"Don't you know--" Raynor broke off. "Obviously, you don't. Your mother never said much about your Mentorian family tree, I suppose? She was a Raynor." He smiled at Bart, a little ruefully. "I won't claim a kinsman's privileges until you decide how much to trust me." Raynor Three settled back. "It's a long story and I only know part of it," he began. "Our family, the Raynors, have traded with the Lhari for more generations than I can count. When I was a young man, I qualified as a medic on the Lhari ships, and I've been star-hopping ever since. People call us the slaves of the Lhari--maybe we are," he added wryly. "But I began it just because space is where I belong, and there's nowhere else that I've ever wanted to be. And I'll take it at any price. "I never questioned what I was doing until a few years ago. It was your father who made me wonder if we Mentorians were blind and selfish--this privilege ought to belong to everyone, not just the Lhari. More and more, the Lhari monopoly seemed wrong to me. But I was just a medic. And if I involved myself in any conspiracy against the Lhari, they'd find it out in the routine psych-checking. "And then we worked out how it could be done. Before every trip, with self-hypnosis and self-suggestion, I erase my own memories--a sort of artificial amnesia--so that the Lhari can't find out any more than I want them to find out. Of course, it also means that I have no memory, while I'm on the Lhari ships, of what I've agreed to while I'm--" His face suddenly worked, and his mouth moved without words, as if he had run into some powerful barrier against speech. It was a full minute, while Bart stared in dismay, before he found his voice again, saying, "So far, it was just a sort of loose network, trying to put together stray bits of information that the Lhari didn't think important enough to censor. "And then came the big breakthrough. There was a young Apprentice astrogator named David Briscoe. He'd taken some runs in special test ships, and read some extremely obscure research data from the early days of the contact between men and Lhari, and he had a wild idea. He did the bravest thing anyone has ever done. He stripped himself of all identifying data--so that if he died, no one would be in trouble with the Lhari--and stowed away on a Lhari ship." "But--" Bart's lips were dry--"didn't he die in the warp-drive?" Slowly, Raynor Three shook his head. "No, he didn't. No drugs, no cold-sleep--but he didn't die. Don't you see, Bart?" He leaned forward, urgently. "_It's all a fake!_ The Lhari have just been saying that to justify their refusal to give us the secret of the catalyst that generates the warp-drive frequencies! Such a simple lie, and it's worked for all these years!" * * * * *