photometer for a specific reading, and it almost drove Bart mad to go through the ritual when the Mentorians were off duty and could not call off the color and the equivalent frequency type for him. Yet he did not dare skip a single step, or someone might have guessed that he could _see_ the difference between a yellow and a green star before checking them.
The Academy ships had had the traditional human signal system of flashing red lights. Bart was stretched taut all the time, listening for the small codelike buzzers and ticks that warned him of filled tanks, leads in need of servicing, answers ready. Ringg's metal-fatigues testing kit was a bewildering muddle of boxes, meters, rods and earphones, each buzzing and clicking its characteristic warning.
At first he felt stretched to capacity every waking moment, his memory aching with a million details, and lay awake nights thinking his mind would crack under the strain. Then Alpha faded to a dim bluish shimmer, Beta was eclipsed, Gamma was gone, Procyon dimmed to a failing spark; and suddenly Bart's memory accustomed itself to the load, the new habits were firmly in place, and he found himself eating, sleeping and working in a settled routine.
He belonged to the _Swiftwing_ now.
Procyon was almost lost in the viewports when a sort of upswept tempo began to run through the ship, an undercurrent of increased activity. Cargo was checked, inventoried and strapped in. Ringg was given four extra men to help him, made an extra tour of the ship, and came back buzzing like a frantic cricket. Bart's computers told him they were forging toward the sidereal location assigned for the first of the warp-drive shifts, which would take them some fifteen light-years toward Aldebaran.
On the final watch before the warp-drive shift, the medical officer came around and relieved the Mentorians from duty. Bart watched them go, with a curious, cold, crawling apprehension. Even the Mentorians, trusted by the Lhari--even these were put into cold-sleep! Fear grabbed his insides.
_No human had ever survived the shift into warp-drive_, the Lhari said. Briscoe, his father, Raynor Three--they thought they had proved that the Lhari lied. If they were right, if it was a Lhari trick to reinforce their stranglehold on the human worlds and keep the warp-drive for themselves, then Bart had nothing to fear. But he was afraid.
Why did the Mentorians endure this, never quite trusted, isolated among aliens?
Raynor Three had said, _Because I belong in space, because I'm never happy anywhere else_. Bart looked out the viewport at the swirl and burn of the colors there. Now that he could never speak of the colors, it seemed he had never been so wholly and wistfully aware of them. They symbolized the thing he could never put into words.
_So that everyone can have this. Not just the Lhari._
Rugel watched the Mentorians go, scowling. "I wish medic would find a way to keep them alive through warp," he said. "My Mentorian assistant could watch that frequency-shift as we got near the bottom of the arc, and I'll bet she could _see_ it. They can see the changes in intensity faster than I can plot them on the photometer!"
Bart felt goosebumps break out on his skin. Rugel spoke as if the certain death of humans, Mentorians, was a fact. Didn't the Lhari themselves know it was a farce? _Or was it?_
Vorongil himself took the controls for the surge of Acceleration Two, which would take them past the Light Barrier. Bart, watching his instruments to exact position and time, saw the colors of each star shift strangely, moment by moment. The red stars seemed hard to see. The orange-yellow ones burned suddenly like flame; the green ones seemed golden, the blue ones almost green. Dimly, he remembered the old story of a "red shift" in the lights of approaching stars, but here he saw it pure, a sight no human eyes had ever seen. A sight that _no_ eyes had seen, human or otherwise, for the Lhari could not see it....
"Time," he said briefly to Vorongil, "Fifteen seconds...."
Rugel looked across from his couch. Bart felt that the old, scarred Lhari could read his fear. Rugel said through a wheeze, "No matter how old you get, Bartol, you're still scared when you make a warp-shift. But relax, computers don't make mistakes."
"Catalyst," Vorongil snapped, "Ready--_shift!_"
At first there was no change; then Bart realized that the stars, through the viewport, had altered abruptly in size and shade and color. They were not sparks but strange streaks, like comets, crossing and recrossing long tails that grew, longer and longer, moment by moment. The dark night of space was filled with a crisscrossing blaze. They were moving faster than light, they saw the light left by the moving Universe as each star hurled in its own invisible orbit, while they tore incredibly through it, faster than light itself....
Bart felt a curious, tingling discomfort, deep in his flesh; almost an itching, a stinging in his very bones.
_Lhari flesh is no different from ours...._
Space, through the viewport, was no longer space as he had come to know it, but a strange eerie limbo, the star-tracks lengthening, shifting color until they filled the whole viewport with shimmering, gray, recrossing light. The unbelievable reaction of warp-drive thrust them through space faster than the lights of the surrounding stars, faster than imagination could follow.
The lights in the drive chamber began to dim--or was he blacking out? The stinging in his flesh was a clawed pain.
Briscoe lived through it....
_They say._
The whirling star-tracks fogged, coiled, turned colorless worms of light, went into a single vast blur. Dimly Bart saw old Rugel slump forward, moaning softly; saw the old Lhari pillow his bald head on his veined arms. Then darkness took him; and thinking it was death, Bart felt only numb, regretful failure. _I've failed, we'll always fail. The Lhari were right all long._
_But we tried! By God, we tried!_
"Bartol?" A gentle hand, cat claws retracted, came down on his shoulder. Ringg bent over him. Good-natured rebuke was in his voice. "Why didn't you tell us you got a bad reaction, and ask to sign out for this shift?" he demanded. "Look, poor old Rugel's passed out again. He just won't admit he can't take it--but one idiot on a watch is enough! Some people just feel as if the bottom's dropped out of the ship, and that's all there is to it."
Bart hauled his head upright, fighting a surge of stinging nausea. His bones itched inside and he was damnably uncomfortable, but he was alive.
"I'm--fine."
"You look it," Ringg said in derision. "Think you can help me get Rugel to his cabin?"
Bart struggled to his feet, and found that when he was upright he felt better. "Wow!" he muttered, then clamped his mouth shut. He was supposed to be an experienced man, a Lhari hardened to space. He said woozily, "How long was I out?"
"The usual time," Ringg said briskly, "about three seconds--just while we hit peak warp-drive. Feels longer, so they tell me, sometimes--time's funny, beyond light-speeds. The medic says it's purely psychological. I'm not so sure. I _itch_, blast it!"
He moved his shoulders in a squirming way, then bent over Rugel, who was moaning, half insensible. "Catch hold of his feet, Bartol. Here--ease him out of his chair. No sense bothering the medics this time. Think you can manage to help me carry him down to the deck?"
"Sure," Bart said, finding his feet and his voice. He felt better as they moved along the hallway, the limp, muttering form of the old Lhari insensible in their arms. They reached the officer's deck, got Rugel into his cabin and into his bunk, hauled off his cloak and boots. Ringg stood shaking his head.
"And they say Captain Vorongil's so tough!"
Bart made a questioning noise.
"Why, just look," said Ringg. "He knows it would make poor old Rugel feel as if he wasn't good for much--to order him into his bunk and make him take dope like a Mentorian for every warp-shift. So we have this to go through at every jump!" He sounded cross and disgusted, but there was a rough, boyish gentleness as he hauled the blanket over the bald old Lhari. He looked up, almost shyly.
"Thanks for helping me with Old Baldy. We usually try to get him out before Vorongil officially takes notice. Of course, he sort of keeps his back turned," Ringg said, and they laughed together as they turned back to the drive room. Bart found himself thinking, _Ringg's a good kid_, before he pulled himself up, in sudden shock.