Hanlon followed him inside the peculiar little open-faced stall that was one of the hundreds surrounding the great market square of this city of Stearra, largest on the West Continent of Estrella. His nose wrinkled against the stench of the uncleaned kennels.
The roches, seeing a stranger and, perhaps, being somewhat upset by his strange, alien effluvia, set up the peculiar, frenzied yelping that was their customary sound. To Hanlon, it was reminiscent of the wail of earthly coyotes.
The young Corpsman was on a very hair-trigger of caution and tenseness. Despite his splendid disguise, he had plodded through the crowd of the market place with a great deal of trepidation.
He had seemingly come through all right so far, and he began to relax a bit, yet was still somewhat fearful that he might give himself away by some difference of action, or speech, or by breaking one of their customs or taboos about which he knew all too little, despite his briefing and study before coming here.
"Have you decided which ones you want, nyer?" the proprietor asked, waving his hand toward the various cages, hardly able to believe he was to make such a large sale.
Hanlon said nothing, continuing to scan closely the roches, for his thoughts were still very much on this, his first prolonged venture into the streets and among the crowds of this strange new world to which he had been assigned on his second problem.
His mind was constantly contacting others, for George Spencer Newton Hanlon was the only member of the secret service who was at all able to read minds. But he could read only their surface thoughts—and these Estrellans had such peculiar mental processes, so different from those of the humans with whom he was familiar, that they were almost non-understandable.
So he was still a bit hesitant to start the bickering he knew he must engage in to stay in character. To delay a bit further he continued examining the animals in the cages, not only with his eyes but mentally scanning the brain of each, that he might be sure of finding those in perfect health, with minds he could most easily control.
"Though how I can expect to find healthy ones in a filthy dump like this, I don't know," he thought. But he finally did.
While he was doing this, however, he was reminded of the time he had discovered this ability to "read" animal minds, and how his subsequent studies had enabled him to control their minds and bodily actions with amazing skill. It was this ability that had led him to this market place on his unusual quest.