How can we possibly amount to much when our fathers were sold at auction a scant five thousand years ago?

Let My People Go

By Walter Miller, Jr

THE SITUATION is ridiculous!" growled Wolek Parn, glaring fixedly at the scope which displayed the planet's surface as a mottled green pattern of pale luminescence. "Look at them. Just look!"

The others said nothing. Taut faces, with eyes locked to the screen. The planet lay seven thousand miles from their landing site on its moon, but the magnification pulled the surface toward them so that they watched it as if from an altitude of thirty miles. There were continents, oceans, islands, peninsulas. The land appeared splotched and spotted, as if by variations in flora between highland and lowland. All this had been expected, predicted by Merrigull's calculations. A planet for colonization, and they had reached it after thirteen years of journeying across the blackness of interstellum. Now they were here, and the planet indeed was inhabitable.

Furthermore, it was already inhabited.

"There's another one!" Wolek Parn breathed as a checkerboard pattern of tiny squares drifted into view near the planet's misty limb. "Six, maybe seven miles square. That's no native village!"

He turned to peer at their faces by the glow-light from the scope. Morgun Sahl, biologist — a tall gaunt man with a saturnine face, he showed no emotion except for a flicker at the corner of his mouth that might have been indicative of bitterness or of grim amusement. A wiry shock of black hair dangled over his forehead. He was a Lincolnesque Machiavelli with a sour drawl.

Beside him stood Faron Qun, chemist, mineralogist — a shorter man with straw hair and a quiet scholarly face, small-featured, slightly pudgy, usually smiling. The smile was absent now. He looked like a small boy at a funeral, and the glow of the screen made his face seem abnormally pale. He held the launch pilot's arm, squeezed it spasmodically.

It was a soft arm, milk-white and scattered with tiny freckles, and it belonged to Alaia Dazille—a tall girl, not beautiful, but cool and pleasant, with red-brown hair, a narrow oval face, and hazel eyes that could shine with friendly amusement and suddenly switch to the cold glitter of sarcasm. Wolek Parn had met women that reminded him of gardenias and fine wine. Alaia Dazille, however, made him think of geraniums and buttermilk. She responded to his stare with a questioning flicker of her eyebrows. She was trying hard not to be frightened.

"Well, Alaia?"

She shook her head. "Don't ask me anything Skipper."

He glanced at the chemist. Faron Qun seemed to shudder. "No opinion. Ask our biologist."

"All right, Sahl," Parn growled. "We spent thirteen years getting here. Shall we spend another thirteen going back home?"

Morgun Sahl watched the slow drift of the checkerboard patterns on the scope. "I'm sure you mean that," he grunted sourly.

"Maybe I do. Why shouldn't I?"

The big man shrugged. "How old would you be, Parn, when we got back? Sixty?"

"Fifty-nine."

"You started in the prime of life. You get back approaching retirement age. Twenty-six years gone for nothing. And you don't get paid a nickel for your trouble." He smiled humorlessly and tapped the scope with his finger. "There's your pay, Skipper. Epsilon Eridani Two. You won't turn it down."

Parn scowled. "You think we can land right in the middle of somebody else's civilization and start a colony?"

SAHL HESITATED, chewed the corner of his mouth thoughtfully for a moment. He gestured at the screen again. "They, whoever they are, undoubtedly know we're here. The ship's big enough, and the moon is close enough, so that they can see us with a small telescope. Creatures that build cities that size probably are advanced enough to spot us and recognize us for what we are: alien invaders. Undoubtedly they're already reacting to what they see."

"And what kind of a reaction?"

The biologist shook his head. "Impossible to guess. Anger—hysteria—terror. Or maybe cold analysis and planning. I suggest we just wait and see."

"And wind up with a fleet of guided missiles coming up to greet us?"

"Maybe."

"What kind of creatures do you think we'd find on such a planet?"

The biologist was slow to answer. "Well, life always takes about the same pattern everywhere we've found it. It's never been too radically different. The basic protoplasm is always the same, or we can't call it 'life.' This planet is very earthlike. The sun is cooler than our Sol, but there's enough ultraviolet for vegetation. I believe the life-forms will be similar to what Earth has developed at various periods in her history."

"Which might be anything from a duck-billed platypus to a dinosaur," Parn fumed. "And the cities might be insect hives."

With an exclamation of disgust, Wolek Parn snapped a switch, flooding the compartment with light. He turned off the scope and paced to his desk where he dropped wearily into his seat and faced them, arms draped across his legs, his shoulders slumped dejectedly.

"We can send a launch down, of course," he said gloomily. "But it'll be a one-way trip because of fuel considerations. If it goes down, it stays. And so it has to take a load of colonists with it, or somebody gets left behind in the long run. How can I send twenty-four guinea pigs down into the hands of—of what?"

Sahl shrugged. "You can ask for volunteers."

Parn leaned forward, clasped his head in his hands, and shook it slowly. "Eventually, I guess I'll have to. Right now, I'm faced with telling them. About the cities. They've been impatient as hell to know what's going on. Why we landed here. A few more hours and they'll start getting mad."

FARON QUN spoke up for the first time. "Why don't you put it to them as a vote, Skipper? Make them responsible for deciding."

"Suppose they decide to load everybody in the launches and go down right now?"

"Well—suppose they do? Can you say definitely that it's the wrong decision?"

"No, I guess not."

"I can," Sahl growled. "But you needn't give them that choice. Ask for volunteers for a first launch, then let the volunteers decide whether they want to jump right in, or wait and see if there's any reaction to our presence here on the planet's moon."

Parn nodded thoughtfully and sighed. "I guess it's the only thing to do."

There was a brief silence, suddenly interrupted by a knock at the entrance. "Colonists," Parn muttered, "wanting to know what's up." He raised his voice. "Okay! Come in!"

The hatch opened, and a young officer leaned inside without entering. "It's Rulian, Sir. He wants to see you."

"Ru—I thought I sent him out to scout the surface."

"He's back, Sir."

"All right, send him in."

The officer nodded and vanished. A pudgy, florid man stepped hurriedly inside. He was panting slightly, appeared to be nervous. He still wore a pressure suit, but the helmet had been removed. He brushed at his disheveled hair and gazed at Parn.

"Well, what is it? Surely you didn't have time to finish—"

Rulian shook his head quickly. "No, Sir. We got halfway to the hills. And then we came back. We thought you ought to know right away."

"Know what?"

The scout held something out on the palm of his hand—a torn bit of metal. Parn frowned questioningly.

"Looks like—maybe a sheared-off rivet. So?"

"Just brought it back so you wouldn't think I was off my rocker, Skipper."

"What are you talking about?"

"Out there—on the surface. There's the entrance to a tunnel, with an air-lock. A meteorite clobbered it—long time ago, maybe." He tossed the bit of metal on Parn's desk. "That's from the wreckage of the lock."

A hush fell over them. Parn reached for the bit of metal, rolled it around in his palm with a blunt finger. Morgun Sahl was the first to break the silence.

"Well, Skipper—I guess that determines what we do next."

"Eh? Oh, yes. Sahl, I guess the job is yours, since we don't have an archeologist aboard. Pick whoever you need."

Sahl glanced at Faron Qun and Alaia. "You two want to go?" The girl glanced at Qun. The chemist paused, then nodded. "We'll get suits and meet you outside."

Chapter II

THE LANDSCAPE lay barren and sunswept under a lurid sky. The moon possessed a thin atmosphere of xenon and other heavy gasses that tempered the harshness of the sun-glare and painted the blackness of space with a translucent film of sky. Morgun Sahl glanced at the wrist-indicators of his suit. The pressure was around two pounds, and temperature a modest 110° Fahrenheit. He stood outside the lock with Rulian, waiting for Qun and Alaia. The scout was pointing to a low outcropping of rock perhaps four hundred yards from the ship.

"The tunnel is just beyond that," came the scout's voice in his headsets. "Believe me, Sahl, I about dropped over when I saw it. Who do you suppose dug it?"

The biologist shrugged, and gazed moodily at the huge but faintly visible crescent that hung in the western sky. What manner of beings were watching them and waiting for a move?

Man had never before touched a planet where flourishing life was possible. There was Mars, of course, with its stunted flora and primitive fauna. And the single planet of Alpha Centauri, with its steaming oceans full of marine life, but with a climate too hot for land-life except in fertile patches in the polar regions.

Here, however, under the orange glare of an Eridanian sun, lay a world nearly Earthlike. So Earth-like that the eventual development of an intelligent species was almost inevitable, according to Sahl's way of thinking. Merrigull had thought so, too, but he had allowed for a probable deviation from Earthlike conditions, and had guessed that the peculiarly human survival response called "intelligence" would not happen here.

Obviously, Merrigull had guessed wrong. And one hundred and twenty colonists were left holding the bag, visitors without reservations, discovering too late that the inn was already full. Certainly the visitors would not be welcome. The only question in Sahl's mind pertained to the amount of resistance the Eridanian life-forms would offer to their coming. It might be anything from grudging tolerance to fanatical opposition. In case of the latter, there was nothing to do but retreat, go back to Earth, if they could escape—and try to laugh off the twenty-six lost years of life. Certainly there could be no forcing an entry into the Eridanian world against the will of the Eridanian civilization. The colony was equipped with no spectacular weapons, nor any way to maintain a technological culture for more than a generation. They had come hoping to begin with a society of small farms in some area where metals were plentiful, and to let their descendants gradually assemble the tools of a better civilization.

THE AIR-LOCK opened behind him, and he turned to watch Alaia and Faron Qun climb down to join them. Across the cracked dry ground they strode, puffs of dust rising about their boots and drifting away on the thin breeze. The scout led them to the outcropping of rock, and they climbed it to stare at the plain beyond. The tunnel's mouth, was only a small pock-mark of blackness on the ground, but there was a glitter of metal at its rim. Sahl stared at the terrain around it, then pointed to dark splotches on the ground a hundred yards beyond the tunnel.

"You examine those?" he asked. "Yeah, we looked at them. Ground looks fused. I'd guess it was used as a landing site."

"Probably. How about the lock? Think we can get through it?"

