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get by with as little as half an hour. His mind rested when it wasn’t being pushed, which was frequently.
    He no longer had to worry about how he would travel, for there were sufficient funds registered on his cardmeter to sustain him for some time yet. Malaika had been generous. Not all the determining factors were financial, however. A glance at those waiting to board the first-class section of the shuttlecraft engendered an acute sense of unease in him, so he registered for standard fare.
    Traveling so would be more enlightening anyway, for his first journey on a commercial spacecraft and his second time off Moth. As he followed the line into the shuttle, passing under the mildly aristocratic eye of the steward, he was shocked to discover that his about-to-be-realized childhood dream of traveling off-planet in one of the great KK-drive freightliners no longer held any thrill for him. It worried him as he strapped into his couch.
    Mother Mastiff could have explained it to him it she were there. It was called growing up.
    Though tolerable, the shuttle journey was rougher than his single previous experience with the little surface-to-orbit vessels. Naturally, he told himself, the pokier commercial craft would be nowhere near as luxurious as the shuttle carried by Malaika’s yacht, the
Gloryhole.
This one was designed solely to get as many beings and as much cargo as possible from the ground into free-fall as economically as possible. There they could be transferred—passengers and cargo alike, with sometimes equivalent handling—into the great globular bulk of the deepspace ship.
    Following that transfer Flinx found himself assigned to a small, compactly designed cabin. He barely took the time to inspect it, and he had little to unpack. During the week-long journey he would spend the majority of travel time in the ship’s several lounges, meeting fellow travelers—and learning.
    The shift from sublight to KK-drive superlight velocity was hardly a surprise. He had already experienced it several times on Malaika’s ship.
    One part of the liner he especially enjoyed. From a forward observation lounge he could look ahead and see the immense length of the ship’s connecting corridor rods stretching outward like a broad narrowing highway to join the back of the colossal curving dish of the KK field projector. It blotted out the stars ahead.
    Somewhere in front of that enormous dish, he knew, the drive unit was projecting the gravity well of a small sun. It pulled the ship steadily and, in turn, the drive projector which then projected the field that much further ahead—and so on. Flinx wondered still at the explanation of it and decided that all great inventions were essentially simple.
    He was amusing himself in the ship’s game lounge on the third day when a neatly painted thranx in the stark brown, yellow, and green of commerce took the couch opposite. Less than a meter high at the b-thorax, he was small for a male. Both sets of wing cases still gleamed on his back, indicating that the traveler was as yet unmated. Brilliant, faceted eyes regarded Flinx through multiple gemlike lenses. The wonderful natural perfume odor of his kind drifted across the game table.
    The creature glanced down at the glowing board, then its valentine-shaped head cocked curiously at the young human operating it.
    “You play
hibush-hunt?
Most humans find it too complicated. You usually prefer two-dimensional games.” The insect’s symbospeech was precise and textbook-flat, the variety any good businessthranx would speak.
    “I’ve heard a little about it and I’ve watched it played,” Flinx told his visitor modestly. “I really don’t know how to play myself.”
    Mandibles clacked in a gesture of interest and understanding, since the insect’s inflexible chitonous face allowed for nothing as rubbery as a smile. A slight nod of the head was more easily imitated.
    Question-response having served for a courteous greeting, the thranx