"When we crashed here five weeks ago, there were an even thousand
natives in the village, plus or minus a few babes in arms. Since
that time they've lost a hundred twenty-six members, all suicides or
murders. At first the entire population turned out at sunrise and went
into the dome for an hour before going to the fields; since we came,
that period has shortened progressively to a few minutes. That much
we've learned by observation. By direct traffic we've learned exactly
nothing except that they can speak Terran Standard, but won't. What
sort of system is that?"
Stryker tugged uncomfortably at the rim of white hair the years had
left him. "It's a stumper for the moment, I'll admit ... if they'd
only _talk_ to us, if they'd tell us what their wants and fears and
problems are, we'd know what is wrong and what to do about it. But
controls forced on them by the Hymenops, or acquired since their
liberation, seem to have altered their original ideology so radically
that--"
"That they're plain batty," Farrell finished for him. "The whole setup
is unnatural, Lee. Consider this: We sent Xavier out to meet the first
native that showed up, and the native talked to him. We heard it all by
monitoring; his name was Tarvil, he spoke Terran Standard, and he was
amicable. Then we showed ourselves, and when he saw that we were human
beings like himself and not mechanicals like Xav, he clammed up. So did
everyone in the village. It worries me, Lee. If they didn't expect men
to come out of the _Marco_, then what in God's name _did_ they expect?"
He sat up restlessly and stubbed out his cigarette. "It's an
unimportant world anyway, all ocean except for this one small
continent. I think we ought to write it off and get the hell out as
soon as the _Marco_'s Ringwave is repaired."
"We can't write it off," Stryker said. "Besides reclaiming a colony, we
may have added a valuable marine food source to the Federation. Arthur,
you're not letting a handful of disoriented people get under your
skin, are you?"
Farrell made an impatient sound and lit another cigarette. The brief
flare of his lighter pierced the darkness and picked out a hurried
movement a short stone's throw away, between the _Marco Four_ and the
village.
* * * * *
"There's one reason why I'm edgy," Farrell said. "These Sadrians may
be harmless, but they make a point of posting a guard over us. There's
a sentry out there in the grass flats again tonight." He turned on
Stryker uneasily. "I've watched on the infra-scanner while those
sentries changed shifts, and they don't speak to each other. I've
tracked them back to the village, but I've never seen one of them turn
in a--"
Down in the village a man screamed, a raw, tortured sound that brought
both men up stiffly. A frantic drumming of running feet came to them,
unmistakable across the little distance. The fleeing man came up from
the dark huddle of cottages by the river and out across the grass
flats, screaming.
Pursuit overtook him halfway to the ship. There was a brief scuffling,
a shadowy dispersal of silent figures. After that, nothing.
"They did it again," Farrell said. "One of them tried to come up here
to us. The others killed him, and who's to say what sort of twisted
motive prompted them? They go to the dome together every morning, not
speaking. They work all day in the fields without so much as looking at
each other. But every night at least one of them tries to escape from
the village and come up here--and this is what happens. We couldn't
trust them, Lee, even if we could understand them!"
"It's our job to understand them," Stryker said doggedly. "Our function
is to find colonies disoriented by the Hymenops and to set them
straight if we can. If we can't, we call in a long-term reorientation
crew, and within three generations the culture will pass again for
Terran. The fact that slave colonies invariably lose their knowledge of
longevity helps; they don't get it back until they're ready for it.
"I've seen some pretty foul results of Hymenop experimenting
on human colonies, Arthur. There was the ninth planet of Beta
Pegasi--rediscovered in 3910, I think it was--that developed a
religious fixation on fertility, a mania fostered by the Hymenops to
supply expendable labor for their mines. The natives stopped mining
when the Hymenops gave up the invasion and went back to 70 Ophiuchi,
but they were still multiplying like rabbits when we found them. They
followed a cultural conviction something like that observed in Oriental
races of ancient Terran history, but they didn't pursue the Oriental
tradition of sacrosancts. They couldn't--there were too many of them.
By the time they were found, they numbered fourteen _billions_ and they
were eating each other. Still it took only three generations to set
them straight."
He took one of Farrell's cigarettes and puffed it placidly.
"For that matter, Earth had her own share of eccentric cultures. I
recall reading about one that existed as late as the twentieth century
and equaled anything we're likely to find here. Any society should be
geared to a set of social controls designed to furnish it, as a whole
with a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of discomfort, but these
ancient Terrestrial Dobuans--island aborigines, as I remember it--had
adjusted to their total environment in a manner exactly opposite. They
reversed the norm and became a society of paranoiacs, hating each
other in direct ratio to nearness of relationship. Husbands and wives
detested each other, sons and fathers--"
"Now you're pulling my leg," Farrell protested. "A society like that
would be too irrational to function."
