Grey wanted to snort and laugh in the man's face; but then suddenly he
shivered, for actually he knew....
"Why there's a circle, a square, a triangle, another circle...."
Then there was a sealed box in which he identified a cube, a sphere, a
cylinder, and a more difficult object which turned out to be a key.
The examiner grinned at him and said, "That's fine. Welcome to the
fraternity of telepaths and perceptors."
And, amazingly, there came a thought of congratulation which was
unmistakably from the Canopan, who extended a tentacle and laid it for
a moment upon his arm.
A gate in his mind swung open. A flood of memories crowded into his
consciousness. Small items. Incidents in which he had known things
before he had seen them. Incidents so unaccountable that he had put
them out of his mind, had refused to consider them. Now they jigsawed
together into a pattern which revolved about the important fact that he
possessed the rare skill of perception coupled with telepathy.
How rudimentary this skill was he realized later when his training
began.
In a month, feeling drab in his work uniform and exhausted from the
preliminary training, he was brought face to face with the Canopan whom
he soon learned to call Joe, and who was to become his partner for as
long as should be necessary.
* * * * *
The first meeting was stilted and formal. They sat in the small room
together with the Terran and Canopan training officers, and within Grey
there was the nervous sensation that the Canopans recognized every
one of his thoughts. There was the embarrassing realization that his
dislike of Canopans was as plain to them as the expression on his face,
and the embarrassment was intensified by the fact that he had not the
slightest idea why the dislike was there.
"Sure, Grey," the officer said, abruptly. "We know you don't like
Canopans. Nobody on earth does--except the people who actually know
them. We know the whole story. But you'll get over that. You're
going to spend the rest of this war working together with this fellow
here--since he doesn't talk a language, he doesn't have a verbal name.
You won't have trouble conversing with him, however, because he knows
what you think, and you will know what he thinks when he wants you to."
"Then they do read minds," Grey said.
"Sure. What of it? You can almost do it, yourself. Why do you think we
picked you for this job? Out of the thousands that we test, a few here
and there have the right kind of sensitivity. When the professors learn
more about the science of psychomechanics maybe we'll learn how it
works. Now all we know is that it works."
"What's wrong with them, then?" The question was involuntary, dropping
suddenly from Grey's mouth. Confused by his own frankness, he
stammered, "I--I mean, why don't people like them?"
"This is a question with many angles," the officer said, gravely.
"It's an old story. We had barely obtained a world government when
interstellar travel was on hand and we came into contact with strange
types of intelligent beings. Man was still trying to overcome distrust
between the slightly different groups within his own species. When he
came to deal with species of such strange shapes and psychologies as
those on the other planets, the distrust was intensified many times.
"Particularly, people fear the telepathic powers of the Canopans.
They fear the mysterious and the supernatural. Telepathy still seems
a supernatural thing to the ignorant and--I'm afraid--to some who are
not so ignorant. People are afraid of their minds being invaded. Their
sense of privacy is outraged.
"They cannot visualize the fact that the Canopans are completely
uninterested in what thoughts a Terran may have. The Canopan psychology
is sufficiently different from ours that our private thoughts may
be interesting, perhaps curious, but never the sort of thing upon
which they would put a moral judgment. Their sense of morality is too
different from ours for moral judgments to have meaning.
"You may accept this intellectually at the moment without absorbing
it into your system. In a short time you will really be convinced that
this is so. In the meantime, the two of you must become friendly enough
so that you can perform your jobs."
* * * * *
Grey looked from the officer to his Canopan partner, and clearly
received the verification that all of this was really so. Inside Grey
there was an impression of relief, a loosening of tensions.
From that moment on, Grey and Joe were inseparable. They lived
together, ate together, and in their training they were as one
mentality.
"Doggone if you wouldn't think we were married," Grey kept saying.
Surely the extreme rapport, and the warm feeling of relaxation and
mental capability which Grey felt when in the presence of Joe,
indicated an intimacy which was the equal of any physical attraction.
With the extreme complexity of the control and communication equipment
in the great space vessels, there had arisen the need for something
radically different in maintenance technicians. The delay of testing
circuits for faults and breakdowns had to be eliminated. For this
purpose the peculiarly suited Canopans had been brought to Earth by the
thousands.
Even in the specialized branch of computing-machines to which Grey had
been assigned, the magnitude of the knowledge to be absorbed in a few
hasty months would ordinarily have made the task impossible. With the
two nervous systems of Grey and Joe acting as one, however, they were
able to absorb huge chunks of knowledge at one gulp, assort it, store
it away, and go on to the next item.
Carefully supervised by psychiatrists to ensure that no breakdowns
would occur from overloading of nervous connections, Grey advanced
from the status of an untrained youngster to that of a highly skilled
electro-technician.
"Joe, with all the brains that you fellows have," Grey remarked one
day, "it's a wonder that you haven't advanced any farther than you
have, as far as technical things are concerned. I don't know why you
need me around. You know all the stuff that I know, and maybe a lot
more. Why don't you Canopans just take over the whole works?"
"We're really not very interested in electronics and such things,"
Joe replied. "We put up with this as a rather unhappy necessity,
but our creative instincts do not lie in that direction. Since we
have developed without hands, and with a brain of capabilities which
are strange to you, our culture has become more introspective--more
interested in the being within than in the things without--more
interested in creating things of beauty to perceive rather than
machines of complexity for the control of nature."
"Very pretty," Grey sighed. "And just as well, for otherwise I would be
out of a job."
Even so, Grey felt little more useful than a soldering-iron or a
screw-driver in the hands of a master mechanic. For Joe, with his
ability to perceive without sight, with his capability of feeling
the very electric currents flowing through a machine--he was the
diagnostician, the one who squatted before a defunct piece of equipment
and without hesitation unerringly decided what was wrong with it and
directed Grey to the point where the repair had to be made. From that
point on Grey wielded the tools.
But there was no room for false pride. The two of them together
constituted a working team. The two of them made one mechanic.
In addition to learning the technical things required for maintenance
of machinery, both Jed Grey and the Canopan had to learn many other
things which inevitably went with their partnership.
They had to learn how it was to walk down a city street and feel the
ebb and flow of thoughts about them--thoughts concerning the race of
Canopans in general and concerning the type of Terran who would walk
down a street arm in arm with a Canopan.
They learned this quickly. Gradually the psychic hurts healed over
and in their place was a hard defense-mechanism compounded of wisdom,
mental toughness, and a contempt for the opinions of the others.
Actually, to Joe, the opinions of the Terrans were of no interest.
But as he once remarked to Grey: "It's an impersonal sort of
unpleasantness--like walking through a street filled with a bad odor,
like walking through a room filled with buzz-saws. It jars the nerves."
Grey presently came to feel in the same manner.
"I'm not quite a Terran any more," he said.
Joe assented. "You are a real cosmopolitan. You have the real
interstellar attitude. In time everybody will see it that way."
* * * * *
Time--time. It went so rapidly. It swept them along through the several
stages of their training, and now it was their last night out before
stepping into the great battlewagon for the final and irrevocable
journey across space to the war, which up to now had been a hazy
background to their work.