The examiner grinned at him and said, "That's fine. Welcome to the fraternity of telepaths and perceptors."

And, amazingly, there came a thought of congratulation which was unmistakably from the Canopan, who extended a tentacle and laid it for a moment upon his arm.

A gate in his mind swung open. A flood of memories crowded into his consciousness. Small items. Incidents in which he had known things before he had seen them. Incidents so unaccountable that he had put them out of his mind, had refused to consider them. Now they jigsawed together into a pattern which revolved about the important fact that he possessed the rare skill of perception coupled with telepathy.

How rudimentary this skill was he realized later when his training began.

In a month, feeling drab in his work uniform and exhausted from the preliminary training, he was brought face to face with the Canopan whom he soon learned to call Joe, and who was to become his partner for as long as should be necessary.

The first meeting was stilted and formal. They sat in the small room together with the Terran and Canopan training officers, and within Grey there was the nervous sensation that the Canopans recognized every one of his thoughts. There was the embarrassing realization that his dislike of Canopans was as plain to them as the expression on his face, and the embarrassment was intensified by the fact that he had not the slightest idea why the dislike was there.

"Sure, Grey," the officer said, abruptly. "We know you don't like Canopans. Nobody on earth does—except the people who actually know them. We know the whole story. But you'll get over that. You're going to spend the rest of this war working together with this fellow here—since he doesn't talk a language, he doesn't have a verbal name. You won't have trouble conversing with him, however, because he knows what you think, and you will know what he thinks when he wants you to."

"Then they do read minds," Grey said.

"Sure. What of it? You can almost do it, yourself. Why do you think we picked you for this job? Out of the thousands that we test, a few here and there have the right kind of sensitivity. When the professors learn more about the science of psychomechanics maybe we'll learn how it works. Now all we know is that it works."

"What's wrong with them, then?" The question was involuntary, dropping 

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