ship is yours, Xav. Callus if anything turns up."
Farrell followed him reluctantly outside into a miasmic desolation moredepressing than he could have imagined.
A stunted jungle of thorny brambles and tough, waist-high grasseshampered their passage at first, ripping at coveralls and tangling thefeet until they had beaten their way through it to lower ground. Therethey found a dreary expanse of bogland where scummy pools of stagnantwater and festering slime heaved sluggishly with oily bubbles of marshgas that burst audibly in the hanging silence. The liverish blaze ofFalakian sun bore down mercilessly from the crater's rim.
They moved on to skirt a small lead-colored lake in the center of thevalley, a stagnant seepage-basin half obscured by floating scum. Itssteaming mudflats were littered with rotting yellowed bones andsupported the first life they had seen, an unpleasant scurrying of smallmultipedal crustaceans and water-lizards.
"There can't be any survivors _here_," Farrell said, appalled by thethought of his kind perpetuating itself in a place like this. "God,think what the mortality rate would be! They'd die like flies."
"There are bound to be a few," Stryker stated, "even after a hundredyears of slavery and another hundred of abandonment. The human animal,Arthur, is the most fantastically adaptable--"
He broke off short when they rounded a clump of reeds and stumbled upontheir first Falakian proof of that fantastic adaptability.
* * * * *
The young woman squatting on the mudflat at their feet stared back atthem with vacuous light eyes half hidden behind a wild tangle of mattedblonde hair. She was gaunt and filthy, plastered with slime from head tofoot, and in her hands she held the half-eaten body of a largercrustacean that obviously had died of natural causes and not toorecently, at that.
Farrell turned away, swallowing his disgust. Gibson, unmoved, said withan aptness bordering--for him--on irony: "Too damned adaptable, Lee.Sometimes our kind survives when it really shouldn't."
A male child of perhaps four came out of the reeds and stared at them.He was as gaunt and filthy as the woman, but less vapid of face.Farrell, watching the slow spark of curiosity bloom in his eyes,wondered sickly how many years--or how few--must pass before the boy wasreduced to the same stupid bovinity as the mother.
Gibson was right, he thought. The compulsion to survive at any costcould be a curse instead of an asset. The degeneracy of these poordevils was a perpetual affront to the race that had put them there.
He was about to say as much when the woman rose and plodded away throughthe mud, the child at her heels. It startled him momentarily, when hefollowed their course with his eyes, to see that perhaps a hundredothers had gathered to wait incuriously for them in the near distance.All were as filthy as the first two, but with a grotesque uniformity ofappearance that left him frowning in uneasy speculation until he foundwords to identify that similarity.
"They're all _young_," he said. "The oldest can't be more thantwenty--twenty-five at most!"
Stryker scowled, puzzled without sharing Farrell's unease. "You'reright. Where are the older ones?"
"Another of your precious little puzzles," Farrell said sourly. "I hopeyou enjoy unraveling it."
"Oh, we'll get to the bottom of it," Stryker said with assurance. "We'llhave to, before we can leave them here."
They made a slow circuit of the lake, and the closer inspection offereda possible solution to the problem Stryker had posed. Chipped andweathered as the bones littering the mudflats were, their grislyshapings were unmistakable.
"I'd say that these are the bones of the older people," Strykerhazarded, "and that they represent the end result of another of thesereligio-economic control compulsions the Hymenops like to condition intotheir slaves. Men will go to any lengths to observe a tradition,especially when its origin is forgotten. If these people were onceconditioned to look on old age as intolerable--"
"If you're trying to say that they kill each other off at maturity,"Farrell interrupted, "the inference is ridiculous. In a hundred yearsthey'd have outgrown a custom so hard to enforce. The balance of powerwould have rested with the adults, not with the children, and adults aregenerally fond of living.
* * * * *
Stryker looked to Gibson for support, received none, and found himselfsaddled with his own contention. "Economic necessity, then, since thevalley can support only a limited number. Some of the old North AmericanIndians followed a similar custom, the oldest son throttling the fatherwhen he grew too old to hunt."
