"As much as any Mentorian." Bart found he could move his right arm, and twitched the bandage away. Vorongil and the medic stood over him; in the other infirmary bunk a form was lying, covered with a white sheet. Sickly, Bart wondered if they had found Montano. Vorongil followed the direction of his eyes.
"Yes," he said, and his voice held deep bitterness, "poor old Rugel is dead. He didn't get much of the radiation, but his heart wouldn't stand it, and gave out." He bowed his head. "He was bald in the service of the ships when my crest was new-sprouted," he said in deep grief.
Bart felt the shock of that, even through his own fear. He looked down at his left arm. It was strapped to a splint, and fluid was dripping slowly into the vein there.
Vorongil nodded. "I expect you feel pretty sick. You got a good dose of radiation yourself, but we've given you a couple of transfusions--one of the Mentorians matched your blood type, fortunately. It was a close call."
The medic was looking down in ill-disguised curiosity. "Fantastic," he said. "I don't suppose you'd tell me who changed your looks. I admit I wouldn't believe it until I had a look at your foot bones under the fluoroscope."
Vorongil said quietly, "Bartol--I don't suppose that's your real name--why did you do it?"
"I couldn't see you all die, sir," Bart said, not expecting them to believe him. "No more than that."
The medic said roughly in Lhari, "It's a trick, sir, no more. A trick to make us trust him!"
"Why would he risk his own life then?" Vorongil asked. "No, it's more than that." He hesitated. "We checked the bunkers--in radiation suits--before we took off. We found a man in one of them."
"Was he dead?" Bart whispered.
"No," Vorongil said quietly.
"Thank God!" It was a heartfelt explosion. Then, apprehensively, "Or did you kill him?"
"What do you think we are?" Vorongil said incredulously. "Indeed no. His own men have probably found him by now. I don't imagine he got half as much radiation as you did."
Bart surveyed the needle in his arm. "Why are you taking all this trouble if I'm going to be put out of the way?"
"You must have some funny ideas about us," Vorongil said shaking his head. "That would be a fine way to reward you for saving all of our lives. No, you're not going to be killed."
"If I had my way--" the old medic began, and suddenly Vorongil flew into a rage. "Get out!"
The medic went stiffly through the door, and Vorongil stood gazing down at Bart, shaking his yellowed crest. "I don't know what to say to you. It was a brave thing you did, but perhaps no braver than you've done all along. Are you a Mentorian?"
"Only half."
"Strange," Vorongil said, looking into space, "that I could talk to you as I did by the monument, and you knew what I meant. But, yes, you would understand." Abruptly, he recalled himself, and his voice was thin and cold.
"I haven't quite decided what to do. I haven't spoken of this to the crew yet; the fewer who know about this, the better. I told them you got a heavy dose of radiation, and you're too sick to see visitors." He sounded kinder when he said, "It's true, you know. It won't hurt you to get your strength back."
He went out, and Bart wondered, _Get my strength back for what?_ He lay back, feeling weaker than he realized. It was a relief to know he wasn't going to be killed out of hand. And somehow he didn't believe he was going to be killed at all.
It wasn't like being a prisoner. The medic brought him plenty of food, urging him to eat--"You need plenty of protein after radiation burns"--and if he stayed in the bunk, it was only because he felt too weak to get up. Actually he was suffering from delayed emotional shock, as well as from radiation. He was content to let things drift.
Inevitably, the time came when he had to think about what he had done. He had betrayed Montano, he had been false to the men who sent him.
"But they don't know the Lhari," his conscience replied, justifying what he had done.
_You sided with the Lhari against your own people. You spoilt our chances of learning about the Lhari fuel catalyst._
"I've done something better than stealing a secret by stealth. I've proved that humans and Lhari can communicate, that they can trust each other. It's only their looks that are strange. A kind, generous man is a kind generous man, whether his name is Raynor Three or Vorongil."
_But who's going to know it?_
"I know it. And truth comes out, sooner or later. Somehow, a better understanding between man and Lhari will come from this."
