"Why shouldn't I?" Alard asked. "I'm a human being; isn't that enough? But, as a matter of fact, that wasn't the reason I came to your ship. I only found out later what you were doing." Mattern waited patiently. "You killed my father!" the boy burst out. And then tension seemed to ebb from him, as if the worst had happened. "So now you know who I am!" Mattern picked his words delicately. "If you have proof that I murdered your father, why don't you prosecute? There's no statute of limitation on murder on any of the planets. Or don't you have proof?" Alard's voice broke slightly. "Everybody on Fairhurst knows you killed him, but they won't do anything about it. They say he deserved what he got." * * * * * Mattern sighed, knowing now who the young man was. His brother. Another responsibility, another vain tie. "How do you know, he didn't deserve what he got?" Mattern asked. Suddenly Alard grew shy. He lowered his eyes to the rug again. "Because _I_ didn't deserve what _I_ got." And there, Mattern thought, Alard had him. Whatever the boy was now, he certainly had not deserved what he'd got then. _But I was only sixteen_, Mattern argued with himself; _how could I have been held responsible?_ And then he told himself, _You haven't been sixteen for twenty-four years._ "I thought one of the women in the village would have adopted you," he said. "One of 'em did. They took me away from her after she beat me so hard she practically killed me. Every little thing I did wrong, she said it was the bad blood coming out in me, and beat me so hard the blood did come. I went from one family to another, but nobody really wanted me." His voice cracked wide across. "You don't know what it's like to grow up with nobody caring for you!" "It so happens I do," Mattern said, "but I can't expect you to believe me." Alard wasn't interested in Mattern's life story; he wanted to wallow in his own in front of a captive audience. "The only hope I had was that you would come back for me some day. They told me you were probably dead, but I wouldn't believe it, see? It was all I had to hang onto." "I thought you were part of a family," Mattern tried to defend himself. "I thought you belonged to somebody." He almost convinced himself that this was true, but, at the back of his mind, something whispered, _You ditched him._ "When I was sixteen, like you'd been, I ran away to look for you. I found out where you'd gone and I followed. I even stayed a while with the flluska. I liked them better than my own people. They said I should try looking for you in hyperspace." "They are a very wise people," Mattern said.