“Busy, son?”
“Come in, Dad.”
Wade Montray came in, nodding at the clutter on the bed. “Good idea. You can’t take more than a few pounds of luggage with you, even these days. I’ve got something for you—picked it up at the Transfer Center.” He handed Larry a flat package; turning it over, Larry saw that it was a set of tapes for his recording machine.
“Language tapes,” his father said, “since you’re so anxious to learn all about Darkover. You could get along all right in Standard, of course—everyone around the Spaceport and the Trade City speaks it. Most of the people going out to Darkover don’t bother with the language, but I thought you might be interested.”
“Thanks, Dad. I’ll hook up the tapes tonight.”
His father nodded. He was a stern-looking man, tall and quiet with dark eyes—Larry suspected that his own red hair and gray eyes came from his unremembered mother—and he hadn’t smiled much lately; but now he smiled at Larry. “It’s a good idea. I’ve found out that it helps to be able to speak to people in their own language, instead of expecting them to speak yours.”
He moved the tapes aside and sat down on Larry’s bed. The smile slid away and he was grave again.
“Son, do you really mind leaving Earth? It’s come to me, again and again, that it’s not fair to take you away from your home, out to the edge of nowhere. I almost didn’t put in for that transfer thinking of that. Even now—” he hesitated. “Larry, if you’d rather, you can stay here, and I can send for you in a few years, when you’re through with school and college.”
Larry felt his throat go suddenly tight.
“Leave me here? On Earth?”
“There are good schools and universities, son. Nobody knows what sort of education you’d be getting in quarters on Darkover.”
Larry stared straight at his father, his mouth set hard to keep it from trembling. “Dad, don’t you want me along? If you—if you want to get rid of me, I won’t make a fuss. But—” he stopped, swallowing hard.
“Son! Larry!” His father reached for his hands and held them, hard, for a minute. “Don’t say that again, huh? Only I promised your mother you’d get a good education. And here I am dragging you halfway across the universe, off on a crazy adventure, just because I’ve got the itch in my bones and don’t want to stay here like a sensible man. It’s selfish to want to go, and worse to want to take you with me!”
Larry said, slowly, “I guess I must take after you, then, Dad. Because I don’t want to stay in one spot like what you call a sensible man, either. Dad, I want to go. Couldn’t you figure that out? I’ve never wanted anything so much!”
Wade Montray drew a long sigh. “I hoped you’d say that—how I hoped you’d say that!” He tossed the tapes into a pile of Larry’s clothes, and stood up.
“All right, son. Brush up on the language, then. There must be more than one sort of education.”
Listening to the language tapes, moving his tongue around the strange fluid tones of the Darkovan speech, Larry had felt hisexcitement grow and grow. There were strange new concepts and thoughts in this language, and hints of things that excited him. One of the proverbs caught at his imagination with a strange, tense glow: It is wrong to keep a dragon chained for roasting your meat.
Were there dragons on Darkover? Or was it a proverbial phrase based on legend? What did the proverb mean? That if you had a fire-breathing dragon, it was dangerous to make him work for you? Or, did it mean that it was foolish to use something big and important for some small, silly job of work? It seemed to open up a crack into a strange world where he glimpsed unknown ideas, strange animals, new colors and thoughts through a glimmer of the unknown.
His excitement had grown with every day that passed, until they had taken the shuttle to the enormous spaceport and boarded the ship itself. The starship was huge and strange, like an alien city; but the trip itself had been a let-down. It wasn’t much different than a cruise by ocean liner, except that you couldn’t see any ocean. You had to stay in your cabin most of the time, or in one of the cramped recreation areas. There were shots and immunizations for everything under the sun—under any sun, Larry corrected himself—so that he went around with a sore arm for the first two weeks of the trip.