on his bunk, shaking all over. He'd come safely
through one more nightmare, one more terror--for the moment! Had he put
Meta in danger, too? Was there no end to this ceaseless fear? Not only
for himself, but for others, the innocent bystanders who stumbled into
plots they did not understand?

_You're doing this for the stars. It's bigger than your fear. It's
bigger than you are, or any of the others...._

He was beginning to think it was a lot too big for him.

CHAPTER TEN

The green-sun Meristem lay far behind them. Karol's burns had healed;
only a faint pattern on Ringg's forehead showed where six stitches had
closed the ugly wound in his skull. Bart's wrist, after a few days of
nightmarish pain when he tried to pick up anything heavy, had healed.
Two more warp-drive shifts through space had taken the _Swiftwing_ far,
far out to the rim of the known galaxy, and now the great crimson coal
of Antares burned in their viewports.

Antares had twelve planets, the outermost of which--far away now, at the
furthest point in its orbit from the point of the _Swiftwing_'s entry
into the system--was a small captive sun. No larger than the planet
Earth, it revolved every ninety years around its huge primary.

Small as it was, it was blazingly blue-white brilliant, and had a tiny
planet of its own. After their stop on Antares Seven--the largest of the
inhabited planets in this system, where the Lhari spaceport was
located--they would make a careful orbit around the great red primary,
and land on the tiny worldlet of the blue-white secondary before leaving
the Antares system.

As Bart watched Antares growing in the viewports, he felt a variety of
emotions. On the one hand, he was relieved that as his voyage in secrecy
neared its official destination, he had as yet not incurred unmasking.

But he felt uncertain about his father's co-conspirators. Would they
return him to human form and send him back to Vega, his part ended? Or
would they, unthinkably, demand that he go on into the Lhari Galaxy?
What would he do, if they did?

At one moment he entertained fantasies of going on into the Lhari
worlds, returning victorious with the secret of their fueling location,
or of the star-drive itself. At another, he could not wait to be free of
it all. He longed for the society of his own people, yet ached to think
that this voyage between the stars must end so soon.

They made planetfall at the largest Lhari spaceport Bart had