bruptly and went out of the door and out of Bart's life,
while Bart stood at the dome-window, feeling alone as he had never felt
alone before.

* * * * *

He had to wait six days, and they felt like six eternities. He played
the training tape over and over. With his Academy background, it wasn't
nearly so difficult as he'd feared. He read and reread the set of papers
identifying him as Astrogator, First Class, Bartol. Forged, he supposed.
Or was there, somewhere, a real Bartol?

The last morning he slept uneasily late. He finished his last meal as a
human, spent part of the day removing all traces of his presence from
Raynor's home, burned the training tape, and finally got into the silky,
silvery tights and cloak that Raynor had provided. He could use his
hands now as if they belonged to him; he even found the claws handy and
useful. He could write his signature, and copy out instructions from the
training tape, without a moment's hesitation.

Toward dusk, a young Lhari slipped unobserved out of Raynor's house and
hiked unnoticed to the edges of a small city nearby, where he mingled
with the crowd and hired a skycab from an unobservant human driver to
take him to the spaceport city. The skycab driver was startled, but not,
Bart judged, unusually so, to pick up a Lhari passenger.

"Been doing a little sight-seeing on our planet, hey?"

"That's right," Bart said in Universal, not trying to fake his idea of
the Lhari accent. Raynor had told him that only a few of the Lhari had
that characteristic sibilant "r" and "s" and warned him against trying
to imitate it. _Just speak naturally; there are dialects of Lhari, just
as there are dialects of the different human languages, and they all
sound different in Universal anyhow._ "Just looking around some."

The skycab driver frowned and looked down at his controls, and Bart felt
curiously snubbed. Then he remembered. He himself had little to say to
the Lhari when they spoke to him.

_He was an alien, a monster. He couldn't expect to be treated like a
human being any more._

When the skycab let him off before the spaceport, it felt strange to see
how the crowds edged away from him as he made a way through them. He
caught a glimpse of himself in one of the mirror-ramps, a tall thin
strange form in a metallic cloak, head crested with feathery white, and
felt overwhelmingly homesick for his own familiar face.

He was beginning to feel hungry