"Have to hoist that wrecked hatch out of the way. I think four of us can manage it. If we can't, I brought a torch."

Sahl leaped from the outcrop and and drifted down the six-foot drop to level ground. The others followed. Moments later they stood at the mouth of the lock. Alaia kicked at a layer of dust with her boot, uncovered a smooth stone ramp in which the lock was set.

Sahl knelt beside the torn hatchway to tug at the sheared metal door, wedged diagonally in the entranceway. "It's still fastened in one spot," he called. "Let's have that torch, Rulie."

The scout fumbled at the valves of the two cylinders strapped to his back, then struck a blinding dart of blue-white flame from the hand-torch. Sahl flipped a dark filter down over his visor, then played the torch slowly over the jagged metal. Minutes later, the fastening pulled loose. The hatch slipped deeper and wedged.

"All right, let's heave. Don't grab the hot spot."

After a concerted effort, the hatch, came free with a suddenness that sent Alaia sprawling. Faron Qun quickly helped her to her feet, leaving the others to struggle with the hatch. Sahl gave him a black look, but said nothing.

Beneath the lock appeared a corridor heaped with cave-in rubble, but apparently passable. Sahl stared down for a moment, then eyed the scout. "Notice anything," he grunted.

"Yeah," the other muttered. "We're not going to be able to stand up down there. Looks like a crawl-way."

Sahl shook his head. "It was probably designed to walk in all right—but the designers evidently aren't very tall. Four feet high at the most." He stepped into the wrecked lock and let himself down gingerly to the top of the rubble heap. He crouched to shine a light down along the corridor, then glanced up at the others.

"Can't see much. Let's go down. We'll stick close together. And don't touch anything that you don't understand." He slid feet-first down the heap of rubble and crouched in the gloom below. The others followed.

"Last man ought to blaze a trail somehow, as we move along," he called. "So we won't get lost down here."

FARON QUN picked up a chunk of rock from the heap and scratched it experimentally on the wall. It left a discernible mark. Sahl nodded and fumed, to move along the narrow corridor. After a few paces, he went to his hands and knees and crawled. The ceiling was too low to permit walking without crouching uncomfortably.

Blackness engulfed them, except for the light thrown by Sahl's hand-lamp. They passed a turn and came to a second hatch. Sahl ran his flash around the edge.

"Tight seal," he grunted. "Another lock."'

"They've probably got the place split into compartments in case of a leak," Faron offered.

Sahl heaved at the door with his shoulder, but it failed to budge. "Try that button," Alaia suggested.

The biologist snorted, but pressed the stud beside the hatch and held it down. With his helmet pressed against the metal, he thought he heard the feeble click of a relay, but the hatch remained closed.

"That disk," she called, reaching over his shoulder. "Might be an emergency hand-control."

"All right, turn it," he growled.

She twisted it hard. After two turns, Sahl glanced down to see a tiny spurt of dust licking up from a valve an inch above floor level. It startled him. He had expected no pressure to remain in the lock. When the jet of dust subsided, he heaved against the door again. It swung slowly open, revealing the inside of the lock.

"We'll have to go through it two at a time," he said, then paused. "Anybody think to bring a weapon?"

No one answered for a moment. Then Faron snapped irritably, "Why should we, Sahl? Don't be silly!"

"Yeah. I'm being silly. Come on, Rulie, let's go through."

They crawled into the lock and closed the hatch. Sahl closed the valve from the inside, and found a similar control for the inner door. Then he watched the fabric of his suit go slowly slack as the pressure built up in the lock.

"Open it." Rulie grunted.

A slight tug brought the thick hatch swinging inward. They stared beyond the door into a long domed room. The ceiling seemed to glow faintly, and Sahl extinguished his flashlight to check it. Bands of faint luminosity provided a dim glow-light to the room. The last feeble flicker, he guessed, of a lighting system abandoned long ago.

THE ROOM was empty, and a layer of dust lay thick over the ledges and across the floor. The dust was marked in places, but the marks were not fresh, and dust had partially covered them again. They closed the hatch behind them so that the others could come through.

Sahl glanced at his pressure gauge. "Twelve pounds," he muttered. "I'm going to try a sniffer."

Rulie protested. "Might get a lungful of chlorine! I can test for oxygen with the torch."

Sahl yelped and snatched it away from him before he struck a spark. "Might get worse than a lungful of chlorine if you strike that thing in here!"

Rulie muttered apologetically. Sahl touched the sniffer valve at the side of his helmet and opened it a tenth of a turn, then cut off his oxygen supply and waited until the pressure in his suit fell to twelve pounds. Then he inhaled deeply several times.

"Don't smell anything," he called. "I'm going to open it all the way. If I keel over, catch me."

The air in the room smelled musty, but after a minute's experimental breathing he removed his helmet. Rulie loosened his own helmet, but the biologist tightened it for him again.

"If I'm all right after half an hour," he shouted against Rulie's visor, "you can take it off."

The others followed them through the lock and looked around quickly. Without his helmet, Sahl could not hear their conversation except as a muffled murmur from behind their visors. He motioned for them to follow, then crossed the room to enter another corridor beyond.

Somewhere in the station, nuclear reactors were still seeping a trickle of energy that kept a faint glow of light from the ceiling, and he hoped that Faron would be able to estimate the age of the place from radioactive decay. He sent Rulie back to call the Ark.

As they progressed through a series of corridors, rooms and other locks, Sahl grew deeply puzzled. This was no observatory, nor was it an experimental station. It had apparently been used as a transfer point to space, a way-station where landing launches from the planet shifted cargo or passengers with larger ships too bulky to land on the mother-world. Why had it been abandoned? Oxygen was still being released from the rocks. The place was still in fair condition. Had the builders abandoned space entirely?

The station was not large, and an hour's exploration brought them to its limits. Faron had discovered the reactors in a vault beneath the main level, where they supplied heat to an extensive bank of thermopiles which still delivered a trickle of power to the equipment. Faron let himself down into the vault to examine the equipment, while the others continued to explore the main level, having removed their helmets to breathe the still air of the station.

SAHL WATCHED Alaia puzzling over a four-foot cube of transparent plastic that rested on a low pedestal in the center of the floor.

"Know what it's for?" he asked. She shook her head and took a last swipe at the dust that covered it. "It's clear except for a few specks of something. Air bubbles maybe."

Sahl extinguished his light and noticed that she stepped away from him quickly in the darkness. He grinned sourly to himself, and waited until his eyes adjusted to the lack of light.

"What's the idea?" she muttered suspiciously.

"Look at the specks in the plastic."

"Why.—they shine faintly! Why?"

"Probably bits of radioactive material covered with a phosphor." He studied it in silence for a moment. One group of dots appeared to be joined by a web of fine lines. Their colors ranged from dull red to blue-white, and they varied in brilliance. "A star map, I think," he said suddenly. "That small orange one near the center of the web. Epsilon Eridani, their sun."

"Why the web?"

"Probably indicates the places their ships have—" He stopped suddenly and sucked in his breath. The web included Sol.

Alaia interpreted his silence. "I wonder how long ago," she murmured.

Sahl turned as footsteps approached from behind. It was Rulie, and he seemed puzzled by an object in his hand. He held it out and stared at Morgun Sahl.

"Bone, Sahl?"

The biologist took the six-inch fragment and turned it over once. His hands seemed to freeze as they held it, and he was silent for several seconds.

"Where did you find this, Rulie?"

"Back by the rubble heap, when I went back out to check with the Ark. Why? What is it?"

The biologist looked up slowly. "Piece of a human tibia," he said, and his voice was somehow flat.

Chapter III

THERE'S ONLY one explanation!" Parn was saying as he paced the floor of his cabin, occasionally glancing at Sahl.

"What's that, Skipper?"

"An Earth civilization that archeologists don't know anything about. A civilization that got to space before it died out and disappeared."

"I don't think so," Sahl disagreed quickly. "A civilization like that would leave too many traces. If primitive architectural ruins stand for thousands of years, as in Egypt—think how long the remains of a technological culture would endure. No, Skipper, I don't agree at all."

"All right, damn it! How do you explain that piece of bone."

"I don't."

Parn snorted irritably. "Do you even know it's human?"

The biologist shrugged. "You got the surgeon's opinion to confirm my own."

"Isn't there any way to tell how old it is?"

"The lab's working on it, but they aren't very experienced at that sort of thing."

"What about this carbon-14 method?"

Sahl nodded indifferently. "They'll try it, but we can't trust results."

"Why not? I thought it was very accurate?"

"It is—on Earth, where we know the percentage of radioactive carbon ingested during life. But how long had the fellow been away from Earth? And what percentage did he get while he was away? Was he even born on Earth?"

Parn clenched his fists and began beating his knuckles together with thoughtful regularity while he paced the floor. "Maybe humanoid creatures evolve wherever it's possible," he ventured. "Maybe the cities down there are—"

"What about those four-foot ceilings in the station?" Sahl interrupted. "That tibia came from a man about our height."

Parn clucked irritably. "Well, you said some of the ceilings were ten feet and over. "Why don't you judge from that?'

Sahl smiled wryly. "How about —say—the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Would you judge the stature of the builders by the height of the nave, or by the size of the smallest door?"

Parn grunted defeat. "All right, why don't you venture an opinion."

"It'd be more, in the nature of a wild guess, I think."

"Make it, then."

"Well—let's turn the situation around. Suppose we had come here as explorers rather than as colonists. Suppose we landed on the planet add found a semi-intelligent species, and we were interested in studying it further. Suppose we captured a few, and carried them back home for breeding purposes."

PARN GLANCED at him sharply as if to interrupt, but Sahl continued: "That three-dimensional star-map we found makes me think the builders have visited Sol. If they visited it before Man began civilizing himself, we'd have no legends, nor any trace of the visit. They could have made off with a few humans and we'd never know it had happened."

"Why would they want humans?"

Sahl shrugged. "Why do we catch wild animals and put them in cages? Why did we domesticate dogs? Curiosity, maybe some usefulness. Man has brought back specimens from every planet he's ever visited. Maybe he's been a specimen himself. It's just a guess."

