The Vardda understood him. His hunger was their own, but they had not been barred from satisfaction. They accepted him. They loved to talk, and Trehearne had no lack of language teachers. His head spun to the tales they told him, of travels around the galaxy, of foreign worlds and happenings in far-off clusters of suns, of dead stars wheeling forever dark through darkness with their frozen worlds, of the sudden dreadful flaring of the novae, of what happens when a ship collides with a rogue star at many times the speed of light. Trehearne was happy. He was living again as a child lives, in a world of wonders, where everything was new and bright and as yet untarnished. But one dark cloud hung over him--the threat of Vardda law and the Council. They might still take away from him all he had found. That threat got bigger and blacker the closer he came to the end of the voyage, and by the time the ship actually went into deceleration it had grown until it blotted out the whole horizon. He had learned more now. He understood how the whole vast structure of Vardda economy rested on the unassailable position of the Starmen themselves and their unique ability to endure interstellar velocities. In this case, the blood, the race, was everything. There could not be any compromises, there could not be any challenges of that superiority. And here was he, Earth-born of Earth stock, with only a set of bastard genes to link him with the Vardda, a compromise and a challenge in himself. "But damn it," he said furiously to Edri, "they can't refuse me now! And why, when you come right down to it, would one Vardda more or less make that much difference? The mutation process has been lost anyway, I certainly can't infect anybody else with it, and I don't see what they're afraid of." Edri gave him a sombre look. "Listen, Trehearne, I haven't helped myself any by being friendly to you, as it is, and I'm not going to make matters worse for both of us by talking treason into the bargain. If you want the full, official answer to that question, go ask Kerrel." "I will." He found Kerrel in the lounge, engaged with Shairn and several other people in the complicated game that seemed to serve the Vardda in the place of bridge. Inside a gigantic crystal globe were suspended a number of little solar systems. Activated by magnetic currents, the tiny suns wheeled along and their planets spun in orbits around them, and it was a dizzying thing to look at. Within this microcosm were a dozen or so tiny ships, operated by the players by remote control, and for hazards there were miniature nebulae, dark clouds, and tiny comets. The object was to move the ships about without losing any, one team racing the opposing team's fleet to a selected destination. Trehearne had played a few times, but with no success whatever.