"So what?" Ringg said impatiently, "What are we going to do, chatter
about light waves or see the city?"
Bart acquiesced, trying to sound eager, but a wild excitement was
gusting up in him. He dutifully pretended fascination with the towers,
the many-leveled roads, the giant dams and pylons, but his thoughts were
racing.
The eighth color! There can't be too many suns of this color, or
they'd have named it and known it! And telescopes can find it.
Could success be salvaged, then, at the very edge 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.