"Pretty wild guess, if you ask me," Parn snorted. "Human beings would be rather dangerous pets to have around."

"Would they? Humans have made pets—or slaves—of humans."

Parn slumped into a chair, shaking his head slowly. "None of which answers the question: 'What are we going to do?' "

"How are the colonists taking it?"

"Better than I expected. They're restless, but quiet. Maybe too quiet. I don't know. I let them out of the ship to roam around. They work off steam that way;"

"If they're not getting disturbed," Sahl offered, "I suggest we wait until we've gone over that station with a fine-tooth comb. Faron is still puzzling over the reactors. And we might learn more about the builders by closer study of the interior structure."

"How?"

"Well, by measuring dimensions, for one thing. The shape of the doorways suggest that they're small bipeds—or at least, their height is about three times their width. And Faron found something else down in the reactor vault that might be significant."

"What's that?"

"A pair of goggles, a circuit diagram, and a place to sit down. The goggles are too closely spaced for human eyes, and perfectly round, but the strap just about fits my head. The circuit diagram is hung on a wall, and we have to stoop to read it. And the seat would be about the right height for a child with a foot-high knee."

Parn threw up his hands. "All right. Go ahead and study all you want to. Until they start shooting at us, anyway."

Sahl glanced at the scope, noticed that it was on. He grinned. "Been watching for them to start?"

"I've been watching. Now get out, Sahl. I got some worrying to do. Go find Alaia."

The biologist stiffened. "What makes you say that?"

"Eh? What makes—?" The captain paused, smirked sadistically. "Oh, sorry. I must have been thinking of Faron Qun, eh? Don't slam the door."

Sahl left it open instead, but he heard it slam when Parn got up to close it. He smiled irritably, and went down through the colonists' quarters to listen to the chatter. But the chatter was absent. Gloom pervaded the ship. He felt it hanging tensely, murderously, in the air, waiting to become rage or rebellion or sudden popular decision. These people were not going back to Earth. They had gambled thirteen years and they didn't intend to quit as losers. He passed quietly through the passenger-areas of the ship, and stopped at his own quarters long enough to slip into a pressure suit. He stopped again at Alaia's cabin, hesitating before the door. But he moved on without knocking. It might embarrass someone if Faron Qun were with her. Sahl tried to grin his way around the twinge of anger that followed the thought, but he failed to rid himself of it.

HE TIGHTENED his helmet and stepped out through the lock. Lunar night, with the planet's disk filling a huge patch of sky. The colonists had tagged the planet "Merrigull's Guesswork", had later shortened it to "Guesswork", Sahl had idly speculated that after a dozen, or ten dozen generations, its name might evolve into "Kesuark", and it might be regarded as the center of the universe, personalized by a symbol of fecundity, and perhaps thought of as the vale of tears into which Man had been cast after his original sin in an Eden called "Erd" or "Urth", or maybe "Brooklyn". But now, it seemed more likely that the planet would stay just what it already was, and that it would never be infected with humanity.

As he strode toward the mouth of the tunnel, he saw Alaia and Faron Qun coming around the outcrop, arm in arm, occasionally touching the metal of their helmets together as if the steel shells possessed somesthetic receptors capable of savoring the contact. They hailed him as he approached, and his headset burbled as both tried to call at once. Alaia won the battle.

"Congratulate us, Sahl!" she called.

"Why? Is Qun pregnant?"

"See here, Sahl!" sputtered the chemist.

"Sorry. What's up?"

"Never mind!" Alaia snapped, marching haughtily past him. Faron gave him a cold stare in passing.

Sahl turned to watch them go. Once Alaia glanced over her shoulder. She tried to toss her head, but her helmet waggled crazily.

"Ridiculous!" he hissed to himself. Then he unclenched his fists and stalked on toward the shaft of the underground station.

Three workmen were sifting through the rubble, searching for more bones. The biologist leaped down into the tunnel to inspect their findings: several vertabrae, a few snapped ribs, and assorted odds and ends. Apparently the meteorite had crashed into the airlock while the man was in the first tunnel-section, and the responsible occupants had not cared enough about him to bother removing the body. But if the station had been in continuous use at the time, surely they would have removed it for reasons of sanitation. Or at least for appearance's sake. I, thought Sahl, wouldn't leave a dead cat on my sidewalk unless I didn't intend to be back.

The suspicion was growing on him that the builders had once used the station extensively, then had tapered off, visiting it at first only on rare occasions, then not at all.

Why? Why would a race which had once mastered space come to consider it as no longer a worthy pursuit? Had they been driven down from the heavens by an exhaustion of resources? Disaster? Or the final ennui of discovering that there was no magic in the sky, no heaven, no solution to everyday problems?

He snorted to himself. He was projecting human characteristics onto the Eridanian race: a fruitless and possibly dangerous pastime. He went on down into the station to join the others who had taken up the task of combing the station for evidence pertaining to the builders.

THE EVIDENCE was accumulating, but it seemed to reveal very little. They appeared to be small bipeds, roughly humanoid in appearance. Their number system was octal, suggesting perhaps four-fingered hands. Their written language was not phonetic, but seemed to be based on a system of ideographs, and a rather complicated system at that. It occurred to Sahl that they might not communicate by sound-waves, but he dismissed the notion as growing out of fragmentary evidence.

A telephone circuit had been run from the Ark to the underground station. It began jangling frantically.

"Sahl!" Parn bellowed when he picked it up. "A spacecraft has been sighted about five miles away, over the hills! It's just hanging there on its jets, watching us. Get back to the Ark. Everybody."

The biologist gathered an incredulous frown. "What kind of a ship?" he gasped.

"Sleek little rocket. About half the size of a launch. Hurry back. If it lands, I want you to size up the occupants."

"Okay, Skipper. But I doubt that there're any of them in it. I'll bet it's a remote control ship, or a computer-piloted job."

"Why? What makes you say that?"

"Simple. They don't know anything about us. They're probably holding up a hat on a stick to see if we'll shoot at it, and maybe to see what kind of weapons we've got. I'll be right out."

He hung up and yelled at the others, then scrambled through the lock and out of the station. He paused to peer at the dark sky in search of the ship, then found it at about thirty degrees above the horizon in the west. A silvery sliver that glittered in the sun, nose pointed skyward as if landing. But the thrust of its jets just matched the tug of gravity, and it hung motionless in mid-air, breathing a fiery tail downward.

Sahl sprinted toward the Ark. Faron and Alaia and several others of the staff were assembled in Parn's cabin when he burst inside. The Captain waved him to a seat. Faron was speaking.

"It's probably a television ship sent to scan us, Skipper. I think we ought to make some friendly gesture toward it, or at least not behave hostilely. We could probably bring it down with a few bursts, but it'd undoubtedly lead to trouble."

"No question about that," Parn muttered. "Well, Sahl? You itching to say something?"

"Yes. Give me a pilot and a launch and permission to blast off and approach the vessel cautiously."

"Wh—why? Suppose it shot you down? We'd lose a launch, and twenty-four people will be stranded. No, I can't do it."

He shook his head quickly. '"Of course it's a risk, but it might pay off. Suppose it is a robot ship? If I can board it and ride it back to the planet, we've gotten an emissary down there without wasting a launch."

Parn sat with his mouth open for a moment, then shouted: "And suppose it's a one-way ship? Suppose it doesn't go back—but only sits there and—"

"Skipper!" A low gasp from Alaia who had been watching the screen.

They stared. The small rocket, motionless at first, had begun to move. Tilting its axis at a slight angle, it began whisking rapidly toward them. Wolek Parn went white and began jabbing buttons.

"Man emergency stations, all hands!" he bellowed into the intercom. "All hands in pressure suits, man the launches! Prepare for blast-off!"

Alaia and the other launch pilots scrambled through the door. Faron raced for the reactor room. Sahl sat quietly staring at the screen.

"Well, everybody got some exercise anyhow," he said as the rocket landed on the flats beyond the tunnel's mouth, fanning up great whirls of scorched dust. He climbed to his feet. "Coming?" he grunted over his shoulder.

"Don't go out there!" Parn barked. "Let them make a first move."

"They've already made it," he called back through the hatch. "If they wanted to mess us up, a few armor piercing shells are all they needed to do the job. Coming?"

Mumbling irritably, the Captain reached for his helmet.

Chapter IV

THE DUST was subsiding, and the rocket was a slender spire through the thin haze as they left the Ark's lock and began walking slowly across the lunar plain.

"See that black hole in the hull?"

Parn snapped. "They're either watching us or aiming at us."

"I see it. Let's keep walking."

"Probably a television camera, eh?"

"If it makes you feel any better to think so."

"Sgerul ingbagge khannil du?" came a third voice on the inter-helmet communicator frequency. The men glanced at each other nervously. Sahl shook his head. "It wasn't me, Skipper."

Parn set his jaw and glared' fixedly at the rocket as they approached. A hatch slid open in its side, revealing an empty lock. Something began snaking down from the lock toward the ground. "What the—!"

"A ladder!" Sahl breathed. "A flexible ladder. They want us to come up. What do you think?" Parn paused. "I—I don't like it. I wish they'd show themselves." He paused again. "But we've got to face them sometime, I guess."

"Yeah."

They stood at the foot of the ladder, looking up the wall of gleaming metal toward the lock. A lense, projecting from the side of the ship had turned downward to survey them with its mechanical gaze.

Sahl grunted nervously and started climbing. Soon he felt Parn coming after him. What manner of creatures were they about to meet? Or was the ship remotely piloted? Once they were inside, would it blast off without warning—a specimen bottle that had been filled?

He scrambled up into the lock and stood gazing back toward, the Ark as Parn climbed up after him.

Two figures were walking across the plain toward them, and he thought he recognized Faron and Alaia. But the hatch slid closed, shutting off the view.

THEY STOOD waiting tensely while air hissed from the ship into the lock. Sahl took a sniffer, then removed his helmet, for spectroscopic analysis had already revealed that the planet's atmosphere contained a breathable supply of oxygen. Parn, too, slipped the helmet from his shoulders, having smelled nothing peculiar.

