suddenly from Grey's mouth. Confused by his own frankness, he stammered, "I—I mean, why don't people like them?"

"This is a question with many angles," the officer said, gravely. "It's an old story. We had barely obtained a world government when interstellar travel was on hand and we came into contact with strange types of intelligent beings. Man was still trying to overcome distrust between the slightly different groups within his own species. When he came to deal with species of such strange shapes and psychologies as those on the other planets, the distrust was intensified many times.

"Particularly, people fear the telepathic powers of the Canopans. They fear the mysterious and the supernatural. Telepathy still seems a supernatural thing to the ignorant and—I'm afraid—to some who are not so ignorant. People are afraid of their minds being invaded. Their sense of privacy is outraged.

"They cannot visualize the fact that the Canopans are completely uninterested in what thoughts a Terran may have. The Canopan psychology is sufficiently different from ours that our private thoughts may be interesting, perhaps curious, but never the sort of thing upon which they would put a moral judgment. Their sense of morality is too different from ours for moral judgments to have meaning.

"You may accept this intellectually at the moment without absorbing it into your system. In a short time you will really be convinced that this is so. In the meantime, the two of you must become friendly enough so that you can perform your jobs."

Grey looked from the officer to his Canopan partner, and clearly received the verification that all of this was really so. Inside Grey there was an impression of relief, a loosening of tensions.

From that moment on, Grey and Joe were inseparable. They lived together, ate together, and in their training they were as one mentality.

"Doggone if you wouldn't think we were married," Grey kept saying.

Surely the extreme rapport, and the warm feeling of relaxation and mental capability which Grey felt when in the presence of Joe, indicated an intimacy which was the equal of any physical attraction.

With the extreme complexity of the control and communication equipment in the great space vessels, there had arisen the need for something radically different in maintenance technicians. The delay of testing circuits 

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