deration is going to do to me. _Conspiracy
unlawfully to board_--and all the rest of it. Even if I don't go to a
prison planet, I'll spend the rest of my life chained down to Vega."

"It doesn't have to be that way."

"What other choice is there?" he demanded.

"You're half Mentorian," she said, raising her eager face. "Oh, Bart,
you love it so, you know you can't bear to give it up. Stay with
us--please stay!"

Before answering, he looked out the viewport a last time. The clouds of
cosmic dust swirled and foamed around the familiar jewels of his own
sky. Blue, beloved Vega, burning in the heart of the Lyre--_home--when
would he go home? He had no home now._ Yet his father had left him Vega
Interplanet, as well as Eight Colors and a quest to the stars.

He searched for the topaz of Sol, where he had learned astrogation;
Procyon, where he had become a Lhari; the ruby of Aldebaran (_hail and
farewell, David Briscoe!_); the bloodstone of Antares, where he had
learned fear and the shape of integrity. The colors, the unknowable
colors of space. And others. Nameless stars where he and his Lhari
shipmates had worked and played. And stars he had never seen and would
never see, all the endless worlds beyond worlds and stars beyond
stars....

He took a last, longing look at the colors of space, then turned his
back on them, deliberately giving them up. He could not pay the price
the Mentorians paid.

"No, Meta," he said huskily. "The Mentorian way is one way, but--I've
had a taste of being one of the masters of space. It's more than most
men ever have, maybe it's more than I deserve. But I can't settle for
anything less. Not even if it means losing you."

He shut his eyes and stood, head bowed. When he looked up again, he was
alone with the stars beyond the viewport, and the lounge was empty.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The low rainbow building of Eight Colors, near the spaceport of Procyon
Alpha, had not changed; and when Bart went in, as he had done a year
ago, it seemed that the same varnished girl was sitting before the same
glass desk, neon-edged and brittle, with the same chrome-tinged hair and
blue fingernails. She looked at Bart in his Lhari clothing, at Meta in
her Mentorian robe and cloak, at Ringg, and her unruffled dignity did
not turn a hair.

"May I help you?" she inquired, still not caring.

"I want to see Raynor One."

"On what business, please?"

"Tell him," said Bart, with immense satisfaction,