ks to study, and which ones not to bother with? Or which ones
to read first, so that what you read in the others will be
comprehensible to you? That's what they'll give you on Terra. The
tools, which you don't have now, for educating yourself."

I thought that over. It made sense. I'd had a lot of the very sort of
trouble he'd spoken of, trying to get information for myself in proper
order, and I'd read a lot of books that duplicated other books I'd
read, and books I had trouble understanding because I hadn't read some
other book first. Bish had something there. I was sure he had. But six
years!

I said that aloud, and added: "I can't take the time. I have to be
doing things."

"You'll do things. You'll do them a lot better for waiting those six
years. You aren't eighteen yet. Six years is a whole third of your
past life. No wonder it seems long to you. But you're thinking the
wrong way; you're relating those six years to what has passed. Relate
them to what's ahead of you, and see how little time they are. You
take ordinary care of yourself and keep out of any more civil wars,
and you have sixty more years, at least. Your six years at school are
only one-tenth of that. I was fifty when I came here to this Creator's
blunder of a planet. Say I had only twenty more years; I spent a
quarter of them playing town drunk here. I'm the one who ought to be
in a rush and howling about lost time, not you. I ought to be in such
a hurry I'd take the _Simon Bolivar_ to Terra and let this place go
to--to anywhere you might imagine to be worse."

"You know, I don't think you like Fenris."

"I don't. If I were a drinking man, this planet would have made a
drunkard of me. Now, you forget about these six years chopped out of
your busy life. When you get back here, with an education, you'll be a
kid of twenty-four, with a big long life ahead of you and your mind
stocked with things you don't have now that will help you make
something--and more important, something enjoyable--out of it."

* * * * *

There was a huge crowd at the spaceport to see us off, Tom and Bish
Ware and me. Mostly, it was for Bish. If I don't find a monument to
him when I get back, I'll know there is no such thing as gratitude.
There had been a big banquet for us the evening before, and I think
Bish actually got a little tipsy. Nobody can be sure, though; it might
have been just the old actor back in his role. Now they were all
c