He sat. There were noises in the ship, but they were unfamiliar ones, the impersonal clangings and boomings of freight hatches, machinery, the invading boots and unknown voices of dockside men. The sounds of the port outside came to him muffled and subdued, like the ceaseless roll of thunder a long way off. There was a feeling of cessation. The voyage was over. Out there a new sun was shining, there was air unbreathed by any man of Earth and a whole wide world waiting, a Vardda world, his as much as theirs, but he was barred from it, he was kept under hatches like a criminal, unable even to speak while strangers decided his fate. It scared him, and it angered him, and the more he felt trapped and helpless the more furious he got. His body would not stay still. He sprang up and began to stride the floor, and Edri watched him speculatively. "Get good and mad," he said. "You can't fight unless you're mad." "I'll fight." "You know the line to take. Don't be afraid to let 'em have it." "I won't." Time passed. Edri sat and smoked. Trehearne paced, sat down, and paced again. A year went by, and then another, and then a young man, very brisk, very efficient, very self-assured, came in and looked at them. "You're to come to the Coordinator's office," he said, and stared with frank curiosity at Trehearne. Then he turned to Edri. "He _looks_ all right. Is this story really true?" "Never mind," said Edri. "Come on, Trehearne." He followed them, down the long corridor and into the lock chamber, leaving the ship as he had first entered it so long ago, so far away. He stepped out onto the open dock, and the full roaring, thundering impact of the biggest spaceport in the galaxy hit him like an explosion. Row upon row, and on all sides, the towering docks stretched to the end of his seeing and beyond. Ships lay in most of them, recumbent monsters taking their ease, while men and machines in vast numbers and great complexity waited on their needs. The ringing air was heavy with smells, strange spices and subtle unidentifiable things mingling with the reek of oil and hot metal, cargoes of unimagined riches from unimaginable worlds. Trehearne stood, feeling the tremendous pulse beat through him, hardly aware for the moment that Edri was trying to steer him to a kiosk at the end of the dock, or that the young Vardda was amused at his wide-eyed astonishment.