Free Trouble Magnet by Alan Dean Foster

call for a vehicle, only to finally pass on the notion with a mental shrug. From the pedestrian walkway he had followed a designated turnoff into the cool, silent confines of the vast public recreational space. Perhaps within its damp depths, he had mused unenthusiastically, he might encounter an emotion or two that would prove uplifting instead of generally depressing.
    What he eventually stumbled upon, both physically and mentally, was a situation as unusual as it was unexpected.
    At first his wide-open mind had perceived only more of the same common, depressing emotions, albeit less of them. The same general feelings of despair, of despondency, of anger and envy and paranoia that afflicted the very few late-night and, later, early-morning visitors to the park. What little hope and inspiration was present came from the park’s nonhuman inhabitants. The emotions they projected were at once infinitely simpler and more straightforward than those of the wandering simians he was compelled to call his cousins. Some flying creature projected nothing but subtle feelings of great joy at finding a bit of food, while a ground dweller’s atavistic delight in finishing the digging of a small tunnel shone like a tiny star amid the cesspool of bitterness and jealousy that radiated from a trio of drunken humans.
    Perhaps it would have been better, he thought as he struggled to work through the morass of mental misery that threatened to overwhelm him, to have been born a genetically altered animal instead of a human.
    That was when a burst of emotion flooded through him that was more powerful than anything he had felt since leaving the hotel. It was stronger than anything he had encountered on the busy streets, more dynamic and forceful than the loud confrontation between a woman and her lover whom he had stumbled past sometime after midnight. Halting, he strained to locate the source.
    At first all was fury and bloodlust jumbled up with fear. Fear, he noted with a mixture of interest and anxiety, that bubbled up from a pair of nonhuman sources. As he altered his route to track them down, the latter changed slowly and methodically from fear to determination. A lull in the emotional brew gave way with stunning swiftness to a flash outpouring of conflicting feelings in which fear, terror, anger, desperation, determination, and a raft of other complex emotions surged upward, crashing into and through one another like storm waves on a rocky coast. By now he had positively identified two of the sources as thranx. As he increased his pace Pip took off, tired of bouncing on his shoulder.
    Improvising a shortcut through a hedgeline of carefully maintained decorative undergrowth, he emerged to find himself confronting by far the most singular scene he had set eyes upon since arriving on this miserable world. Directly in front of him a youth was struggling in the grasp of two thranx. Though none of them was armed, a simple blade lay on the ground nearby. One moment the youth appeared to be struggling to reach it, the next he was slumping in the multilimbed grasp of his opponents.
    Off to the left, a group of youngsters were disappearing into a wall of dense park vegetation. Signs of a larger struggle were evident in the disturbed surface of the ground cover, a single but deep blast-mark on the winding, paved walkway, and the presence of blood in several places. Only human blood, he noted. If the bodily integrity of one of the thranx had been compromised, a lot more blood would be present; once violated, their open circulatory systems tended to gush profusely.
    Though no further confirmation of the confrontation that had taken place was necessary, it was present in the still hyper emotions of both those fleeing and the three still engaged in combat before him.
    This was none of his business, he knew, though the involvement of thranx both puzzled and intrigued him. He hesitated, and even retreated a step back into the bushes. What finally persuaded