he 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