He got even madder when I put the irons on him and at the same time turned him down again when he wanted to call in the military. The idea of a space fleet around while the Aliens were still free to use their mind powers gave me cold chills.
When the group returned from the Aliens' camp, they did so without the Alien. They brought back the still tied strips of the purple kilt. It looked as if he'd teleported right out of them. But at least they did have a piece of the prefab hut with them. I had it sent back to Earth, but not until after I'd attached chains to the party's legs, so that they had to creep along with six-inch steps like the others.
As the days passed without any apparent action from the Aliens, dissatisfaction and grumbling grew. My precautionary action with the chains was very unpopular. At the end of the first week after my arrival on Sunder's Pride, Jones tried to invoke the Policy he'd signed with the company to call in the military, on the grounds that the situation hadn't been resolved in the prescribed time, and that the use of chains proved that the colony was in even greater danger than before I had arrived.
I invoked the "substantial progress" clause, of course, but the fact that I'd changed the combination to the vault and had the only gun in the entire camp outside of it probably was more convincing to him.
Carter called in a top-flight Engineer and made real progress in developing lie-detector techniques against the Alien. The Aliens were basically a guileless lot. I almost felt sorry for them.
Things eased up a little when Earth sent us a stack of sheets they claimed would be just as good in blocking out thoughts as the sample we had sent them. The Alien captive told us, after Carter persuaded him a little, that the blocking power was impressed on their building materials by a mental process. We used electronic techniques, and our Engineers said they could have done it years before, if Mentalists and they could have gotten together on the work.
By testing, we found that the stuff we had blocked out anything Carter could transmit, so I let the rest of our people take off their chains as long as they were inside camp—as soon that is, as we had it fully protected. They worked faster on that job than they ever had worked in their lives before.
A few hours later, I was strolling down toward Telepath Clearing with a courier to send a report back to Earth when the Aliens returned. The first warning we had was a sudden wave of hate that struck like a physical blow. It brought the courier to his knees, momentarily helpless. Even with an automatic and instantaneous shot of the drug, it had me grinding my teeth.
Whether it was the rapidity of my recovery and my quickness of thought, or whether it was just the effect of the hate spasm, I didn't know—at any rate, I did the right thing. Before the courier could get up off his knees and try to kill me, as I was sure he would do, I slugged him alongside the ear with the butt of my pistol.