Then the enticing view was obscured as Keevan passed into the Hatching Ground cavern. The sands underfoot were hot, even through heavy wher-hide boots. How the bootmaker had protested having to sew so small! Keeven was forced to wonder why being small was reprehensible. People were always calling him "babe" and shooing him away as being "too small" or "too young" for this or that. Keevan was constantly working, twice as hard as any other boy his age, to prove himself capable. What if his muscles weren't as big as Beterli's? They were just as hard. And if he couldn't overpower anyone in a wrestling match, he could outdistance everyone in a footrace.


 "Maybe if you run fast enough," Beterii had jeered on the occasion when Keevan had been goaded to boast of his swiftness, "you could catch a dragon.  That's the only way you'll make a dragonrider!"


 "You just wait and see, Beterii, you just wait," Kee-van had replied. He would have liked to wipe the con-temptuous smile from Beterli's face, but the guy didn't fight fair even when a wingsecond was watching. "No one knows what Impresses a dragon!"


 "They've got to be able to find you first, babe!"


 Yes, being the smallest candidate was not an en-viable position. It was therefore imperative that Kee-van Impress a dragon in his first hatching. That would wipe the smile off every face in the cavern, and accord him the respect due any dragonrider, even the small-est one.


 Besides, no one knew exactly what Impressed the baby dragons as they struggled from their shells in search of their lifetime partners.


 "I like to believe that dragons see into a man's heart," Keevan's foster mother, Mende, told him. "If they find goodness, honesty, a flexible mind, patience, courage-and you've got that in quantity, dear Keevan -that's what dragons look for. I've seen many a well-grown lad left standing on the sands. Hatching Day, in favor of someone not so strong or tall or hand-some. And if my memory serves me"-which it usually did: Mende knew every word of every Harper's tale worth telling, although Keevan did not interrupt her to say so-"I don't believe that F'lar, our Weyr-leader, was all that tall when bronze Mnementh chose him. And Mnementh was the only bronze dragon of that hatching."


 Dreams of Impressing a bronze were beyond Kee-van's boldest reflections, although that goal dominated the thoughts of every other hopeful candidate. Green dragons were small and fast and more numerous.  There was more prestige to Impressing a blue or brown than a green. Being practical, Keevan seldom dreamed as high as a big fighting brown, like Canth, F'nor's fine fellow, the biggest brown on all Pem. But to fly a bronze? Bronzes were almost as big as the queen, and only they took the air when a queen flew at mating time. A bronze rider could aspire to become Weyr-leader! Well, Keevan would console himself, brown rid-ers could aspire to become wingseconds, and that wasn't bad. He'd even settle for a green dragon: they were small, but so was he. No matter! He simply had to Impress a dragon his first time in the Hatching Ground.  Then no one in the Weyr would taunt him anymore for being so small.