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faltering steps, away from the customs barrier.
    One hurdle past. And I’d managed to live through it—this time.
    I rejoined Marius and went to hail a skycar.

CHAPTER TWO
    The Sky Harbor Hotel was tawdry and expensive, and I didn’t much like the place; but I wasn’t apt to run into other Comyn there, and that was the main thing. So they showed us up to two of the square cubicles which Terrans call rooms.
    I’ve gotten used to them on Terra and Vainwal, and they didn’t bother me. But as I fastened the doors, I turned to Marius in sudden dismay; “Zandru’s hells, I’d forgotten! Does this bother you?” I knew how doors, and walls, and locks, could affect a Darkovan. I’d known that terrible, suffocating claustrophobia all during my first years on Earth. More than anything else it sets Darkovan apart from Terran; Darkovan rooms had translucent walls, divided by thin panels or curtains or solid light barriers.
    But Marius seemed quite at ease, sprawling idly on a piece of furniture so modernistic I couldn’t tell whether it was a bed or a chair. I shrugged; I’d learned to tolerate claustrophobia, probably he had too.
    I bathed, shaved, and wadded up, carelessly, most of the Terran clothing I’d worn on the starship. The things were comfortable, but I couldn’t turn up in Comyn Council wearing them. I dressed in suede-leather breeches, low ankle-boots, and laced up the crimson jerkin deftly, making a little extra display of my one-handed skill because I was still too damned sensitive about it. The short cloak in the Alton colors concealed the hand that wasn’t there. I felt as if I’d changed my skin.
    Marius was roaming restlessly about the room. He still didn’t feel familiar. I vaguely recognized his voice and manner, but there wasn’t that sense of closeness usual between telepaths in a Comyn family. I wondered if he sensed it, too. Maybe it was the drugs.
    I stretched out, shut my eyes and tried to doze, but even the quiet bothered me; after eight days in space, the thrumming of the drives an omnipresent nuisance under the veils of drug. Finally I sat up and hauled my smaller piece of luggage toward me.
    “Do me a favor, Marius?” “Sure.”
    “I’m still doped—can’t concentrate. Can you open a matrix lock?”
    “If it’s a simple one.”
    It was; any nontelepath could have attuned his mind to the simple psychokinetic pattern broadcast by the matrix crystal which held the lock shut. “It’s simple, but it’s keyed to me. Touch my mind and I’ll give it to you.”
    The request was not an uncommon one, within a telepath family. But the boy stared at me in something like panic. I looked back, amazed, then relaxed and grinned. After all,
    Marius hardly knew me. He’d been a small boy when I left, and I supposed, to him, I was the next thing to a complete stranger. “Oh, all right. Lock, and I’ll touch you.”
    I made a light telepathic contact with the surface of his thoughts, visualizing the pattern of the matrix lock. His mind was so totally barriered that he might have been a stranger, even a nontelepath. It embarrassed me; I felt naked and intrusive.
    After all, I wasn’t sure Marius was a telepath. Children don’t show that talent to any extent before adolescence, and he’d been a child when I went away. In all else he had inherited Terran traits, why should he have this one Darkovan talent?
    He laid the case, opened, on the bed. I lifted out a small square box and handed it to him.
    “Not much of a present,” I said, “but at least I remembered.”
    He opened the box, hesitantly, and looked at the binoculars that lay, shiny and alien, inside. But he handled them with a strange embarrassment, then laid them back in the box without comment. I felt mildly annoyed. I hadn’t expected gratitude, especially, but he might have thanked me. He hadn’t asked about father, either.
    “The Terrans can’t be beaten for lensed goods,” he said, after a minute.
    “They can grind