Part 2

"Forget it," Joe flashed at him. "They're not dead. But we'll have to get rid of them. We'll be back in a minute."

The Canopans silently carried the bodies outside the door, leaving Grey sitting still at his table, performing a great quantity of furious thinking.

Joe was back quickly. He anticipated Grey's questions.

"They'll wake up, and they'll think somebody slipped them a Mickey. But they won't remember what happened."

He hesitated, sat down, and lit another smoke. "You're okay, now, by the way."

Grey tried, and found that the nervous impulses now went where they were supposed to go. He stood up, shakily. Then he sat down again. While he was searching for words to say something, Joe interrupted.

"Look," he transmitted. "This has to be kept under cover. Things are bad enough for us without this sort of thing getting around. I didn't even want you to know, but that couldn't be helped. I didn't feel like getting bashed."

Grey accepted another glass gratefully from Elby Jones.

"Sure," he said. "I don't talk to anybody, anyway. But you have to tell me. How much _can_ you do?"

Joe considered for a moment before replying.

"I don't know, really. Terran nervous systems are not like ours. We have had only a short time to discover what we can do and what we can't do. We don't have real control--although there are certain possibilities with a modified hypnotic suggestion. At present we are only able to introduce resistances temporarily in certain nerve paths, so that inhibitions are produced."

"So for a while I was just inhibited against standing up, and they were inhibited against being conscious. It that it?"

"Approximately."

Grey sipped from his glass, peering over the edge of it at Joe. Precisely how much was there, he thought, hidden within the recesses of that brain? Just how much did this innocent little character have on the ball?

* * * * *

Joe chose this moment to become taciturn. The music was riding once more, and the place was settling down after the sudden disturbance. It took Jed Grey several more minutes and another glass to throw off the nervous tension which sat like a blanket over his shoulders. Gradually he began to relax, and the warm spot within his belly proceeded to creep up into his head.

"Tomorrow," he thought drowsily, "we will be taking off, and there will be no more of this. No more music except from cans. No more...."

Abruptly he realized that the rapport had been broken off again by the Canopans, and that at the other end of town there was the faint howl of the police siren.

"There's a brawl down the street," Joe informed Grey. "Some of our heroes back from the battle sector feel that they haven't had enough fighting."

"I bet you a pack of smokes that the guys in the fight haven't been within a light year of an actual battle," said Grey, dryly. "They're the ones who always try to make like tough heroes when they get back."

Through the Canopan's sense of perception Jed Grey could catch faint impulses of the tumult which filled the street a hundred yards away. There was a violence in the thoughts projected from that area which caused the colors of Joe's fur to shift erratically, nervously. In Grey they caused a tightening of the stomach and a heavy feeling in the chest.

"It hurts almost as much to listen in to a fight as it does to be right in the middle of it," he remarked. "Why don't you just shut it off if you can't take it?"

"As well try to shut off your sense of hearing," Joe snapped back.

The sirens down the street had wailed to a halt. Grey lit another cigarette and tried what was left in his glass. It was flat. The warm glow which had diffused through his body was gone, and in its place there was a bitter taste and a burning sensation around the eyes.

Abruptly he mashed out his cigarette and stood up.

"The night's washed up," he growled. "Let's get out of here."

Joe, with a thought of regret, assented, and the two of them left.

It was bitter to end the last night upon such an uncompleted note.

* * * * *

The two of them strolled back in the direction of the bus station. The fresh night, bright with the blaze of stars and saloon signs, should have exhilarated them; but the mental tension which filled the street pressed hard on Joe's receptors, and, through him, against Grey.

A pair of police cars squatted at the corner. Fleet Police milled through the crowds, shock sticks in hand. An ambulance helicopter roaring in from the Fleet Base settled down in the center of the street.

The fight was over, but so keyed up were the Fleetmen in town that for Grey and the Canopan to walk through the street was to walk through a sticky, obscene glue of malevolence.

Joe's fur colors had faded to a dismal blue. Grey glanced at this with alarm.

The thoughts in the crowd around them had been impersonal ones--fight thoughts, pleasure thoughts, passion thoughts--violent and unnerving to the pair who had to thread their way through this tumult, but yet impersonal.

It began to change.

They began again with the snake thoughts and the thoughts about the Terran who walked with the damn snake. They looked at the pair who walked in their midst, and in their state of excitement with violence not yet out of their minds, there was a redirection of passion from the recent fight to the new center of attention.

Grey gasped as the force of this new agitation struck them.

