one of the
monsters_--

"Which one of the planets was it we stopped on?" Rugel asked. "I can't
tell 'em apart from this distance."

Bartol swallowed; he had almost said _the blue one_. He pointed.
"The--the big one there, with the rings almost edge-on. I think they
call it Alpha."

"It's their planet," said Rugel. "I guess they can call it what they
want to. How about another game?"

Resolutely, Bart turned his back on the bewitching colors, and bent over
the pinball machine.

* * * * *

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 t