But suddenly Sahl was groping feebly to fit it in place again. "Gas!" he gasped. "Odorless, anaesthetic—Skipper! Skipper!"

His vision blurred. He slumped against the wall, then slid to the floor. His last impression was that of the inner hatch rolling quietly open. Then blackness.

"Morgun Sahl. Open your eyes."

A soft purring voice that he did not recognize, a quiet mechanical monotone. He felt intuitively that he had slept for quite some time. And his first fear was that the rocket had gone into space. But he still felt the faint moon-gravity beneath him, and no drum of rockets broke the silence.

"Morgun Sahl. Open your eyes."

He was strapped in a metal seat, with bands of steel encircling his wrists and ankles. He opened his eyes and blinked away blindness in the bright light. He sat in a glass cubicle, peering out into a room whose walls were instrument panels. A small machine faced him, and it was connected to a loudspeaker mounted in the glass. Beyond it, a man lay flat on his back on a narrow table—a hairless man with saffron skin and the face of an idiot. The man's lips moved, and a voice came from the loudspeaker.

"Assimilate your surroundings, then I shall release you. You were subjected to a hypnotic drug. It was necessary that we might quickly gain command of your language. Its structure was analyzed and entered in the translator you see before you. I am speaking my own tongue. The voice you are hearing is your own, built up of recorded syllables you spoke while in trance."

Sahl forced himself to remain silent and to refrain from reacting while he studied his surroundings, Parn was not in sight. There was only the glass partition, the machine, and the saffron man who lay speaking quietly to a microphone that hung down from overhead.

"How do you feel, Morgun Sahl?"

"Dizzy, but fair. Unlock me. I won't kick the place apart."

The wristlocks snapped open, then the ankle-bands. He stood up stretching. He felt calm, too calm. Drugs? Or perhaps post-hypnotic suggestion? He realized that he should be violently startled.

"Where is Wolek Parn?" he asked.

"Sleeping. He will awaken soon, as will the others."

"Others?"

"The two who followed you."

"Alaia and Faron. Are we prisoners?"

"No. We realize that our treatment of you runs contrary to your ethical system. We did not realize it before the hypnotic interview. You are not prisoners. We wished only to establish contact, and to study you. We welcome your colony to our planet."

SAHL SAT very still, studying the reclining figure beyond the glass partition. The puffy, Neanderthaloid features of the saffron man, and the small circular tattoo on his shoulder, and the simple white loincloth that he wore did not somehow jibe with the complex science suggested by the visible equipment. The man's head was bald, with a heavy protruding brow and a small flat skull. His body was thick and heavy, with long arms and broad hands. Sahl imagined that he would stoop when standing, for his shoulders, though thick, seemed steeply sloping.

"May I ask some questions?" he grunted.

"Certainly," purred the loudspeaker.

"Are you the dominant race on the planet?"

"Yes."

"Are your ancestors locally evolved?"

"Yes."

Sahl hesitated, staring at the man. He shook his head slowly. Somehow he could not believe that the fellow was not originally descended of Earth stock.

"Apparently your race has explored extensively in space during its history. Why did you give it up?"

A brief pause, then: "We found what we regard as a more mature goal than mere widespread expansion. For thousands of years our activities have been directed toward the biologic integration of all life-forms on our planet."

"Into a world-organism, you mean?"

"Ultimately perhaps. Interdependence and elimination of destructive parasitism are the immediate goals. Symbiosis rather than conflict. You might call it biologic socialism."

"With your race leading and integrating?"

"Naturally."

It sounded plausible, Sahl thought. Perhaps earthlings would someday become bored with the stars and turn back to their own planet to "rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures". For they had never really tried to do so, had never tried world-wide schemes of biologic control.

"But why," he said slowly, "are you ready to invite outsiders? What makes you think we would cooperate?"

THE VOICE was silent for a time, then: "We have taken in other outsiders. The fauna and flora of our planet is no longer local, but a composite—made up of selected species from forty star-systems. You will find it something like an artificial garden. It would be virtually impossible for you not to cooperate.

Sahl wondered how much information had been gleaned from him along with his language. Quite a lot, he guessed, since the very structure of a language implied many things about the linguistic animal that spoke it.

"Maybe you understand," he said slowly, "why we came here. We want to establish a colony and try to equip it with our own brand of culture. Our culture is expansive, exploitive. I fail to see how it could fit in without some strong shift in cultural goal."

"That would be expected."

Sahl frowned. "You don't understand. Our cultural continuity is as important to us as 'genetic continuity.'

"Why?"

The biologist groped for an explanation. "A leader of one of our primitive tribes once put it this way, when his own culture was dying. He said, 'In the beginning, God gave to every people a cup of clay, from which it drank its life. Now our cup is broken.' "

The Eridanian was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his tone remained unchanged—for the machine had but one tone one rhythm of speech. But Sahl somehow felt an aura of menace associated with the words.

"If you wish to survive, you must come to our planet. If you come to our planet, you must conform to our patterns and our plans. You cannot come to expand and exploit."

Sahl weighed it carefully for a moment. "Before we decide, may we send a delegation down to look around?"

"That was anticipated," came the quick reply. "We will take your delegation down and bring it back." A pause, then: "Wolek Parn has awakened. We will speak with him. Then you may return to your ship to discuss the matter among yourselves if you wish." There was a click, and the loudspeaker went dead.

A sudden thought came to him. How did the fellow know Parn was awake? He had not moved nor opened his eyes. Sahl watched him carefully. His lips still moved, but no sound penetrated the glass wall. Evidently the translator's output had been channelled to another compartment. Evidently the fellow was talking to Parn.

Two hours of waiting and watching followed, two hours during which a suspicion flickered in his mind, and grew to proportions of near-certainty: the man who lay on the table and talked was a cat's paw, a servant of something else.

But who was using him?

Observation failed to answer the question or even confirm the suspicion. A panel slid open behind him, revealing the door to the airlock. His helmet lay on the floor. He fastened it quickly in place, and the airlock opened. Simultaneously Parn entered it from a flanking hatch. They glanced at each other silently, grimly, but neither spoke.

Before the hatch closed behind Parn, Sahl saw another glass cubicle beyond it. Another suspicion entered his mind: that this ship had been designed specifically for this one mission.

Moments later, they were descending the ladder to the plain below, and the comforting beam of a searchlight picked them up from the Ark. It was night, and the warm tinted crescent of the planet shone overhead. Somehow it seemed gloomy and forbidding.

Chapter V

THEY SEEM to have interviewed all four of us separately," said Parn when they were back in the Ark again. "Let's compare notes. I'll begin with what happened to me."

The Skipper related his conversation with the Eridanian matter-of-factly, and it differed only in detail from Sahl's experience. The Skipper apparently had reacted more angrily, but the general line of discussion was the same. The same was true of the others, except for Faron Qun, who apparently had been more eager than the rest to take advantage of the Eridanian's "generous offer", as he put it.

"Let's get it straight," Parn grunted. "I said flatly that we wouldn't fit in like a cog in somebody else's wheel. Sahl took a dim view of it. Alaia kept her mouth shut—which was probably smart. And Faron, you thought their offer was a good idea."

"I still do."

"That remains to be seen. The point is, they probably realize now that there's going to be a diversity of opinion among us. They might try to take advantage of it somehow. But the main question of course is: 'What the devil do they have in mind for us?' "

"They seem to want us, all right," muttered the girl.

"But why?"

"Maybe the delegation can find out."

"That brings up the question of who's going."

Alaia glanced around quickly. "How about us?"

Parn shook his head, grinning wryly. "Not you, Ala. I'll send Qun and Sahl."

The girl reddened angrily, fell silent. Faron Qun touched her arm lightly. "I'd rather you'd stay where it's safer. . . ."

"Excuse me, Skipper," Sahl interrupted sourly. "But I think we'd better have a pilot along, just in case."

Faron snorted contemptuously. "In case of what?"

"In case we have to seize the ship and come back on our own."

"Of all the silly—"

"Maybe it's not so silly, Faron," Parn growled. "I believe you're right, Sahl."

"Not Alaia, of course, but—" She bounded to her feet angrily. "Why not Alaia?" she demanded.

Parn sighed and shrugged. "All three of you go, then. I'll have to stay and watch over the brood, I guess. Try to get them to establish radio contact with us, so you can keep us informed."

TWO DAYS later, the small Eridanian ship bearing the three Earthlings spaceward, climbed a column of flame. They sat locked in a small but comfortably furnished compartment until blast-off was accomplished and acceleration fell to something around a gravity. They waited. The compartment was locked. Sahl rapped sharply at the door, but there was no answer.

"No sightseeing permitted," he grunted suspiciously.

"They probably just want to keep a balanced loading, so they don't want us moving around."

Sahl glanced at the pilot. "Think so?" he muttered.

She frowned at him irritably, but shook her head. "I doubt it. They must have automatic trimming mechanisms to correct for slight load unbalance."

"No sightseeing permitted, then," he reasserted.

Faron sneered slightly. "You've got a lousy attitude, Sahl. It makes me sick."

"That's too bad," the biologist sympathized quietly.

Alaia glanced from one to the other of them. Then she twisted Faron's ear with playful sternness. "Sorry, darling, but you're out of line this time."

He reddened, and fell silent. An hour passed. Alaia, normally calm, began to seem restless. She moved about the small compartment nervously, peering at each fixture and marking.

"This ship is new," she muttered. "Brand new! I'll bet it's the first flight."

Sahl watched her, but said nothing. She reached a grille-covered vent over the hatch and tried to pull herself up to peer through it. The grille came free and she fell clumsily. Faron helped her up, while the biologist stared up at the opening with interest.

"Only a ventilator duct," she said.

"Yeah, but—" Sahl stood up. "Might be big enough to crawl through."

"Not for you."

Sahl glanced at her. She might be slender enough to wiggle into the duct, unless her hips ...

"Get that notion out of your head, Sahl!" Faron snapped. He picked up the grille and moved toward the opening to replace it.

"Put it down," Sahl said tonelessly.

Something about his voice made Faron hesitate.

