He had to grit his teeth to keep from showing the frustration he felt on this world when trying to understand what these people were thinking. For he had long since found that, whatever a human might be speaking in words, his thoughts showed his true feelings simultaneously with and despite what he was saying. And Hanlon could usually read those surface thoughts and understand them fully.
But with the Estrellans, he had found this was not always true. There was sometimes an ... an obliqueness ... that could not be directly translated by one no more used to their thought-patterns than he was so far.
George Hanlon was the only member of the Inter-Stellar Corps' secret service who could read minds at all—one of the very few humans ever to possess this ability to any demonstrable extent. And he was still young enough to feel occasionally that he was being badly treated by his inability to read these native minds at will.
While he was on that Simonidean assignment, and on the planet of Algon, he had even learned to telepath with the natives, the Guddu "Greenies," or plant-men. But here he could not do that at all. He could read and control animal minds, "and these lousy Estrellans are almost animals," he had growled beneath his breath at first, "so why can't I handle their minds?"
But even through this rude shock to his vanity he did not entirely lose his ability to think and reason logically. He had studied the problem intensively for these past days, and had come to certain preliminary conclusions.
"It's not, after all, that they're lower in the evolutionary scale than we Terrans are," he finally concluded. "It's just that they haven't advanced as far in scientific and technological knowledge. They may look like apes, but they sure aren't. Probably, when we get to really know them—if we ever do—we'll find they are 'way ahead of us in many things. They certainly, as a whole, practice their 'Code of Living' far better than most of our people do their professed religion."
This conclusion was another shock to his confident young mind. For he had more than half expected, when he first came here, to have an easy time of it in solving the problem on which he and the other secret servicemen were working.
Yet how quickly he had been disabused.
And now, in this little place where men drank, he was finding it out anew. None of the minds he was scanning with all the ability he possessed, was quite of the calibre he sought, although most of them displayed leanings toward larceny and other criminal tendencies. For this drinking place was not one which the more generally law-abiding and decent people of Stearra cared to patronize.
Maddeningly meager were the thoughts he could interpret, but when he finally came to scan the minds of four natives who were seated at a five-place table near the back, close to the bar, he made an almost unconscious exclamation of surprise and delight.