Secure in the knowledge, he turned over and went peacefully to sleep.
When he woke again, he felt better. The Mentorian girl, Meta, was sitting quietly between the bunks, watching him. He started to turn over, flinched at the pain in his arm.
"Yes," she said, "we're giving you one last transfusion. Plasma, this time. It's Lhari, but if you know that much, you know it won't hurt you." She came and inspected the needle in his wrist, and Bart caught her hand with his free one. "Meta, does anyone else know?"
She looked down with a troubled smile. "I don't think so. I was off watch, waiting for cold-sleep--we're just about to make the long jump--when Vorongil came to my quarters. I was startled almost out of my wits. He asked if I could keep a secret; then he told me about you. Oh, Bart!" Her small soft hand closed convulsively on his, "I was so afraid! I knew they wouldn't kill you, but I was afraid!"
_Yet they had killed David Briscoe_, Bart thought, and hunted down two of his friends. It was the only thing he couldn't square with his perception of the Lhari. It didn't fit. He could understand that they had shot down the robotcab with Edmund Briscoe in it, in pure self-defense; and that knowledge had taken off the edge of the horror. But the death of young Briscoe and everyone he had talked to could not be explained away.
"You seem very sure they wouldn't have killed me, Meta," he said, carefully clasping his hand around hers.
"They wouldn't," she affirmed. "But they could--make you forget--"
A small chill went over Bart. He let go of her hand and lay staring bleakly at the wall. He supposed that was his probable fate: remembering the tragic tone of Raynor Three when he said _I won't remember you_, he gritted his teeth, feeling his face twist convulsively. Meta, watching, misunderstood.
"Arm hurting? I'll have that needle out of your vein in a few minutes now."
When she had freed his arm and put away the apparatus, she came to his side. "Bart, how did it happen? How did they find you out?"
Suddenly, the longing for human contact was too much for Bart, and the knowledge of his secret intolerable. The Lhari could find out what he knew, if they wanted to know, very simply; he was in their power. It didn't matter any more.
The telling of the story took a long time, and when he finished, Meta's soft small kitten-face was compassionate.
"I'm glad you--decided what you did," she whispered. "It's what a Mentorian would have done. I know that other races call us _slaves of the Lhari_. We aren't. We're working in our own way to show the Lhari that human beings can be trusted. The other peoples--they hold away from the Lhari, fighting them with words even though they're afraid to fight them with weapons, carrying on the war that they're afraid to fight!
"Did it ever occur to you--all the peoples of all the planets keep saying, _We're as good as the Lhari_, but only the Mentorians are willing to prove it? Bart, a Lhari ship can't get along in our galaxy without Mentorians any more! It may be slower than trying to take the warp-drive by force, or stealing it by spying, but when we learn to endure it, I have faith that we'll get it!"
Bart, although moved by Meta's philosophy, couldn't quite share it. It still seemed to him that the Mentorians were lacking in something--independence, maybe, or drive.
"I wasn't thinking about anything like that," he said honestly. "It was simply that I couldn't let them die. After all--" he was speaking more to himself than to the girl--"it's _their_ star-drive. _They_ found it. And they've given us star-trade, and star-travel, cheaply and with profit to both sides. I hope we'll get the star-drive someday. But if we got it by mass murder, it would sow the seeds of a hatred between men and Lhari that would never end. It wouldn't be worth it, Meta. Nothing would be worth that. We've got enough hate already."
* * * * *
Bart was still in his bunk, but beginning to fret at staying there, when the familiar trembling of Acceleration Two started to run through the ship. It was, by now, so familiar to him that he hardly gave it a second thought, but Meta panicked.
"What's happening? Bart, what is it? Why are we under acceleration again?"
"Shift to warp," he said without thinking, and her face went deathly white. "So that's it," she whispered. "Vorongil--no wonder he wasn't worried about what I would find out from you or what you knew." She drew herself together in her chair, a miserable, shrunken, terrified little figure, bravely trying to control her terror.