Bart turned on him furiously. "You mean, go home like a good little boy, and pretend none of this ever happened? What do you think I am, anyhow?" Bart's chin set in the new, hard line. "What I want is a chance to go on where Dad left off!"
"It won't be easy, and it could be dangerous," Raynor Three said, "but there's nothing else to be done. We had the arrangements all made; and now somebody's got to take the dangerous risk of calling them off. Are you game for a little plastic surgery--just enough to change your looks again, with new forged papers? You can't go by the _Swiftwing_--it doesn't carry passengers--but there's another route you can take."
Bart sprang up. "No," he said, "I know a better way. Let me go on the _Swiftwing_--in Dad's place--_as a Lhari_!"
"Bart, no," Raynor Three said. "You'd never get away with it. It's too dangerous." But his gold eyes glinted.
"Why not? I speak Lhari better than Dad ever did. And my eyes can stand Lhari lights. You said yourself, it's going to be a dangerous job just calling off all the arrangements. So let's _not_ call them off. Just let me take Dad's place!"
"What was Dave Briscoe? No, Raynor. Dad left me a lot more than Vega Interplanet, and you know it. I'll finish what he started, and then maybe I'll begin to deserve what he left me."
Raynor Three gripped Bart's hand. He said, in a voice that shook, "All right, Bart. You're your father's son. I can't say more than that. I haven't any right to stop you."
"All right, Bart, today we'll let you look at yourself," Raynor Three said.
Bart smiled under the muffling layers of bandage around his face. His hands were bandaged, too, and he had not been permitted to look in a mirror. But the transition had been surprisingly painless--or perhaps his sense of well-being had been due to Raynor Three slipping him some drug.
He'd been given injections of a chemical that would change the color of his skin; there had been minor operations on his face, his hands, his feet.
Bart obeyed awkwardly, and Raynor frowned. "Hurt?"
"Not exactly, but I feel as if I were limping."
"That's to be expected. I changed the angle of the heel tendon and the muscle of the arch. You're using a different set of muscles when you walk; until they harden up, you'll have some assorted Charley horses. Have any trouble hearing me?"