At first there were periods when he felt that he was dreaming, that the ship and all within it would disappear and he would waken. But as his mind readjusted itself, shaking free from the narrow horizons where it had been prisoned, ancestral pride and ancestral longing began to stir. And with that stirring came an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Edri was his chief teacher. For some reason, the ugly man with the unhappy eyes and unfailing cheerfulness of speech had taken a liking to him, and Trehearne was glad of it. He needed friends. But there were others, too. Men and women, mostly young, healthy and full of themselves, loving the life they lived and enjoying to the hilt his own wide-eyed reactions to it. For a while they regarded him very much as he would have regarded an animal that had suddenly learned to talk and do sums, but they got used to him, and there was never any malice in their conduct. He liked them. They were his kind of people. They _were_ his people. Kerrel remained civil, but aloof. Shairn spoke to him when she felt like it, as casually as though they had known each other all their lives and nothing of interest had ever happened between them. But sometimes he thought she looked at him in a way that was not casual at all, and he could not tell what she was thinking. He played along. It was hard, when he got to remembering things. But he did it. And he had enough to do to keep his mind off women. There weren't hours enough in the ship's day to supply him. He learned the Vardda tongue. He learned the rudiments of Vardda history and the outlines of their social structure. But most of all, with an inborn sureness, he learned the Vardda mind, the Vardda point of view, and his own character expanded, having found a meaning for itself. He was a Vardda, and they were the Starmen--Galactic Man, as Edri had put it once, a unique species, specialized and fitted for the most splendid work of all, the conquest of the stars. The power, the magnificence of that voyaging! No wonder the little ships and little skies of Earth had seemed so futile. This was his heritage, the freedom of the stars, the long, long roads of outer space, the swift ships plying between the island continents of suns, the windless, timeless, boundless gulf that washed the shores of a galaxy. He haunted the ship's bridge, studying the intricate controls and cracking his brain over the staggering complexities of astrogation. In the generator rooms he learned by heart the pulse of the ship, listening to the silence of free flight after acceleration was complete. He deviled the engineers, the pilots, the technicians, with questions, understanding less than half of what they told him but always avid for more. He learned much, and yet it was nothing, and he was mad for learning, mad to hold under his own hands one of these proud giants of the starways.