Alaia said, "Let me try it. I want a look at the control room."

"You're not going to do it," Faron growled, blocking the duct opening.

"Move, Faron," murmured the biologist. "Let's not have a tussle." "Let's do."

"It would be rather one-sided, I'm afraid," Sahl grunted, producing an automatic. "Ever get pistol-whipped, Qun?"

"Wh—where did you get that? What do you mean by bringing a weapon? This is supposed to be a peaceful—"

"Yeah. Now move. Help her up in the duct."

Faron stepped reluctantly aside, his face bright with anger. Alaia gave him a peculiar glance, then scrambled up and into the opening without assistance. She glanced back at Sahl and beckoned him close.

"Three openings just up ahead. Watch down the duct in case I get caught."

He handed her the gun and nodded. "Don't go too far. Return trip'll be harder, backing up."

She stuffed the gun in her belt and gave Faron a warning look. "You better keep your temper, F.Q." She crawled slowly out of sight.

Faron glared at the biologist. "Fool! Don't you imagine they're watching us? Know exactly what's going on?"

"I doubt it. They're probably too busy to bother." He climbed to the duct opening and glanced along it. Alaia'S body blocked the light from the other openings toward the front of the ship, but faintly he could hear her moving.

"Well?" Faron growled.

"You watch if you want to." Sahl returned to a seat.

Faron peered along the dark duct for several minutes. "She's reached another grille," he muttered suddenly. "I can see the light—and—oh! no!"

"What's wrong?"

"The grille came loose. She—Alaia, no! No!"

SAHL HEARD a muffled report, then another. He scrambled for the opening, as Faron began beating frantically at the hatch.

"They saw her! They shot her!" Sahl stared toward the faint light a dozen yards down the duct. He could see her faintly, her arm dangling from the opening. She lay very still. Somewhere someone was screaming gibberish. "Help me!" Faron howled. "Help me get it open!"

Together they battered the locked hatch. The light metal door seemed to give slightly with each crash. After four tries, the lock gave way, and they spilled out into the corridor. A few paces away, the saffron-skinned man stood staring at them idiotically. Suddenly he opened his mouth and screamed. After a moment, he screamed again—without moving. Scalp crawling, Sahl darted around him. He seemed not to see them, but continued screaming as they ran down the corridor.

Faron kicked open a hatch, then froze. Sahl's gun lay on the floor beyond it, and Alaia's hand hung limply down from above. And there was something else. A small manlike creature with a huge head lay dead in a pool of red-brown blood near an instrument panel, his skull torn open by a ten millimeter slug from the automatic. A fat hand-weapon with multiple barrels was still clutched in his small fist.

"See about Alaia," Sahl snapped, grabbing up the gun. "I'll watch the corridor."

Faron stepped inside and felt her wrist. "Thank God," he breathed, "she's alive. Unconscious."

"Wounded badly?"

"I—I can't tell." He paused. "There's something stuck in her face. Help me get her down." Sahl paused. Another saffron crewman was coming along the corridor, feeling his way and stumbling, as if blinded. He kept pawing at his head. He moved past Sahl without glancing at him.

The biologist watched him go, then stepped inside and helped Faron haul the limp girl down out of the duct.

"Damn you, Sahl! Now we're in trouble, bad trouble!"

"All right, save it till later, will you? There's no time to fight about it now."

They stretched her out on the floor and examined her for wounds.

"Nothing," Faron muttered. "Except these little red marks on her face, and—" He bent over her and jerked three tiny splinters from her cheek and laid them on his palm. "Crystals. Sharp little crystals.

SAHL LOOKED at her pupils and felt her pulse. "I'd say she was drugged." He arose and crossed the cabin to bend over the dead creature. He disentangled the weapon from a slender four-digital hand and inspected it closely. He drew back what seemed to be a charging-plunger, then aimed at the dead thing and flicked a switch. It kicked in his hand and emitted a dull cough. Six crystals appeared, stuck in a patch of the creature's hide. They began to volatilize at once.

"Anaesthetic crystals," he guessed. "Must be quick acting, but not quick enough to keep Ala from shooting back when she got stung."

"This is terrible !" Faron mourned. "Now they'll never let us colonize."

"Wake up, fellow," Sahl snapped, pointing at the dead creature. "That's one of our hosts, not the idiots with orange hides."

He tossed Faron the Eridanian's weapon and stepped through the hatch. "I'm going to search the ship, see if he's the only one."

He moved warily along the corridors, peering cautiously into each compartment. He found one other saffron servant, curled up in the foetal position on the floor of a cabin. The man did not look up. There were no other creatures like the one Alaia had killed. And the three servants—if such they were—appeared to be completely demented. They seemed unaware of their surroundings, stared vacuously at nothing. The search convinced him that automatic devices were keeping the rocket on a constant heading with respect to the planet's gravitic field—which would make it a spiralling course with respect to a fixed framework. Unless the devices corrected when they reached the atmosphere, or unless they could get control of the ship, they would go in like a meteor and crash.

He returned to the compartment where Alaia lay moaning but still unconscious. Faron was studying the instrument panels. He turned away white-faced to stare at the biologist. His voice was high and tense.

"Do you realize this is the control cabin? That thing was piloting the ship! Somebody's got to take over!"

"He's the only one of his kind aboard. I guess it'll have to be you. I'm a mechanical moron, Qun."

Faron groaned. "I can't even pilot one of our own ships. And we'll never be able to read the markings on these instruments, or know what they mean. The controls look fairly simplified, but—" He shook his head, pointed at the screen. The ship seemed to be plunging surfaceward at a shallow angle.

"We've got to get Alaia awake. Maybe she can analogize between those gadgets and familiar controls."

Faron growled a low curse and went to the hatch. "I'm going to see if I can't shut off the jets somehow. We might still have enough of an orbital velocity-component to carry us around the planet, if we can stop the rockets from skidding us back any more."

"An orbit?"

"Yeah. Probably with an underground perihelion. If we get out of this, Sahl, I'm going to kick your face in."

"I'll be looking forward to it," the biologist murmured; as he knelt beside Alaia.

TWENTY MINUTES later, the instrument panel's lights began flashing frantically, and relays clattered loudly. He straightened, sensing vaguely that they were falling. His weight was diminishing rapidly. Then he noticed that the thunder of the rockets was dying. It became a dull roar, then a purr.

Faron came back. "I got the reactors damped down," he said, "but it may not matter. Look at the screen."

Sahl turned. The scope revealed the curving horizon of the planet, but the cross-hairs rested only a fraction of a degree above the misty limb. "Will we skim through that atmosphere?" he asked.

"If we do, we'll melt the hull off at this speed. We'll just have to wait and see." He glanced down at the girl. "How is she?"

"Opened her eyes once. Drifted off again. Might bring her around if we had some sort of stimulant."

Faron fumbled quickly through his suit, brought out a small vial. "Neurodrine," he grunted. "I brought it along to keep awake in case we were pretty busy."

The biologist took it quickly and shook out two small capsules. "You on the stuff?" he asked.

"Of course not!"

The vehemence of the denial made Sahl guess that Faron was at least worried about the possibility of addiction. The drug did not set up a true craving, but habitual users became listless and apathetic when it was withdrawn, and they had to continue taking it in order to stay normally alert.

He took the capsules apart and emptied the white powder in Alaia's mouth. Her jaw worked spasmodically, and he held her mouth closed lest she reflexively spit out the bitter compound. Five minutes passed.

Sahl became aware of a faint whine, high-pitched and all-pervading. He glanced at Faron who was staring at the instruments.

"Upper fringes of the atmosphere!" the chemist groaned.

"That whistle?"

"Yeah!" He hurried out of the cabin and returned a moment later, his face taut with worry.

"What's up?" Sahl asked.

"The temperature. Leading edges of projections on the hull. Red spots here and there." He stared at the screen. The cross-hairs seemed a little higher above the horizon now, but the horizon's curvature was less. "We're low, too low. Maybe sixty miles."

"Perihelion?"

"Maybe we're at it. But if that air slows us down enough, we'll drop."

ALAIA BEGAN muttering aloud. She opened her eyes and pressed her hands to her temples. Her face went tense with fear. "It shot . . . hurt—my face. Where?"

"No time now!" Sahl grunted. "Listen to me. You've got to get control of the ship."

"The big head ... the thing . . . is it—?"

"Dead."

She closed her eyes again and moaned. Sahl shook her hard. "Alaia! Listen to me!"

"Sick . . . Water . . ."

He shook her again, then pulled her up to a sitting position. She saw the dead creature, and her eyes widened. She gasped and seemed to recover a little. She stared at the control panel and shook her head.

"That whine!" she gasped. "Air!"

Sahl helped her to her feet. "Faron got the jets idled," he told her quickly, "but that's all. You've got to figure out the controls."

She staggered toward the instrument panel and stared. "I'll never be able to read those things. But . . ." She looked down at the array of switches and studs. "Only two variable controls," she muttered. "The rest are on-off. I hope this, thing is—" She touched a lever and bent close to inspect it. "Ball and socket mounting. Can push it any direction. That means—" She pushed it forward slightly.

"No!" Faron howled. "Look at the screen!"

The cross-hairs had split into a pair, one set red, the other black. The black set rested now below the horizon.

"Don't worry," she muttered. "That must be just the aim of our nose. I didn't feel a course-change."

She tugged back slowly on the lever. A low drone came from the instrument panel. The black cross-hairs drifted slowly upward, and the planet's horizon swept completely off the screen. The scope revealed only a patch of space. "Must be a stern pick-up somewhere." She touched one of the switches under the scope, then returned it to the original position. "Magnification. And this one — intensity. And this—" The scene on the scope changed abruptly and the planet's surface appeared again. "That's it. Now we're looking back toward the tail."

She turned abruptly to look at Faron. "How did you get the reactors damped?"

"Back in the power room. Slipped in a couple of rods."

"Better go slip them back like they were."

HE NODDED and departed silently. Minutes later, the rocket's purr became a roar again. Alaia slowly moved the second control and the thunder waned, then grew again. The ship lurched clumsily as she fumbled with the heading-lever, but gradually the planet's surface lay directly tailward, and they were climbing slowly. The whine began to diminish.

