[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction July 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
An enormous weapon is forcing people to keep
their troubles to themselves--it's dynamite!
_Numb with the terror that had dogged him from the moment he regained
consciousness and found himself naked and weaponless, Farrell had no
idea how long he had been lost in the honeycombed darkness of the
Hymenop dome._
_The darkness and damp chill of air told him that he was far
underground, possibly at the hive's lowest level. Somewhere above
him, the silent audience chambers lay shrouded in lesser gloom, heavy
with the dust of generations and peopled only by cryptic apian images.
Outside the dome, in a bend of lazy silver river, sprawled the Sadr III
village with its stoic handful of once-normal Terran colonists and, on
the hillside above the village, Gibson and Stryker and Xavier would be
waiting for him in the disabled_ Marco Four.
_Waiting for him...._
_They might as well have been back on Terra, five hundred light-years
away._
_Six feet away on either side, the corridor walls curved up faintly, a
flattened oval of tunneling designed for multiple alien feet, lighted
for faceted eyes demanding the merest fraction of light necessary
for an Earthman's vision. For two yards Farrell could see dimly, as
through a heavy fog; beyond was nothing but darkness and an outlandish
labyrinth of cross-branching corridors that spiraled on forever without
end._
_Behind him, his pursuers--human natives or Hymenop invaders, he had
no way of knowing which--drew nearer with a dry minor rustling whose
suggestion of imminent danger sent Farrell plunging blindly on into the
maze._
_--To halt, sweating, when a sound exactly similar came to him from
ahead._
_It was what he had feared from the beginning. He could not go on, and
he could not go back._
_He made out the intersecting corridor to his right, then a vague oval
opening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He darted
into it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice had
been forced upon him._
_It had been intended from the start that he should take this way. He
had been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steady
threat of action never quite realized._ They _had known where he was
going, and why._
_But there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel's
aimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see--_
_He did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led him
into a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whose
central area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien and
familiar._
_He went toward it hesitantly, confused for the moment by a paramnesiac
sense of repeated experience, the specious recognition of_ déjà vu.
_It was a Ringwave generator, and it was the thing he had ventured into
the dome to find._
_His confusion stemmed from its resemblance to the disabled generator
aboard the_ Marco Four, _and from the stereo-sharp associations it
evoked: Gibson working over the ship's power plant, his black-browed
face scowling and intent, square brown body moving with a wrestler's
easy economy of motion; Stryker, bald and fat and worried, wheezing up
and down the companionway from engine bay to chart room, his concern
divided between Gibson's task and Farrell's long silence in the dome._
_Stryker at this moment would be regretting the congenital optimism
that had prompted him to send his navigator where he himself could
not go. Sweating anxiety would have replaced Stryker's pontifical
assurance, dried up his smug pattering of socio-psychological truisms
lifted from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook...._
* * * * *
"So far as adaptability is concerned," Stryker had said an eternal
evening before, "_homo sapiens_ can be a pretty weird species. More
given to mulish paradox, perhaps, than any alien life-form we're ever
likely to run across out here."
He had shifted his bulk comfortably on the grass under the _Marco
Four's_ open port, undisturbed by the busy clatter of tools inside the
ship where Gibson and Xavier, the _Marco's_ mechanical, worked over
the disabled power plant. He laced his fingers across his fat paunch
and peered placidly through the dusk at Farrell, who lay on his back,
smoking and watching the stars grow bright in the evening sky.
"Isolate a human colony from its parent planet for two centuries,
enslave it for half that time to a hegemony as foreign as the
Hymenops' hive-culture before abandoning it to its own devices, and
anything at all in the way of eccentric social controls can develop.
But men remain basically identical, Arthur, in spite of acquired
superficial changes. They are inherently incapable of evolving any
system of control mechanisms that cannot be understood by other men,
provided the environmental circumstances that brought that system into
being are known. At bottom, these Sadr III natives are no different
from ourselves. Heredity won't permit it."
Farrell, half listening, had been staring upward between the icy white
brilliance of Deneb and the twin blue-and-yellow jewels of Albireo,
searching for a remote twinkle of Sol. Five hundred light-years away
out there, he was thinking, lay Earth. And from Earth all this gaudy
alien glory was no more than another point of reference for backyard
astronomers, a minor configuration casually familiar and unremarkable.
A winking of lighted windows springing up in the village downslope
brought his attention back to the scattered cottages by the river, and
to the great disquieting curve of the Hymenop dome that rose above them
like a giant above pygmies. He sat up restlessly, the wind ruffling
his hair and whirling the smoke of his cigarette away in thin flying
spirals.
"You sound as smug as the Reorientation chapter you lifted that bit
from," Farrell said. "But it won't apply here, Lee. The same thing
happened to these people that happened to the other colonists we've
found, but they don't react the same. Either those Hymenop devils
warped them permanently or they're a tribe of congenital maniacs."