"I imagine it's synthetic," Bart said.
"I suppose it won't hurt us?"
Bart laughed. "They wouldn't serve it to us if it would. No, men and
Lhari are alike in a lot of ways. They breathe the same air. Eat about
the same food." Their bodies were adjusted to about the same gravity.
They had the same body chemistry--in fact, you couldn't tell Lhari blood
from human, even under a microscope. And in the terrible Orion Spaceport
wreck sixty years ago, doctors had found that blood plasma from humans
could be used for wounded Lhari, and vice versa, though it wasn't safe
to transfuse whole blood. But then, even among humans there were five
blood types.
And yet, for all their likeness, they were different.
Bart sipped the cold Lhari drink, seeing himself in the mirror behind
the refreshment stand; a tall teen-ager, looking older than his
seventeen years. He was lithe and well muscled from five years of sports
and acrobatics at the Space Academy, he had curling red hair and gray
eyes, and he was almost as tall as a Lhari.
Will Dad know me? I was just a little kid when he left me here, and now
I'm grown-up.
Tommy grinned at him in the mirror. "What are you going to do, now we've
finished our so-called education?"
"What do you think? Go back to Vega with Dad, by Lhari ship, and help
him run Vega Interplanet. Why else would I bother with all that
astrogation and math?"
"You're the lucky one, with your father owning a dozen ships! He must be
almost as rich as the Lhari."
Bart shook his head. "It's not that easy. Space travel inside a system
these days is small stuff; all the real travel and shipping goes to the
Lhari ships."
It was a sore point with everyone. Thousands of years ago, men had
spread out from Earth--first to the planets, then to the nearer stars,
crawling in ships that could travel no faster than the speed of light.
They had even believed that was an absolute limit--that nothing in the
universe could exceed the speed of light. It took years to go from Earth
to the nearest star.
But they'd done it. From the nearer stars, they had sent out colonizing
ships all through the galaxy. Some vanished and were never heard from
again, but some made it, and in a few centuries man had spread all over
hundreds of star-systems.
And then man met the people of the Lhari.
It was a big universe, with measureless millions of stars, and plenty of
room for more than two intelligent civilizations. It wasn't surprising
that the Lhari, who had only been traveling space for a couple of
thousand years themselves, had never come across humans before. But they
had been delighted to meet another intelligent race--and it was
extremely profitable.