Yet they had killed David Briscoe, Bart thought, and hunted down two of his friends. It was the only thing he couldn't square with his perception of the Lhari. It didn't fit. He could understand that they had shot down the robotcab with Edmund Briscoe in it, in pure self-defense; and that knowledge had taken off the edge of the horror. But the death of young Briscoe and everyone he had talked to could not be explained away.
"You seem very sure they wouldn't have killed me, Meta," he said, carefully clasping his hand around hers.
"They wouldn't," she affirmed. "But they could—make you forget—"
A small chill went over Bart. He let go of her hand and lay staring bleakly at the wall. He supposed that was his probable fate: remembering the tragic tone of Raynor Three when he said I won't remember you, he gritted his teeth, feeling his face twist convulsively. Meta, watching, misunderstood.
"Arm hurting? I'll have that needle out of your vein in a few minutes now."
When she had freed his arm and put away the apparatus, she came to his side. "Bart, how did it happen? How did they find you out?"
Suddenly, the longing for human contact was too much for Bart, and the knowledge of his secret intolerable. The Lhari could find out what he knew, if they wanted to know, very simply; he was in their power. It didn't matter any more.
The telling of the story took a long time, and when he finished, Meta's soft small kitten-face was compassionate.
"I'm glad you—decided what you did," she whispered. "It's what a Mentorian would have done. I know that other races call us slaves of the Lhari. We aren't. We're working in our own way to show the Lhari that human beings can be trusted. The other peoples—they hold away from the Lhari, fighting them with words even though they're afraid to fight them with weapons, carrying on the war that they're afraid to fight!
"Did it ever occur to you—all the peoples of all the planets keep saying, We're as good as the Lhari, but only the Mentorians are willing to prove it? Bart, a Lhari ship can't get along in our galaxy without Mentorians any more! It may be slower than trying to take the warp-drive by force, or stealing it by spying, but when we learn to endure it, I have faith that we'll get it!"