ansfixed.

The fingers looked longer and thinner than he remembered them, but they
were his own hands again. The nails seemed faintly thick and ridged, and
there was still a faint grayish tinge through the pale flesh color, but
they were human hands. Unmistakably. He felt of his nose and ears, with
fumbling fingers; raised his hand and touched the very short, crisp hair
growing on his newly shaven skull.

"You fool," said Vorongil to the Mentorian, in disgust, "why didn't you
tell him what the medics had done for him? Easy, Bartol!" The old
Lhari's arm tightened around his shoulder. "I thought they'd told you.
Somebody come here and give the youngster a hand."

Later, in the small cabin (it had been Rugel's) which was to be his
prison during the return voyage of the _Swiftwing_, he had a chance to
study his familiar-strange face. He had thought that only a short
time--an hour or so--had elapsed between the time he was drugged and the
time they took him before the Council. Later, from what he learned about
the dispatch schedules of the _Swiftwing_, he realized that he had been
kept under sedation for nearly three weeks, while his face and hands
healed.

As Raynor Three had warned, the change was not altogether reversible.
Studying his face in the mirror, he could still see a hint of something
thin, strange, alien in the set of his features; the nose and chin
somewhat too pointed, elfin, to be human. His hands would always be too
long, too narrow, too supple. For the rest, he looked grim, older. He
could never go back to what he had been before he became a Lhari; it had
left its mark on him forever.

Before the _Swiftwing_ lifted, outbound, Vorongil came to his cabin.
"You've seen very little of our world," he said diffidently. "I have
permission for you to visit the city before we leave Council Spaceport."

"You think you can trust me?" Bart asked bitterly.

Vorongil said gravely, without humor, "The question does not arise. You
do not know the coordinates of this world, and have no way of finding
them. Within those limitations, you are an honored guest here, and if it
would give you any pleasure, you are welcome to see as much of Council
Planet as time permits."

It seemed, through Vorongil's kindness, that the old Lhari sensed his
bitter defeat. Nothing was to be gained by sulking in his cabin, a
prisoner. He had an opportunity which no human, except the Mentorians,
had ever had; which perhaps no human would e