space opera, possivelmente Robert Sheckley, Piers Anthony ou Harry Harrison

Eu acredito que você está fundindo duas diferentes Keith Laumer em óperas espaciais. A classificação de bulbos é da Galactic Odyssey de Laumer, identificada em < a href="https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/159535/14111"> resposta de John Thompson . No entanto, a caminhada na corda bamba é de Earthblood por Keith Laumer e < href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosel_George_Brown"> Rosel George Brown , que também foi a resposta para esta questão . Earthblood foi originalmente publicado como uma série de quatro partes em Se , que está disponível no Internet Archive ( [1] , [2] , [3] , [4] ). Na parte 1, o herói, Roan, é pego usando seu talento para andar no circo sem pagar. O ser que o entrevista não é uma ave, mas esta deve ser a cena que você está lembrando:

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."

Você está descrevendo Odyssey Galáctica por 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."

Ele começa vestindo um cinto que administra choques elétricos nas pontas dos dedos. Ele passa a utilizar o processo ao lutar com um facão.