"But the system worked," Stryker insisted. "It balanced well enough, as
long as they were isolated. They accepted it because it was all they
knew, and an abrupt reversal that negated their accustomed habits would
create an impossible societal conflict. They were reoriented after
the Fourth War, and succeeding generations adjusted to normal living
without difficulty."
A sound from overhead made them look up. Gibson was standing in the
_Marco's_ open port.
"Conference," Gibson said in his heavy baritone, and went back inside.
* * * * *
They followed Gibson quickly and without question, more disturbed by
the terse order than by the killing in the grass flats. Knowing Gibson,
they realized that he would not have wasted even that one word unless
emergency justified it.
They found him waiting in the chart room with Xavier. For the
thousandth time, seeing the two together, Farrell found himself
comparing them: the robot, smoothly functional from flexible gray
plastoid body to featureless oval faceplate, blandly efficient, totally
incapable of emotion; Gibson, short and dark and competent heavy-browed
and humorless. Except for initiative, Farrell thought, the two of them
could have traded identities and no one would have been able to notice
any difference.
"Xav and I found our Ringwave trouble," Gibson said. "The generator is
functioning, but the warp isn't going out. Something here on Sadr III
is neutralizing it."
They stared at him as if he had just told them the planet was flat.
"But a Ringwave can't be stopped completely, once it is started,"
Stryker protested. "You'd have to dismantle it to shut it off, Gib!"
"The warping field can be damped out, though," Gibson said. "Adjacent
generators operating at different phase levels will heterodyne at a
frequency representing the mean variance between levels. The resulting
beat-phase will be too low to maintain either field, and one or the
other, or both, will blank out. If you remember, all Terran-designed
power plants are set to the same phase for that reason."
"But these natives _can't_ have a Ringwave plant!" Farrell argued.
"There's only this one village on Sadr III, Gib, an insignificant
little agrarian township! If they had the Ringwave, they'd be
mechanized. They'd have vehicles, landing ports...."
"The Hymenops had the Ringwave," Gibson interrupted. "And they left the
dome down there, the first undamaged one we've found. Figure it out for
yourselves."
They digested the statement in silence. Stryker paled slowly, as if
it needed time for apprehension to work its way through his fat bulk.
Farrell's uneasiness, sourceless until now, grew to chill certainty.
* * * * *
"I think I've expected this, without realizing it, since my first
flight," he said. "It stood to reason that the Hymenops would quit
running somewhere, that we'd bump into them eventually out here on the
fringes. Twenty thousand light-years back to 70 Ophiuchi is a long way
to retreat.... Gib, do you think they're still here?"
Gibson did not shrug, but his voice seemed to. "It won't matter one way
or the other unless we can clear the _Marco's_ generator."
From another man it might have been irony. Knowing Gibson, Farrell and
Stryker accepted it as a bald statement of fact.
"Then we're up against a Hymenop hive-mind," Stryker said. "And we
can't run away from it. Any suggestions?"
"We'll have to find the interfering generator and stop it," Farrell
offered, knowing that was the only obvious solution.
"One alternative," Gibson corrected. "If we can determine what
phase-level the interfering warp uses, we may be able to adjust the
_Marco's_ generator to match it. Once they're in resonance, they won't
interfere." He caught Stryker's unspoken question and answered it. "It
would take a week. Maybe longer."
Stryker vetoed the alternative. "Too long. If there are Hymenops here,
they won't give us that much time."
Farrell switched on the chart room scanning screen and centered it
on the village downslope. Scattered cottages with dark tiled roofs
and lamp-bright windows showed up clearly. Out of their undisciplined
grouping swept the great hemispherical curve of the dome, glinting
dully metallic in the starshine.
"Maybe we're jumping to conclusions," he said. "We've been here for
five weeks without seeing a trace of Hymenops, and from what I've read
of them, they'd have jumped us the minute we landed. Chances are that
they left Sadr III in too great a hurry to wreck the dome, and their
Ringwave power plant is still running."
"You may be right," Stryker said, brightening. "They carried the fight
to us from the first skirmish, two hundred years ago, and they damned
near beat us before we learned how to fight them."
He looked at Xavier's silent plastoid figure with something like
affection. "We'd have lost that war without Xave's kind. We
couldn't match wits with Hymenop hive-minds, any more than a swarm
of grasshoppers could stand up to a colony of wasps. But we made
mechanicals that could. Cybernetic brains and servo-crews, ships that
thought for themselves...."
He squinted at the visiscreen with its cryptic, star-streaked dome.
"But they don't think as we do. They may have left a rear guard here,
or they may have boobytrapped the dome."
"One of us will have to find out which it is," Farrell said. He took
a restless turn about the chart room, weighing the probabilities. "It
seems to fall in my department."