The pair of Fleet Police ahead of them changed their direction of motion and started walking towards them. Grey's face twitched as he felt the increased tension within Joe's nervous system.

"Hold it, son," he cautioned. "Remember we're supposed to be tough. Remember the nerves of steel we're supposed to have, like it says in the books."

Joe's grip on Grey's arm tightened, and then relaxed.

"I thought I could take anything. Tonight has been almost too much."

The Fleet Police were directly in front of them. The one on the right pointed at Grey with his stick and began to say something.

The door of the adjacent saloon swung open and a giant of a bearded Fleetman roared out. The girl hanging to his arm caught a sudden sight of Joe, and a burst of fright exploded in her empty little head, shocking Joe with its intensity.

She screamed, "It's thinking about me!"

The big Fleetman clapped his hand to his hip. There was no gun holstered there, but Joe reared back in a dismayed reflex.... In the next moment the Fleetman slumped to the pavement, where he lay quite still.

That was all--for a moment.

The Fleet Police looked at Joe and they looked down at the Fleetman. Then they looked back at Joe. One of them stooped down and remained there for a long minute. He rose, and his face was white.

"The guy's dead," he said, and his shock stick came up, pointing at Joe. "You do that?" he snapped.

"He didn't touch the guy," Grey said.

"Maybe yes and maybe no. Guys don't just drop and die. I think both of you'd better come."

* * * * *

At the Fleet Police headquarters the medic turned pale when he examined the body. A number of urgent calls were made. The Canopan liaison officer arrived after a nasty fifteen minutes during which the doctor and the Fleet Police Commandant argued violently and then stood staring blackly at the floor.

Grey's eyes widened when behind the Canopan there stalked not only the commanding officer of his ship, but the Commandant of the entire Fleet Base.

"The joint's lousy with brass tonight," he flashed silently at Joe as the two of them stood rigidly at attention. "I think you've become notorious."

He caught a sense of amusement from an undetermined source, and in a moment narrowed it down as coming from the Canopan liaison officer.

Good for our side, Grey thought in relief--at least Canopan officers kept their minds unbound by brass. They'd stand behind Joe.

The Fleet Base Commandant knifed Joe with a rigid stare. He spoke rapidly and bitingly. "It is difficult enough to keep harmony among the various planetary groups at the base without it becoming know that the Canopans can kill Terrans by their mental powers. You have been trained in self-control. By this incident tonight you have jeopardized the morale of all the troops in the region."

The Canopan officer put in gently, "This was clearly a case of self-defense. The Fleetman was drawing a gun."

"Unfortunately for that argument," stated the Commandant, "the Fleetman was not carrying a gun."

"But this 34C could not see in the first instant. His attention was on the thoughts which the Fleetman transmitted at that moment. The Fleetman forgot he was not wearing a sidearm, and in his mind there was the distinct picture of drawing his gun and shooting 34C. To 34C this was the reality of the moment. In his extreme nervousness he misjudged the force needed, and projected a lethal thought."

"A pretty legality," the Base Commandant growled. "Is it self-defense when you kill a person for _thinking_ that he is about to kill you?"

"I know nothing of your law," the Canopan replied. "We have warned that an incident such as this was bound to occur sooner or later in the tense atmosphere of this town. May I suggest...."

"I know, I know." The Commandant passed a hand through his hair in disgust. "Your ideas about orienting the entire fleet. Subconscious psychological training ... still sounds like hypnotism to me. But if we must, then we must."

"And you, Jeffreys." He turned to Grey's ship-commander. "You're taking off tomorrow. You wouldn't want to lose a team, would you?"

"Certainly not, sir." Grey caught the relief in the commander's mind. "They're a good team."

"Then as far as anybody is concerned there has been no incident tonight." The Commandant turned to the medic. "Get that?"

Commander Jeffreys motioned to Joe and Grey. "You two will return to the base with me."

Grey nodded mutely and began to follow the commander out of the door, his attention focussed upon an idea which had sprung into his consciousness during the past minute.

"Look, Joe," he thought. "If you can do that to a Terran, what could you do to one of the enemy?"

Joe began, "If I knew what the enemy was like...."

A blast of thought broke into their minds. It blazed a warning signal in vivid, incandescent pictures, and in roaring sound. It said, in numerous and tumultuous manners, Stop where you are--keep out--restricted, confidential, top-secret territory!

Grey jerked his head around. He stared for one astounded moment at the Canopan officer.

Then he was walking out to the waiting helicopter, the palm of his hand moist as he tightly held one of Joe's tentacles.

The people who ran a war were not always the obvious ones, he thought.