Faron returned from the power room to stare over her shoulder. "Wonderful!" he murmured.

"Not so wonderful, maybe," she said gloomily. "We don't know what the instruments are registering. One slip and we're finished."

"Can we make it back?" Sahl asked.

"Back? To the moon? No!" She shook her head emphatically. "No way to navigate."

"What then?"

"We'll have to get in an orbit, let me practice on the controls. Then—there's nothing to do but try to land it somewhere down there. Unless you'd rather stay here as a permanent satellite."

"They'll send other ships up after us," Faron said darkly. "They're probably watching us right now."

Sahl stared at the surface revealed on the screen. "I agree that they're watching us. But I don't think they'll send pursuit."

"Why not?"

"It's my guess that they don't have anything to pursue us with. I believe this rocket was specially constructed for this one task."

Faron snorted contemptuously. "If they can build this one, they've certainly built others."

"Why?"

"Well—"

"I'm certain they could build all the ships they wanted to," Sahl continued. "And Earthlings could build humanoid robots if they wanted to. But who wants to? The Eridanians have deserted space. They don't need to build ships, except for some special purpose, like this one."

"Maybe," Faron admitted. "But if we stay here very long they'll build one to come after us. If what you say is true, they certainly built this one in a hurry."

The biologist nodded, glanced at Alaia. "How long will it take?"

"Somewhere between five minutes and forever," she answered curtly.

"Well, we land as soon as you think you can manage it. We'll have to be careful about choosing a spot. Some place pretty far from a city. Let's say—high ground in the twilight zone."

"Why twilight?"

"So that if we get down, we might try to get away in the dark." He paused. "I'm going to look over the ship again and try to get something out of those crewmen. If that's what they are."

Chapter VI

HE WAS gone for half an hour, during which the ship lurched and rocked and spun as Alaia tested the controls. He came back looking grim, and went to bend over the dead Eridanian. He pried open its jaw and stared.

"Want it to say `ah'?" Faron asked sourly.

"Look," Sahl grunted, pressing back the creature's lips to expose the inside of his mouth.

"Toothless," Faron observed, "and no tongue. So?"

"Look again." He inserted his finger and pressed something. A pair of gleaming white fangs slipped slowly into view. "Hollow and retractile."

Faron frowned. "Poison sacs?"

"No. Feeding mechanisms."

"A blood-feeder!"

"Not exactly. I found something growing on one of the crewmen's backs. A parasite vegetable growth, I think. It's taken root there—deep roots. And there's a pale green pulpy sphere on the outside. It had fang-marks on it. Seems to be full of a milky fluid, but not blood. I'd say it's the fruit of the parasite growth. And the fellow's flesh is the ground it grows in."

"And he's still alive?"

"In a stupor. He's the one curled up on the floor. Asleep, or unconscious."

"How about the others?"

"They don't have it. Apparently this thing—" He nudged the small body. "—just brought along one dinner pail."

Faron shuddered. "They're slaves, then."

"Maybe. Better look the other way," he said, producing a pocketknife. He made a neat incision in the throat, and studied for a moment. "Breathing tube, no real vocal cords. They can't talk, nor even make much oral noise."

"Somebody was talking to us!" the chemist protested.

"Yeah, but I think this thing was using the saffron fellow as a mouth piece; telepathic control. The human—if he is a human—spoke in his own language, and the machine translated. But the original thoughts must have come from this."

Faron looked toward the door thoughtfully. "I can't even believe those people have a language. They act like complete idiots."

Sahl looked up. "I have an idea that's withdrawal shock, rather than idiocy. If this little beastie was controlling them telepathically, they must have gotten some kind of jolt when Alaia shot it. And maybe they've been controlled so long that they've lost their own egos, lost their own personality."

They looked up as the tug of acceleration decreased suddenly.

"Okay," Alaia called nervously, "I guess it's now or not at all. I'm going to start down."

Sahl turned to watch the planet's surface on the screen. It tilted again, revealed a horizon as she guided the ship so as to resume the process of cancelling out its orbital velocity component.

"I'll have to do it fast," she called. "We're too close to the atmosphere. You'd better lie down—or sit."

THE ROCKETS' thunder grew to deafening proportions, and Sahl felt his weight tripling under the force of the thrust. He sat braced against the wall, watched Alaia's face sag under the pressure. Soon the whine of atmospheric friction returned, and grew into a wild shriek. He inched away from the wall as it began to burn his back. Faron mopped his face with a heavy hand.

"Hot," he gasped. "Lord, it's getting hot!"

"How's it coming?" Sahl shouted, but the girl was too tensely absorbed to answer.

After a time the shriek seemed to diminish slightly, became a low howl, then a muffled drumming, scarcely audible above the roar of the rockets. The minutes crawled slowly past, and gradually the surface markings on the screen stopped their crawl. Their normal weight had returned, and the sound of the jets ceased to be deafening.

"How's it coming?" he called again.

This time she answered. "We're just about stationary. Sitting on our thrust at—oh, somewhere between twenty and thirty miles. I think I've located the radar-altimeter—by watching it crawl back—but I still can't read it."

"Can you tell the zero-mark on it?" the chemist called.

"Yes. But I'm afraid to trust it. There's some kind of adjustment on the dial."

"There's a small transparency port in the power room," Faron called. "Want me to watch it?"

"Yes. I'll go down at about a mile a minute until we're a couple of miles up. Think you can yell when we're at about ten-thousand feet?"

"I'll try," he muttered. "How'll you judge our rate of descent?"

She tapped an instrument dial. "This thing seems to be an acceleration balance. It sits on this center mark when the thrust is just right to make me feel my normal weight. I've been comparing the reading with the feel of the thrust. We'll start down slow, then keep it on the center mark. Warn me if we seem to be dropping too fast."

Faron shook his head, muttered pessimistically, and left the cabin. The biologist sat watching the scope and feeling helpless. Slowly the surface markings spread, grew larger. The land was rising to meet them.

Faron burst into the cabin again. "Better slow it down," he called. "We're dropping pretty fast." The rockets droned louder for a moment, and the screen markings ceased to spread. Alaia risked a quick glance at Faron:

"What kind of country down there?"

"Hilly," he said, then glanced at the scope and touched it. "This place right here looks like a valley. Fairly flat."

She nodded and touched the controls lightly. The marking crept slowly under the crosshairs, then stopped. The descent began again. Sahl saw that her only yardstick of velocity lay in the seeping spread of the markings on the scope. She occasionally glanced at the acceleration balance, but her eyes turned quickly back to the screen. Faron had returned to the power room.

HER HANDS began flickering quickly about the controls as the spread became more rapid. She muttered through gritted teeth. Sahl braced himself and waited.

Faron was shouting from the power room, but the roar made his voice unintelligible.

"See what's the matter with him!" she snapped suddenly. "I'll hold us right here." The roar increased slightly as she nudged the thrust control, and the spread of the marking slowed to a halt.

Faron was mopping his face on his sleeve as Sahl entered the power room. "About to go down in a gorge!" he shouted. "She's got to move it over some."

Sahl glanced at the transparent port, saw nothing but grayness beyond it. "What's that?"

"Smoke. Our jets touched off the vegetation. We're about a hundred yards up. No use watching any more. I'll try to guide her in."

They hurried back to the control cabin. Faron traced a finger lightly along a dark marking on the scope. "Deep cut," he told her. "Move it over here."

The scenery began to crawl. "Say when!" she called.

"Take it slow—all right, now!" "Check. Brace yourselves. We're going in."

Seconds later, a series of muffled tearing sounds echoed through the ship. Then a settling jar. She killed the jets.

"Down!" gasped Faron, sitting up,

"Watch out!" Alaia screamed suddenly. "We're going over!"

The room began to tilt, first slowly, then gathering impetus. Sahl scrambled toward the down-going wall. A thunderous roar. A bone-crushing jolt. A body slammed against him hard, and the wind went out of him. The room spun crazily, and the jolts continued, as if they were rolling down a hill. His head slapped hard against the wall. Awareness faded.

The jolting had stopped. Apparently he had blacked out for only a few seconds, for Alaia was still untangling herself from him when he shook the fog away. "Sorry, Sahl," she muttered. "I didn't mean to use you for a crash pad. You just got in the way."

HE SAT up slowly, found himself sitting on the dead Eridanian, and arose to stand on the slightly inclined wall. Faron lay groaning in the corner.

"Nice landing," Sahl breathed, and meant it.

"Faron's hurt!" she gasped, bending over him. "His leg! It's all—"

Sahl knelt to take a look. "Broken," he muttered, then began splitting the fabric of his suit. "Broken femur." He shook his head and reached for the Eridanian's crystal gun.

"No!" the girl protested, knocking his hand away.

He glowered at her. "Rather listen to him scream while I splint it?"

"It didn't kill you, did it?"

"All right, but—if he's unconscious—he can't—"

He looked at her sourly. "Can't come trotting along with us?" He held the gun close to Faron's shoulder, pressed the firing switch, and waited for the groans to stop. Then he brushed away the crystals that remained half-imbedded in his skin.

"Go find me something long and straight for a splint," he grunted, and began ripping Faron's suit into strips.

She came back after a few minutes, empty-handed. "All I found was a long metal rod, but it must weigh thirty pounds. He's heavy enough as it is."

He gazed at her quietly. "You planning to carry him, Ala?"

She sucked in a short breath. "Why, I—"

"Get the rod, if you want it splinted."

She hesitated, then went back to get it. "We're hanging over the edge of a bluff. It's a wonder we didn't roll into it," she called.

"Let's have the rod."

She gave it to him, then watched as he packed one end of it under Faron's arm, then bound it to his body from the chest down. Gradually it seemed to dawn, on her that Faron wasn't going any place.

"Pull this tight and tie it when the fracture pops in place," he muttered, then sat down to stretch the limb against the writhing knot of muscles.

There was a dull snapping sound. "Tie it!" he grunted.

Minutes later, Sahl arose panting. "It may not be properly set, but that'll keep it from compounding, anyhow. Let's go."

