“May we all meet again,” said his father. And they drank, standing. The remains of the whiskey in his glass flowed tasteless as water down Donal’s tongue and throat—and for a second everything cleared and he saw these tall men standing around him. Big, even for Dorsai, they were; even his brother Mor topping him by half a head, so that he stood like a halfgrown boy among them. But at that same instant of vision he was suddenly wrung with a terrible tenderness and pity for them, as if he was the grown one, and they the children to be protected. He opened his mouth to say, for once in his life, how much he loved them, and how always he would be there to take care of them—and then the fog closed down again; and he was only aware of Mor leading him stumblingly to his room.

Later, he opened his eyes in the darkness to become aware of a dim figure drawing the curtains of his room against the bright new light of the double moon, just risen. It was his mother; and with a sudden, reflexive action he rolled off his bed and lurched to her and put his hands on her shoulders.

“Mother—” he said.

She looked up at him with a pale face softened by the moonlight.

“Donal,” she said tenderly, putting her arms around him. “You’ll catch cold, Donal.”

“Mother—” he said, thickly. “If you ever need me . . . to take care of you—”

“Oh, my boy,” she said, holding his hard young body tightly to her, “take care of yourself; my boy . . . my boy—.”

MERCENARY

Donal shrugged his shoulders in the tight civilian half-jacket and considered its fit as reflected in the mirror of his tiny, boxlike cabin. The mirror gave him back the image of someone almost a stranger. So much difference had three short weeks brought about in him, already. Not that he was so different, but his own appraisal of himself had changed; so that it was not merely the Spanish- style jacket, the skin-tight undertunic, and the narrow trousers that disappeared into boots as black as all the rest of the costume, that made him unfamiliar to himself—but the body within. Association with the men of other worlds had done this to his point of view. Their relative shortness had made him tall, their softness had made him hard, their untrained bodies had made his balanced and sure. Outbound from the Dorsai to Arcturus and surrounded by other Dorsai passengers, he had not noticed the gradual change. Only in the vast terminal on Newton, surrounded by their noisy thousands, had it come on him, all at once. And now, transhipped and outbound for the Friendlies, facing his first dinner on board a luxury-class liner where there would probably be no others from his world, he gazed at himself in the mirror and felt himself as suddenly come of age.