"Because I'm the only one who _can_ go. Remember what Gib said about
changing the _Marco's_ Ringwave to resonate with the interfering
generator? Gib can make the change; I can't. You're--"
"Too old and fat," Stryker finished for him. "And too damned slow and
garrulous. You're right, of course."
They let it go at that and put Xavier on guard for the night. The
mechanical was infinitely more alert and sensitive to approach than any
of the crew, but the knowledge did not make Farrell's sleep the sounder.
He dozed fitfully, waking a dozen times during the night to smoke
cigarettes and to speculate fruitlessly on what he might find in the
dome. He was sweating out a nightmare made hideous by monstrous bees
that threatened him in buzzing alien voices when Xavier's polite
monotone woke him for breakfast.
* * * * *
Farrell was halfway down the grassy slope to the village when he
realized that the _Marco_ was still under watch. Approaching close
enough for recognition, he saw that the sentry this time was Tarvil,
the Sadrian who had first approached the ship. The native's glance took
in Farrell's shoulder-pack of testing tools and audiphone, brushed the
hand-torch and blast gun at the Terran's belt, and slid away without
trace of expression.
"I'm going into the dome," Farrell said. He tried to keep the
uncertainty out of his voice, and felt a rasp of irritation when he
failed. "Is there a taboo against that?"
The native fell in beside him without speaking and they went down
together, walking a careful ten feet apart, through dew-drenched grass
flats that gleamed like fields of diamonds under the early morning sun.
From the village, as they approached, straggled the inevitable exodus
of adults and half-grown children, moving silently out to the fields.
"Weird beggars," Farrell said into his audiphone button. "They don't
even rub elbows at work. You'd think they were afraid of being
contaminated."
Stryker's voice came tinnily in his ear. "They won't seem so strange
once we learn their motivations. I'm beginning to think this
aloofness of theirs is a religious concomitant, Arthur, a hangover
from slave-controls designed to prevent rebellion through isolation.
Considering what they must have suffered under the Hymenops, it's a
wonder they're even sane."
"I'll grant the religious origin," Farrell said. "But I wouldn't risk a
centicredit on their sanity. I think the lot of them are nuts."
The village was not deserted, but so far as Farrell's coming was
concerned, it might as well have been. The few women and children he
saw on the streets ignored him--and Tarvil--completely.
He met with only one sign of interest, when a naked boy perhaps six
years old stared curiously and asked something in a childish treble of
the woman accompanying him. The woman answered with a single sharp
word and struck the child across the face, sending him sprawling.
Farrell relayed the incident. "She said '_Quiet!_' and slapped him
down, Lee. They start their training early."
"Their sort of indifference couldn't be congenital," Stryker said. His
tinny murmur took on a puzzled sound. "But they've been free for four
generations. It's hard to believe that any forcibly implanted control
mechanism could remain in effect so long."
A shadow blocked the sun, bringing a faint chill to Farrell when he
looked up to see the great rounded hump of the dome looming over him.
"I'm going into the dome now," he said. "It's like all the others--no
openings except at ground level, where it's riddled with them."
Tarvil did not accompany him inside. Farrell, looking back as he
thumbed his hand-torch alight in the nearest entranceway, saw the
native squatting on his heels and looking after him without a single
trace of interest.
* * * * *
"I'm at ground level," Farrell said later, "in what seems to have
been a storage section. Empty now, with dust everywhere except in the
corridors the natives use when they come in, mornings. No sign of
Hymenops yet."
Stryker's voice turned worried. "Look sharp for traps, Arthur. The
place may be mined."
The upper part of the dome, Farrell knew from previous experience,
would have been given over in years past to Hymenop occupation, layer
after rising layer of dormitories tiered like honeycombs to conserve
space. He followed a spiral ramp downward to the level immediately
below surface, and felt his first excitement of discovery when he found
himself in the audience chambers that, until the _Marco's_ coming, had
been the daily goal of the Sadrian natives.
The level was entirely taken up with bare ten-foot cubicles, each
cramped chamber dominated by a cryptic metal-and-crystal likeness
of the Hymenop head set into the metal wall opposite its corridor
entrance. From either side of a circular speaking-grill, the antennae
projected into the room, rasplike and alert, above faceted crystal
eyes that glowed faintly in the near-darkness. The craftsmanship was
faultless, stylized after a fashion alien to Farrell's imagining and
personifying with disturbing realism the soulless, arrogant efficiency
of the Hymenop hive-mind. To Farrell, there was about each image a
brooding air of hypnotic fixity.
"Something new in Hymenop experiments," he reported to Stryker. "None
of the other domes we found had anything like this. These things have
some bearing on the condition of the natives, Lee--there's a path worn
through the dust to every image, and I can see where the people knelt.