She shook her head slowly. "I'm not going anywhere."

He frowned sharply. "Listen! It's certain that someone spotted our landing. It's equally certain that we can't move Faron, and that they'll get him anyway. Your presence won't help him a damn bit."

"I can't just desert him!"

"If you don't, you'll be deserting a hundred and twenty others."

"I don't see how—"

"We came down here to look around, get information, and get it back to the Ark. I don't know how we can accomplish it now, but I know we can't do it just sitting here waiting to be captured. They're probably on their way here now. Come on, let's get moving."

She looked down at Faron and bit her lip. "All right, I'll come," she said hoarsely. "But Sahl, I hate your guts."

Chapter VII

THE FIRES still smoldered on the low hillside about the ship. By their light, he could see that they had landed in what appeared to be a garden, or an orchard. The sun had set, and only a trace of twilight lingered in the west. A faint breeze washed the hillside and whispered in the foliage of the shrub-like trees. The breeze brought pleasant odors: a wisp of smoke, the smell of moldering leaves, a faint perfume from the trees. Despite the danger, they paused a moment savoring the feel of mossy earth under their feet.

"Thirteen years," Alaia kept murmuring, "thirteen long years." The "orchard" was cool and pleasant, the trees shaped like inverted hearts, with the foliage draped from the branches like tassels. They reminded Sahl of weeping willows, except for their near-perfect symmetry. It was indeed a garden world—and old, old and carefully tended.

She caught his arm suddenly. "Sahl! Lights moving in the sky! Up there!"

He gazed in the direction she pointed and saw them. The breeze brought the faint drone of engines. Circling aircraft.

He moistened his lips nervously and hesitated. "Probably sent to spot the rocket. But they can't land here, not unless they do it the same way you did."

"Yes, but they'll guide a ground party to us."

He nodded and walked to the rim of the gorge. A hundred feet down to the rush of water over rocks. The moon was rising, and by its faint light he saw the dim whiteness of a small waterfall.

"Let's go," he grunted, and began trotting toward higher ground, following the lip of the cliff a dozen yards on their right.

"Where to?" she called from behind.

"How should I know? Anywhere, away from that rocket. We'll stay on the crest of the ridge. It seems to follow the gorge. Down there might be a good place to hide, if we have to."

"This moss is too soft. Sahl, we're leaving a clear trail."

"I know it, but I hope they won't find it before morning."

"Those lights. They're circling lower. They've seen the fires."

"Yeah. Save your breath for running."

The crest of the ridge steepened and angled away from the gorge and led them to a steep hill that arose on their left. They scrambled up a series of rocky ledges to a rain-guttered slope that was free of the moss. Regular patches of brush lay ahead. Alaia pleaded exhaustion and they paused to rest.

"We must have run ten miles," she panted.

"Closer to four, maybe," he muttered, staring back at the orange etching of glowing embers on the hillside where they had landed.

"Sahl, look! Down the gorge toward the valley!"

"Uh—yes, lights. A whole swarm of them. And they're moving."

"Torches?"

"I don't think so. They—they move too fast. And they're too white for flame."

They fell silent for a moment. "I don't hear anything. No engines."

"Too far away, maybe."

"The wind's right. But—look! They're flying. Close to the ground, but they're flying."

"Come on," he muttered, "we'd better be moving."

They climbed again, and as the brush thickened a moon-splashed cliff loomed ahead. They made for it, tearing through the brush and stumbling over the rocky ground.

"That cliff," Sahl muttered. "Looks like a mesa up there, or a high plateau."

"What good is it? Why do we keep climbing?"

"To get a view of the land. So that if we last through tomorrow, we'll see where to go."

SHE TURNED to look back.

"Sahl! Those lights. They've split up back by the rocket." He paused to follow her gaze, then tugged her on. "Part of them coming this way. Hurry!"

"But where?" she gasped as she ran.

"The cliff's got an overhang. We'll get under it."

"The lights—they wink on and off—like signals. And they warm around like wasps."

"Come on!" he snapped. "You can watch them from under the overhang."

They sprinted across a clearing, then ran along the foot of the cliff until they reached a gulley where the rock hung like a jaw over the ground. They crawled quickly back into the blackest shadows of the recess and sat panting on the moist rocks.

"Nice place for something big and stealthy and hungry to hang out," she said with a shiver in her voice.

"Maybe. But I doubt if there's anything like that left on this planet." He paused, and his voice changed slightly. "Nothing, that is, except us."

He heard her moisten her lips in the darkness, as if to speak, but she said nothing. Peering out at the night he caught a glimpse of the winking lights, momentarily visible beyond a dip in the ridge.

"They must have picked up our trail all right," he muttered. "Let's hope they lose it where the mossy ground ends."

"What are they?"

"I don't know but—they're getting closer. Listen!"

"I don't hear . . ." She paused, then: "Yes, I do—faintly. It's a whirring sound, like wings, like quail flying. A whole big covey of quail."

"That's what it is," he whispered. "Wings." He crawled closer toward the opening and stared.

"Fireflies. Giant fireflies, Ala—only they're probably nothing like fireflies except that they glow. Listen to those wings! And they light up a whole patch of hillside."

"Corning this way?"

"They're circling. Must have lost us."

She laughed suddenly. "Fireflies, chasing humans. It's funny—"

"Don't get hysterical, Ala!"

"It's really funny," she went on. "All the quaint little life-forms, out to hunt us down. Watch out for the rabbits, Sahl! Beware of the sparrow patrol! They work in packs. I wonder what the fireflies are leading. A band of gophers? A flock of snakes?" She laughed again, but choked it off in a hiss and a shiver.

"You're not far from wrong," he muttered. "They are leading something. There's lots of rustling in the brush. But—I think they're heading the wrong way."

"Intelligent fireflies—what next?"

"Not intelligent, I'd guess. Just under control. Like a dog-pack."

"Under whose control? The little fat-heads?"

"Remotely, I imagine. I wouldn't be surprised but what every life-form on the planet is controlled. The fellow we communicated with on the ship said as much. Or hinted at it."

She was silent for a moment. "Have the lights gone away?"

HE CRAWLED halfway out into the open and stared. "They're swarming up the cliff, about half-a-mile away—up to the top of the mesa. I guess they think we went . . ."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I just happened to think: if they suspect we took that way, then there must be a path up the cliff down there—or some reason why they think we'd want to climb it. Both, maybe."

"So?"

"So maybe we should, if we get a chance."

"Sahl—I'm too tired to move."

"Sleep awhile, if you can. I'll watch."

She murmured gratefully, and he heard her shifting around on the loose rock, seeking a place to stretch out. Suddenly she giggled. "Something crawled down my back. I—" Then she choked out a yelp. "Sahl, help me! It stings, and I can't reach it."

With a worried grunt he crawled back to where she lay, trying to claw at something between her shoulder-blades. He slipped his hand down the neck of her suit and felt along the smooth skin until he found it—a rough scaly little disk that clung tight to her back. He pinched it hard and jerked. She whimpered as the thing came free. Sahl struck a light and studied it briefly—a leathery creature with wiry tendrils that moved very slowly, as if groping for the hold they had lost. His face remained expressionless.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Nothing much," he grunted.

He laid it on a rock and burned it. It wasn't much, as it stood—but he had seen the mature one with the pale green fruit, growing with its roots buried deep in the flesh of a man.

"Better sleep up closer to the front," he advised.

The moon rose higher in the star-flecked sky, and he watched the quiet land with its orderly patterns of vegetation, and the winking lights that circled slowly over it. The orderliness implied ownership. Here was no primitive forest waiting for the axe and the plough. Here was no place for a colony. He glanced at the lurid disk of the moon and tried to pick out the landing site where over a hundred humans waited and watched.

In vain.

No, they would not turn back, would not spend the long years required for the journey home. They would come down here eventually. And when they came, what would be their role in the scheme of the world? Servants? Or merely an organ in the biologic corporation the native Eridanians were building?

VOICES FLOATED to him on the breeze, voices and the rustle of brush. He frowned, brought out his gun, and stretched out on his stomach to wait. The search was continuing. Peering carefully, he finally spotted them a hundred yards away. A dozen of the saffron-skinned manlike creatures were beating about in the brush and talking among themselves.

The language seemed monosyllabic and primitive, but somehow human, designed for the acoustics of the human throat. Sahl felt certain that they were not locally evolved, but rather had descended from primitive Earthlings, captured by the Eridanian space-wanderers during their day of expansion. How long ago? Judging by their bone structure, he guessed it to be at least fifty thousand years. Mutations had occurred, of course; their coloring and their loss of hair had undoubtedly come about since their departure from Earth. Also their ability to commune telepathically with the Eridanian species. The latter specialization seemed to suggest forced breeding.

The searchers were wandering closer. They seemed to carry no weapons except staves, and their only source of light was the moon. Since they spoke among themselves, he guessed that they were free agents rather than telepathically-controlled creatures such as the ones they had encountered on the ship.

Sahl retreated deeper into the recess. The party reached clear ground fifty yards down the cliff, then turned and wandered toward the place where the fugitives lay hidden. He quickly searched through the pockets of Alaia's suit and found the crystal gun, which seemed preferable to the more lethal automatic, in case they were discovered.

The party paused occasionally to prod under the edge of the cliff with their staves. Didn't they realize that the Earthlings were armed? That numbers were no match for guns?

SUDDENLY HE heard a burst of laughter from the group, then a sudden shriek—a woman's voice, raised in clamoring protest. He frowned. There had been no woman among the searchers. He stole closer for a look. A short, thick female was struggling to escape them, but they pinned her arms behind her and held her fast. He suddenly heard the screech of an infant among the babble of voices. One of the men held the baby under his arm, and the woman fought frantically to get it back. Suddenly Sahl understood. The men had not been searching for the Earthlings, but for the woman and her child. The small drama was breaking up. They dragged the howling female down the hill. The fellow with the baby set out in another direction—along the foot of the cliff toward the place where the winking lights had swarmed up its side.

