and evacuation."
Farrell, tangled in contradictions, swore bitterly. "But why should theBees let them through? The three domes on Five are over two hundredyears old, which means that the Bees were here before the ship came. Whydidn't they blast it or enslave its crew?"
"We haven't touched on all the possibilities," Gibson reminded him. "Wehaven't even established yet that these people were never under Hymenopcontrol. Precedent won't hold always, and there's no predicting norevaluating the motives of an alien race. We never understood theHymenops because there's no common ground of logic between us. Why tryto interpret their intentions now?"
Farrell threw up his hands in disgust. "Next you'll say this is anancient Terran expedition that actually succeeded! There's only one wayto answer the questions we've raised, and that's to go down and see forourselves. Ready, Xav?"
* * * * *
But uncertainty nagged uneasily at him when Farrell found himself alonein the helihopper with the forest flowing beneath like a leafy river andXavier's scouter disappearing bulletlike into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose this is aHymenop experiment that really paid off? The Bees did some weird andwonderful things with human guinea pigs--what if they've created theultimate booby trap here, and primed it with conditioned myrmidons inour own form?
Suppose, he thought--and derided himself for thinking it--one of thosesuicidal old interstellar ventures _did_ succeed?
Xavier's voice, a mellow drone from the helihopper's Ringwave-poweredvisicom, cut sharply into his musing. "The ship has discovered thescouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instrumentsrecord an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidlyvarying frequency. The operation seems pointless."
Stryker's voice followed, querulous with worry: "I'd better pull Xavback. It may be something lethal."
"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised. Surprisingly, there was excitementin the engineer's voice. "I think they're trying to communicate withus."
Farrell was on the point of demanding acidly to know how one went aboutcommunicating by means of a fluctuating electric field when theunexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopperscudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretchingbelow in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, anundefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a centralbonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and inits plunging ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying of shadowyfigures.
"I'm passing over a hamlet," Farrell reported. "The one nearest thecity, I think. There's something odd going on down--"
Catastrophe struck so suddenly that he was caught completely unprepared.The helihopper's flimsy carriage bucked and crumpled. There was ablinding flare of electric discharge, a pungent stink of ozone and astunning shock that flung him headlong into darkness.
* * * * *
He awoke slowly with a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmareheightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on anarrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cellcluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers andchests. The lighting was harsh and overbright and the air hung thickwith pungent unfamiliar chemical odors. From somewhere, far off yet atthe same time as near as the bulkhead above him, came the unceasingdrone of machinery.
Farrell sat up, groaning, when full consciousness made his positionclear. He had been shot down by God knew what sort of devastatingunorthodox weapon and was a prisoner in the grounded ship.
At his rising, a white-smocked fat man with anachronistic spectacles andclose-cropped gray hair came into the room, moving with the professionalassurance of a medic. The man stopped short at Farrell's stare andspoke; his words were utterly unintelligible, but his gesture wasunmistakable.
Farrell followed him dumbly out of the infirmary and down a barecorridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near thecorridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood ofreddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering howlong he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he sawXavier's scouter lying, port open and undefended, on the square outside.
The mechanical had been as easily taken as himself, then. Stryker andGibson, for all their professional caution, would fare no better--theycould not have overlooked the capture of Farrell and Xavier, and whenthey tried as a matter of course to rescue them the _Marco_ would bestruck down in turn by the same weapon.
The fat medic turned and said something urgent in his unintelligibletongue. Farrell, dazed by the enormity of what had happened, followedwithout protest into an intersecting way that led through a bewilderingsuccession of storage rooms and hydroponics gardens, through a smallgymnasium fitted with physical training equipment in graduated sizes andfinally into a soundproofed place that could have been nothing but anursery.
The implication behind its presence stopped Farrell short.
"A _creche_," he said, stunned. He had a wild vision of endlessgenerations of children growing up in this dim and stuffy room, to betaught from their first toddling steps the functions they must fulfillbefore the venture of which they were a part could be consummated.
One of those old ventures _had_ succeeded, he thought, and was awed bythe daring of that thousand-year odyssey. The realization left him morealarmed than before--for what technical marvels might not an isolatedgroup of such dogged specialists have developed during a millennium ofapplication?
Such a weapon as had brought down the helihopper and scouter waspatently beyond reach of his own latter-day technology. Perhaps, hethought, its possession explained the presence of these people here inthe first stronghold of the Hymenops; perhaps they had even fought anddefeated the Bees on their own invaded ground.
He followed his white-smocked guide through a power room where greatcrude generators whirred ponderously, pouring out gross electric currentinto arm-thick cables. They were nearing the bow of the ship when theypassed by another open port and Farrell, glancing out over the loweredrampway, saw that his fears for Stryker and Gibson had been wellgrounded.
The _Marco Four_, ports open, lay grounded outside.
* * * * *
Farrell could not have said, later, whether his next move was planned orreflexive. The whole desperate issue seemed to hang suspended for abreathless moment upon a hair-fine edge of decision, and in that instanthe made his bid.
Without pausing in his stride he sprang out and through the port anddown the steep plane of the ramp. The rough stone pavement of the squaredrummed underfoot; sore muscles tore at him, and weakness was like aweight about his neck. He expected momentarily to be blasted out ofexistence.
He reached the _Marco Four_ with the startled shouts of his guideringing unintelligibly in his ears. The port yawned; he plunged insideand stabbed at controls without waiting to seat himself. The ports swungshut. The ship darted up under his manipulation and arrowed into spacewith an acceleration that sprung his knees and made his vision swimblackly.
He was so weak with strain and with the success of his coup that he allbut fainted when Stryker, his scanty hair tousled and his fat facecomical with bewilderment, stumbled out of his sleeping cubicle andbellowed at him.
"What the hell are you doing, Arthur? Take us down!"
Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
Stryker lumbered past him and took the controls, spiraling the _MarcoFour_ down. Men swarmed outside the ports when the Reclamations craftsettled gently to the square again. Gibson and Xavier reached the shipfirst; Gibson came inside quickly, leaving the mechanical outside makingpatient explanations to an excited group of Alphardians.
Gibson put a reassuring hand on Farrell's arm. "It's all right, Arthur.There's no trouble."
Farrell said dumbly, "I don't understand. They didn't shoot you and Xavdown too?"
It was Gibson's tu
rn to stare.
"No one shot you down! These people are primitive enough to use metallicpower lines to carry electricity to their hamlets, an anachronism youforgot last night. You piloted the helihopper into one of those lines,and the crash put you out for the rest of the night and most of today.These Alphardians are friendly, so desperately happy to be found againthat it's really pathetic."
"_Friendly?_ That torpedo--"
"It wasn't a torpedo at all," Stryker put in. Understanding of the errorunder which Farrell had labored erased his earlier irritation, and hechuckled commiseratingly. "They had one small boat left for emergencymissions, and sent it up to contact us in the fear that we mightoverlook their settlement and move on. The boat was atomic powered, andour shield screens set off its engines."
Farrell
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