Hanlon probed quickly into the man's mind but, as usual, he could read only the surface thoughts. These told of some terrible danger threatening—that only running, always running away, could possibly save him.
What the danger was; who or what was threatening him, was not in those surface thoughts.
"Snyder help me," Hanlon begged bitterly beneath his breath. Why couldn't he learn how to penetrate deeper into human minds, as he could with animals, and read everything that was there, instead of merely whatever thoughts were passing across the surface?
But Hooper was fighting as only a madman can fight, and Hanlon was barely able to hold him. Yet he must. He had to learn what this was all about—why Hooper was here in the Town of the Ruler, instead of back where he had been stationed. What the danger was, and if it threatened the work of the secret servicemen, and possibly the other Terrans. It was clear that Hooper was either drugged or that his mind had become unsane in some manner—whether permanently or temporarily, Hanlon could not as yet figure out.
Acting on sudden impulse, Hanlon switched his grasp to a neo-judo hold he had been taught, that made Hooper powerless in his hands. He dragged his companion back inside.
Once in his room Hanlon forced Hooper's unwilling body down on the bed, and pressed certain nerve-ends that temporarily paralyzed his body. In this way Hanlon could be more free to study that sick mind, which was not paralyzed, without having to watch every minute lest the deranged man escape him.
While Hanlon was able only to read the surface thoughts, he had learned from experience that by asking leading questions he could often make the other think of things he wanted to know, and this method he now put into practice.
What he learned now, in spite of all the leading questions he could think of to ask, was pitifully meager. Hooper had been made a prisoner and brought to this continent and confined, but had escaped. But he did not know—or could not be made to reveal—why he was on this Western Continent at all, nor how he had been captured or by whom. Hanlon guessed that the man had been held in a small house somewhere fairly near, since he had been running away from there a fairly short time, even though it had seemed an eternity to the frightened man.
Suddenly a stray wisp of thought brought Hanlon upright in his chair.
"Give me that again, Curt!" he demanded, and under his questioning brought out the fact that his father, Admiral Newton, was also a prisoner of these unknowns, as was the fourth member of the S S who had been assigned to Estrella—Morris Manning.