A feeble thought piped back at him: “You wait until Elmer gets at you!”
Lathrop said grimly: “I have Elmer where I want him now.”
He tucked the squirming Buster carefully in a pocket and started down the stairs.
Outside the door that had been locked to keep him in, Peter Harper carefully checked himself. His beard, he decided, was just a shade too red. He concentrated on it and the beard grew pink.
“The fools!” he hissed in contempt at the still-locked door.
His body, he knew, was all right — just as it had been before. But his mind was in a mess. Standing rigidly, he sought to smooth it into pattern, forcing it into human channels, superimposing upon it the philosophy he hated.
All this, he told himself, would be over soon. The end of his mission finally was in sight — the mission he had worked so hard to carry out.
Footsteps were coming down the corridor and Harper forced himself to relax. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a cigarette, was calmly lighting it as Stephen Lathrop, still clad in space gear, came around the corner.
“You must be Harper,” Lathrop said. “I heard that you were here.”
“Just for a time,” said Harper. “Studying the canvases.”