"But even there infanticide was more popular than patricide," Farrellpointed out. "No group would practice decimation from the top down. It'stoo difficult to enforce."
Stryker answered him with a quotation from the Colonial ReclamationsHandbook, maliciously taking the pontifical classmaster's tone bestcalculated to irritate Farrell.
"Chapter Four, Subsection One, Paragraph Nineteen: _Any custom, fixationor compulsion accepted as the norm by one group of human beings can beunderstood and evaluated by any other group not influenced by the sameideology, since the basic perceptive abilities of both are necessarilythe same through identical heredity. Evaluation of alien motivations,conversely--_"
"Oh, hell," Farrell cut in wearily. "Let's get back to the ship, shallwe? We'll all feel more like--"
His right foot gave way beneath him without warning, crushing throughthe soft ground and throwing him heavily. He sat up at once, and sworein incredulous anger when he found the ankle swelling rapidly inside hisboot.
"Sprained! Damn it all!"
Gibson and Stryker, on their knees beside the broken crust of soil,ignored him. Gibson took up a broken length of stick and proddedintently in the cavity, prying out after a moment a glistening two-footellipsoid that struggled feebly on the ground.
"A chrysalid," Stryker said, bending to gauge the damage Farrell's heavyboot had done. "In a very close pre-eclosion stage. Look, the protectivesheathing has begun to split already."
The thing lay twitching aimlessly, prisoned legs pushing against itsshining transparent integument in an instinctive attempt at prematurefreedom. The movement was purely reflexive; its head, huge-eyed and aslarge as a man's clenched fist, had been thoroughly crushed underFarrell's heel.
Oddly, its injury touched Farrell even through the pain of his injuredfoot.
"It's the first passably handsome thing we've seen in this pesthole," hesaid, "and I've maimed it. Finish it off, will you?"
Stryker grunted, feeling the texture of the imprisoning sheath withcurious fingers. "What would it have been _in imago_, Gib? A giantbutterfly?"
"A moth," Gibson said tersely. "_Lepidoptera_, anyway."
He stood up and ended the chrysalid's strugglings with a bolt from hisheat-gun before extending a hand to help Farrell up. "I'd like toexamine it closer, but there'll be others. Let's get Arthur out ofhere."
* * * * *
They went back to the ship by slow stages, pausing now and then whileGibson gathered a small packet of bone fragments from the mudflats andunderbrush.
"Some of these are older than others," he explained when Strykerremarked on his selection. "But none are recent. It should help to knowtheir exact age."
An hour later, they were bathed and dressed, sealed off comfortably inthe ship against the humid heat and stink of the swamp. Farrell lay on achart room acceleration couch, resting, while Stryker taped his swollenankle. Gibson and Xavier, the one disdaining rest and the other needingnone, used the time to run a test analysis on the bones brought in fromthe lakeside.
The results of that analysis were more astonishing than illuminating.
A majority of the fragments had been exposed to climatic action for someten years. A smaller lot averaged twenty years; and a few odd chips,preserved by long burial under alluvial silt, thirty.
"The older natives died at ten-year intervals, then," Stryker said. "Andin considerable numbers; the tribe must have been cut to half strengtheach tim
e. But why?" He frowned unhappily, fishing for opinion. "Gib,can it really be a perversion of religious custom dreamed up by theHymenops to keep their slaves under control? A sort of festival ofsacrifice every decade, climaxing in tribal decimation?"
"Maybe they combine godliness with gluttony," Farrell put in, unasked."Maybe their orgy runs more to long pig than to piety."
He stood up, wincing at the pain, and was hobbling toward his sleepingcubicle when Gibson's answer to Stryker's question stopped him with acold prickle along his spine.
"We'll know within twenty-four hours," Gibson said. "Since both thedecimations and the winter darkness periods seem to
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