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, and realized that he could not go into
an ordinary restaurant without attracting attention. There were
refreshment stands all over the spaceport, and he briefly considered
getting a snack at one of these.
No, that was just putting it off. The time had to come when he must face
his fear and test his disguise among the Lhari themselves. Reviewing his
knowledge of the construction of spaceports, he remembered that one side
was the terminal, where humans and visitors and passengers were freely
admitted; the other side, for Lhari and their Mentorian employees only,
contained--along with business offices of many sorts--a sort of arcade
with amusement centers, shops and restaurants catering to the personnel
of the Lhari ships. With nine or ten ships docking every day, Raynor had
assured him that a strange Lhari face would be lost in the crowds very
easily.
He went to one of the doors marked DANGER, LHARI LIGHTS BEYOND, and
passed through the glaring corridor of offices and storage-warehouses,
finally coming out into a sort of wide mall. The lights were fierce, but
he could endure them without trouble now, though his head ached faintly.
Raynor, testing his light tolerance, had assured him that he could endure
anything the Lhari could, without permanent damage to his optic nerves,
though he would have headaches until he got used to them.