she saved
me from having the same thing happen. I was just going to lean against a
strip of sheet metal when she _screamed_ at me. Do you think they can
really _see_ heat vibrations? She called it _red_-hot."

They had reached a line of tall cliffs, where a steep rock-fall divided
off the plain from the edge of the mountains. A few slender, drooping,
gold-leaved trees bent graceful branches over a pool. Bart stood
fascinated by the play of green sunlight on the emerald ripples, but
Ringg flung himself down full length on the soft grass and sighed
comfortably. "Feels good."

"Too comfortable to eat?"

They munched in companionable silence. "Look," said Ringg at last,
pointing toward the cliffs, "Holes in the rocks. Caves. I'd like to
explore them, wouldn't you?"

"They look pretty gloomy to me. Probably full of monsters."

Ringg patted the hilt of his energon-ray. "This will handle anything
short of an armor-plated saurian."

Bart shuddered. As part of uniform, he, too, had been issued one of the
energon-rays; but he had never used it and didn't intend to. "Just the
same, I'd rather stay out here in the sun."

"It's better than vitamin lamps," Ringg admitted, "even if it's not very
bright."

Bart wondered, suddenly and worriedly, about the effects of green
sunburn on his chemically altered skin tone.

"Well, let's enjoy it while we can," Ringg said, "because it seems to be
clouding over. I wouldn't be surprised if it rained." He yawned. "I'm
getting bored with this voyage. And yet I don't want it to end, because
then I'll have to fight it out all over again with my family. My father
owns a hotel, and he wants me in the family business, not five hundred
light-years away. None of our family have ever been spacemen before," he
explained, "and they don't understand that living on one planet would
drive me out of my mind." He sighed. "How did you explain it to your
people--that you couldn't be happy in the mud? Or are you a career man?"

"I guess so. I never thought about doing anything else," Bart said
slowly, Ringg's story had touched him; he had never realized quite so
fully how much alike the two races were, how human the Lhari problems
and dreams could seem. _Why, of course, the Lhari aren't all spacemen.
They have hotel keepers and garbage men and dentists just as we do.
Funny, you never think of them except in space._

"My mother died when I was very young," Bart said, choosing his words
very carefully.