space opera, möjligen Robert Sheckley, Piers Anthony eller Harry Harrison

Jag tror att du samlar två olika Keith Laumer rymdoperationer. Lampans sortering är från Laumer's Galactic Odyssey , identifierad i < a href="https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/159535/14111"> John Thompson svar . Det är dock den snäva gången från Earthblood av Keith Laumer och < a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosel_George_Brown"> Rosel George Brown , som också var svaret på den här frågan . Earthblood publicerades ursprungligen som en fyrdelad serie i Om , som finns tillgängligt på Internet-arkivet ( [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] ). I del 1 fångas hjälten, Roan, med sin trådvandrande talang för att smyga in i cirkusen utan att betala. Varelsen som intervjuar honom är inte en aviär, men det här måste vara den scen du kommer ihåg:

The being behind the big, scarred, black-brown desk blinked large brown eyes at him from points eight inches apart in a head the size of a washtub mounted on a body like a hundred gallon bag of water. Immense hands with too many fingers reached for a box, extracted a thick brown cigar, peeled it carefully, thrust it into a gaping mouth that opened unexpectedly just above the brown eyes.

"Some kind of Terry, aren't you?" a bass voice said from somewhere near the floor.

Roan swallowed. "Terry stock," he said, trying to sound as though he were proud of it. "Genuine Terrestrial strain," he added.

The big head waggled. "I saw you on the wire. Never saw a Terry walk a wire like that before." The voice seemed to come from under the desk. Roan peered, caught a glimpse of coiled purplish tentacles. He looked up to catch a brown eye upon him; the other was rolled toward the gilled creature.

"You shouldn't have hurt Ithc." The wandering eye turned back to Roan. "Take off your tunic."

"Why?"

"I want to see what kind of wings you've got."

"I don't have any wings," Roan said, sounding as though he didn't care. "Terries don't have wings; not real original stock, anyway."

"Let's see your hands."

"He's holding them."

"Let him go, Ithc." The brown eyes looked at Roan's hands as he opened and closed them to get the blood going again.

"The feet," the basso voice said. Roan kicked off a shoe and put a foot up on the desk. He wriggled his toes, then put his foot back on the floor.

"You walked the wire with those feet?"

Roan didn't answer.

"What were you doing up there?"

"I was getting in without a ticket," Roan said. "I almost made it, too."

Du beskriver Galactic Odyssey av Keith Laumer.

"Watch," Fsha-fsha said, and I followed through as he sorted them into six categories. Then I tried it, without much luck. "You have to key-in your response patterns," he said. "Tie this one . . ." he flipped his sorting key, " . . . to one of your learned circuits. And this one . . ." he coded another gob of wires, " . . . to another. . . ." I didn't really understand all that, but I tried making analogies to my subliminal distinctions among apparently identical glorm-bulbs—and it worked. After that, I sorted all kinds of things, and found that after a single run-through, I could pick them out unerringly. "You've trained a new section of your brain," Fsha-fsha said. "And it isn't just a Sorting line where this works; you can use it on any kind of categorical analysis."

Han börjar med att bära en sele som hanterar elektriska stötar på fingertopparna. Han fortsätter att använda processen när man kämpar med en machete.