"Your air-line got snagged," said one of the men helpfully, telling Trehearne no news. He grunted and said,
"But how? I thought I must have hooked it on one of these ugly brutes, but they break so easily...."
"They toughen up as they age. Look here." The man reached out and took a horny protuberance in his hand. "Plenty of resistance, especially if your coupling was not properly tightened."
He didn't remember any such protuberances, and the blotched brain-shaped thing had looked bright and youthful. But he let it drop. He didn't know quite what other answer there could be, and right now he didn't want to think about it any more. Everything was lost in an overpowering desire to get back to the ship. He started to flounder up onto his feet, and Yann's powerful arm helped him. "Anyway," he said to the men in front of him, "thanks for saving my neck."
"Thank Yann. He had your air-line recoupled by the time we came. You were running right toward us, but you might not have made it if he hadn't found you first."
Trehearne turned round to face Yann. "Thanks."
"No trouble at all. I don't say I'd save you out from under the claws of something or other at the risk of my own skin, Trehearne, but since this was a simple task, think nothing of it. I was just lucky to find you. And next time don't stray so far away." He grinned and shoved Trehearne forward. "You aren't finished yet. You still have to explain to the Old Man why you lost your sack."
"Oh God," Trehearne muttered. But he didn't turn back. If the Skipper wanted that sack he could go and look for it. For the time being, Trehearne was through.
The Saarga creaked and groaned and lurched her way deeper and deeper into the Cluster, touching like a tramp freighter at this port and that one, wherever there was trading to do and cargo to be had. Only her ports were planets, and her seas were the nighted gulfs between them. The memory of what had happened on the world of the variable star faded out of Trehearne's conscious mind, though he sometimes started awake in his bunk with the ghastly feeling of suffocation strong on him from a dream. But the succession of places and peoples, ever-shifting, ever-new, gave him too much to think about to waste his time brooding over something that was over and done. Insensibly, through habit and association, he was losing all sense of personal strangeness, becoming as thoroughly a Vardda as though he had been born on Llyrdis. Some of the first fine childlike glow of wonder wore off. It began to seem the most natural thing in life to go between the stars as between islands. The interest remained, but the feeling of awe departed.
They touched at systems that had a high degree of civilization, where Trehearne first saw the Vardda factories, vast walled compounds held under treaty, and crammed with warehouses full of goods from all over the galaxy. The system of the compound, the separate landing field, and the Vardda factory were universal wherever there was trade enough to warrant them, even on barbarian planets. "That's where the fortunes are made," Yann told him, and grinned. "I know. A few years in a factory, and you can retire."