I don't like it. I've got a hunch that whatever these damned idols were
used for succeeded too well."
"They can't be idols," Stryker said. "The Hymenops would have known how
hard it is to displace anthropomorphism entirely from human worship.
But I think you're right about the experiment's working too well. No
ordinary compulsion would have stuck so long. Periodic hypnosis? Wait,
Arthur, that's an angle I want to check with Gibson...."
He was back a moment later, wheezing with excitement.
"Gib thinks I'm on the right track--periodic hypnosis. The Hymenops
must have assigned a particular chamber and image to each slave. The
images are mechanicals, robot mesmerists designed to keep the natives'
compulsion-to-isolation renewed. Post-hypnotic suggestion kept the
poor devils coming back every morning, and their children with them,
even after the Hymenops pulled out. They couldn't break away until
the _Marco's_ Ringwave forced a shutdown of the dome's power plant
and deactivated the images. Not that they're any better off now that
they're free; they don't know how--"
Farrell never heard the rest of it. Something struck him sharply across
the back of the head.
* * * * *
When he regained consciousness, he was naked and weaponless and lost.
The rustling of approach, bodiless and dreadful in darkness, panicked
him completely and sent him fleeing through a sweating eternity that
brought him finally to the dome's lowest level and the Hymenop power
plant.
He went hesitantly toward the shadowy bulk of the Ringwave cylinder,
drawn as much now by its familiarity as driven by the terror behind
him. At the base of the towering machine, he made out a control board
totally unrecognizable in design, studded with dials and switches
clearly intended for alien handling.
The tinny whispering of Stryker's voice in the vaultlike quiet struck
him with the frightening feeling that he had gone mad.
He saw his equipment pack then, lying undamaged at the foot of the
control board. Stryker's voice murmured from its audicom unit: "We're
in the dome, Arthur. Where are you? What level--"
Farrell caught up the audicom, swept by a sudden wild lift of hope.
"I'm at the bottom of the dome, in the Ringwave chamber. They took my
gun and torch. For God's sake, hurry!"
The darkness gave up a furtive scuffling of sandaled feet, the tight
breathing of many men. Someone made a whimpering sound, doglike and
piteous; a Sadrian voice hissed sharply, "_Quiet!_"
Stryker's metallic whisper said: "We're tracking your carrier, Arthur.
Use the tools they left you. They brought you there to repair the
Ringwave, to give back the power that kept their images going. Keep
busy!"
Farrell, only half understanding, took up his instrument case. His
movement triggered a tense rustle in the darkness; the voice whimpered
again, a tortured sound that rasped Farrell's nerves like a file on
glass.
"_Give me back my Voice. I am alone and afraid. I must have
Counsel...._"
Beneath the crying, Farrell felt the terror, incredibly voiced, that
weighted the darkness, the horror implicit in stilled breathing, the
swelling sense of outrage.
There was a soft rush of bodies, a panting and struggling. The
whimpering stopped.
The instrument case slipped out of Farrell's hands. On the heels of its
nerve-shattering crash against the metal floor came Stryker's voice,
stronger as it came closer.
"Steady, Arthur. They'll kill you if you make a scene. We're coming,
Gib and Xav and I. Don't lose your head!"
Farrell crouched back against the cold curve of the Ringwave cylinder,
straining against flight with an effort that left him trembling
uncontrollably. A spasm of incipient screaming seized his throat and
he bit it back savagely, stifling a terror that could not be seen,
grasped, fought with.
He was giving way slowly when Xavier's inflectionless voice droned out
of the darkness: "Quiet. Your Counsel will be restored."
There was a sudden flood of light, unbearable after long darkness.
Farrell had a failing glimpse of Gibson, square face blocked with light
and shadow from the actinic flare overhead, racing toward him through a
silently dispersing throng of Sadrians.
Then he passed out.
* * * * *
He was strapped to his couch in the chart room when he awoke. The
_Marco Four_ was already in space; on the visiscreen, Farrell could
see a dwindling crescent of Sadr III, and behind it, in the black pit
of space, the fiery white eye of Deneb and the pyrotechnic glowing of
Albireo's blue-and-yellow twins.
"We're headed out," he said, bewildered. "What happened?"
Stryker came over and unstrapped him. Gibson, playing chess with Xavier
across the chart-room plotting table, looked up briefly and went back
to his gambit.
"We reset the Ringwave in the dome to phase with ours and lugged you
out," Stryker explained genially. He was back in character again, his
fat paunch quivering with the beginning of laughter. "We're through
here. The rest is up to Reorientation."