e of failure? Maybe he
need not go empty-handed, empty-eyed, from the Lhari worlds! They had
dismissed him, scornfully, stolen cookie in hand--but maybe it would be
a bigger cookie than they dreamed!

The exhilaration lasted through the tour of the port, through the heavy
surge of acceleration which brought them up, out and way from Council
Planet. Bart, confined in Rugel's cabin, hardly felt like a prisoner,
his mind busy with schemes.

_I'll study star-maps, and spectroscope reports...._

It lasted almost two days of shiptime, and they were readying for
Acceleration Two, before he came, figuratively, down to earth. To pick
one star out of trillions--and not even in his own galaxy? It would take
a lifetime and he didn't even know which of the four or five spiral
nebulae in the skies of the human worlds was the Lhari Galaxy. A
lifetime? A hundred lifetimes wouldn't do it!

He might have known. If there had been one chance in the odd billion of
his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil
permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have
been returned to the _Swiftwing_ as he had been taken from it, by closed
car, and imprisoned, maybe even drugged, until he was safely back in the
human worlds again.

He was under parole not to enter the drive chamber (and sure he would be
stopped if he attempted it anyhow), but when Acceleration One was
completed, he went to the viewport in the Recreation Lounge, and nobody
threw him out. He stood long, looking at the unfamiliar galaxy of the
Lhari stars; the unknown, forever unknowable constellations with their
strange shapes. Stars green, gold, topaz, burning blue, sullen red, and
the great strangely colored receding sun of the Lhari people, known to
them by the melodious name of the Ke Lhiro--which meant, simply, _The
Sun_: it was their first home.

Where had he seen that color? In that stolen glimpse of the Lhari ship
landing, long ago? Of all the colors of space, this one he would never
know.

He turned away from the unsolvable riddle of the strange constellations;
and went to his cabin, to dream of the green star Meristem where he had
first plotted known coordinates for a previously unknown world, and to
wander in baffling nightmares where he fed jagged, star-colored pieces
of hail into the ship's computer and watched them come out as tiny
paperdoll spaceships with the letterhead of Eight Colors printed neatly
across their s