He thought for a moment of following, but decided to wait. There were still signs of activity in the area about the damaged rocket, and certainly the search was continuing, probably along the gorge. He was puzzled by the incident he had just witnessed. It seemed to have an ominous significance, but he could not interpret it. Did the child's capture in some way involve the motives of the Eridanian race? Or had the woman merely stolen a child that was not her own?

He stiffened suddenly, hearing a sound in the distance. Had he imagined it, or did a voice call his name—a booming voice that rolled across the hills. It came again, swelling louder with a change in the breeze.

"Morgun Sahl. Alaia Dazille!"

He lay frozen for a moment. A giant loudspeaker calling to them. Echoes rang and reverberated among the hills. Was it Faron, captured by the master-creatures, and responding to their bidding? But the voice seemed mechanical, and he remembered the translator unit aboard the rocket. Undoubtedly the language structure was still set up in its memory circuits and recording units. They had only to feed its output into a large amplifier.

"Welcome! Welcome! Sahl and Dazille, Welcome!

THE WORD made him shiver. Perhaps it resulted from a malfunction of the translator. Or perhaps it was a trick. He wondered how much insight they had gained into human psychology. Or were they interpreting it in terms of their almost sub-human servants with the saffron hides? He shook Alaia awake, and she sat up muttering sleepily. Then she clutched his arm as the voice resumed.

"Welcome, wanderers!" A pause to let the echoes die. "You are free to roam and observe . . . You will not be harmed. . ."

"What's going on?" Alaia whispered in fright.

"Shhh! Listen!"

". . . as long as you harm no one else . . . We shall wait until you feel the need to cooperate with us . . . Meanwhile, lest you think of violence, remember that we hold Faron Qun a hostage."

The voice fell silent. The echoes died.

"Free to roam!" Alaia repeated. "Did we misjudge them?"

"I hadn't realized that we'd made a judgement," he murmured sourly.

"Then why run? Why hide?"

"Because we didn't know how they'd react to the seizure of their rocket, and to your killing the one on board. We still don't know."

"I've got the feeling we're trapped," she murmured.

"We are. We can't contact the Ark or get back to it without their help. We don't dare trust them. And I can't see how they dare trust us. To them, we're a couple of wolves—wandering in their flocks."

"They've got Faron," she reminded him.

He hesitated, then spoke softly: "Listen, Ala—the three of us are expendable. We have to be, for the hope of the colony. If you don't agree, then we'd better part company—and you can head for the nearest city."

"I—I know, Sahl. Of course we're expendable, but—"

"Then we can't think of Faron as a debit. If he has to be spent, then we'll spend him. If you can't agree, you'd better go. If you feel he's a club over your head, then you'd better go look for our hosts—and 'cooperate', as they put it."

"I—" She started to speak, but fell silent. Her breathing became labored. "I hate you." Her voice was violent.

"That's beside the point," he said coldly. "It doesn't give an answer."

Another silence, then: "All right. All right."

He nodded in the darkness. "I doubt if they'll harm him, no matter what we do."

"Why not?"

"They want us for something. And I have an idea what it is. No, don't ask me yet—because I'm far from being certain, and I don't want us to act on guesswork."

Chapter VIII

DAWN CAME, and he arose with a start, having fallen asleep during the night. He touched Alaia's arm and she stirred, then sat up to rub drowsy eyes. He crawled to the opening and stared across the hilltops and beyond them toward a plain. The orange sun spread a lurid light over the landscape, fully revealing its features to them for the first time.

A moss-draped world, hoary with age. No vivid colors splashed its gray-stained spread of vegetation, no riotous growth, nor any tangle of plants seeking sunlight in a frantic competition. It was a restrained world of dusty greens, drab browns, silvery grays. The hills and the valley were covered with evenly spaced trees, and the moss blanket lay soft over the ground between. Perhaps ten miles away on the plain nestled a patch of white buildings.

He looked further and saw others like them—small villages scattered across the valley nestled beside the creeks in nests of trees. And the inhabitants?

"It looks like a painting," Alaia murmured beside him.

"It is," he grunted, "but the pigment is protoplasm. Nature's been changed into an art-form—or a system of slavery, depending on how you look at it, and from which side of the fence."

"Reminds me of pictures I've seen of Japanese landscapes."

"Yeah, Earth might look like this someday. With one difference."

"What's that?"

"It'll belong to Man."

"And here?"

"We'll just fit in somewhere. Or else we won't fit in at all. We won't be at the top."

"Maybe someday—"

"No, Ala. If this is as carefully a tailored biologic system as I think, it's designed to serve one species—the one that developed it. Thinking that Man could supplant the designers of it is like expecting a whale's brain to function in the body of an elephant."

"What hope is there, then?"

"That maybe we can live here as predators—or at least as non-participants. We brought tons of seeds from Earthplants, and the small animals, of course. If we could get established on an island continent —" He stopped suddenly.

"What's wrong?"

"Seeds," he muttered. "Seeds. Vegetables of course, but also—clover and Johnson grass, oaks and pecans and pines, even sagebrush and cactus. Not to mention the rabbits and white rats."

"I don't understand."

"Never mind, let's just look around. There's no one in sight."

THEY SLIPPED from the recess under the cliff face and paused for a moment. A few winged creatures circled lazily in the sky. A tendril that grew from a fissure in the rock seemed to sense their presence, and began curling back away from them at perhaps an inch a minute. A ball of fur hung in a nearby shrub, dangling by a single tentacle that was coiled about a branch. It opened a single eye and blinked at them. Then it snaked out another tentacle, caught at a neighboring shrub, and began swinging away—hand over hand.

Alaia shuddered. "I'm starving, but what'll we eat?"

He brought out a single stick of protein dehydrate and broke it in half. "We'll have to wait and see what the saffrons eat. We don't dare experiment. Come on. Let's walk."

They hurried along the foot of the cliff toward the place where the flying lights had ascended. They cast nervous glances toward the hills, and all about them.

"I keep feeling like something's watching us," she breathed.

"It's possible," he grunted. "That fur ball with one eye, for instance. Or the trees. The birds. Which creatures are semi-intelligent? Which communicate among themselves, or with the dominant race? We don't have a way of knowing."

"Sahl, what are we looking for? It seems so hopeless?"

"We're looking for weak spots, for sensitive points. There's one thing about an integrated system, a system of interdependencies: if some key member of it gets out of whack, the whole thing goes to pot, Like mechanical civilization, for instance; deny it any one of a dozen key materials and it starts falling to pieces."

"Even if we found it, how could we do anything about it?" He chuckled grimly. "We won't —in anything less than a lifetime. You didn't expect anything else, did you?"

She shook her head. "I didn't expect it to be easy, no." She paused, staring ahead. "What's that up there, where the rock juts out?"

"It's—" they moved ahead a few paces. "—a ladder, I think. Iron rungs, set in the rock." His eyes followed them up, but the face of the cliff sloped back out of sight.

He trotted out toward the brush, seeking a better vantage point. He stood there for a time, gazing at the clifftop two hundred feet above them.

"What is it?" she called in a low voice.

"A wall," he answered. "A high wall along the top of the cliff." He looked around quickly, as if fearing an eavesdropper, then called, "Come on out here."

As she approached, he handed her the gun. "I'm going to climb it, Ala. Cover me. I want a look at what's on the mesa."

She took the gun and made a wry mouth. "You'll be a perfect target up there whether I cover you or not."

He nodded. "I know—but I'm beginning to believe what they said, about leaving us free to roam awhile. Surely they could have taken us before now if they wanted to."

HE STRODE to the cliff and began climbing slowly. But the rungs seemed to be about three and a half feet apart, making the climb something of a struggle. Standing on the first rung, and clutching the second at the level of his waist, he could just comfortably reach the third. A person of less than adult stature could not have climbed the ladder. Why the wide spacing, he wondered?

Halfway up, he froze. The loudspeaker had thundered a single word from over the hills: "Wait!" And the echoes said, "wait . . . wait. . . ait. ."

He hung there motionless for a moment, listening. A perfect target indeed! A helpless speck on the crag. They wouldn't even have to inflict a lethal wound. If he were winged, the drop to the rocks would kill him.

"If we meant to destroy you," boomed the voice, "now would be the time."

He waited.

"Wouldn't it?" demanded the smug watchers.

He gingerly went back down one rung.

"But you are free to continue upward, or to descend, as you choose."

A moment of indecision. He looked back at Alaia. She stood very still, eyes sweeping along the cliff-top. He set his jaw and began climbing again.

"Do not molest the young ones," warned the distant voice, "nor their nurses."

The warning made him catch his breath. Young ones? Were they letting him wander into a place where the Eridanians spawned their young? If so, he decided that they were making a serious mistake.

But as he continued the climb, a faint babble of voices reached his ears—childish shrieks and laughter and gibberish. Human voices, or those of the saffron primates.

He scrambled up the last step and stood in a narrow pathway that ran along the eight-foot wall, overhung here and there by the drapery of foliage. He stood on a rock, leaped for a hand-hold, and pulled himself up. He looked over into what seemed to be a shady garden or park He caught a glimpse of two orange-tinted children toddling across the moss-covered turf. They vanished among the trees, but he heard the wailing of infants, and the shouting of the young. Puzzled, he sat on the wall and beckoned to Alaia. She came forward and labored through, the same as he had.

HE STIFFENED, suddenly sensing the reason for the wide spacing: so that the children could not escape. He looked quickly back toward the villages on the plain, remembered the incident of the woman and her child. The searchers had led her back in the general direction of the villages, but they had obviously taken the child up here. Why?

Alaia's frightened face came into view. "I never felt so helpless," she gasped as he helped her up to the top of the wall.

She regained her breath and listened to the sounds in the park. "Children. Lots of them. What is this?"

"Let's find out." He leaped down to the mossy turf and caught her arm as she followed.

They moved a few yards deeper into the trees, then stopped suddenly. A buxom saffron female lay nude on the soft moss, sprawled listlessly on her back with her eyes closed. Two toddlers nursed hungrily at her large breasts. One looked up to peer at the intruders with his large brown eyes, but did not interrupt his meal.

They moved quietly on through the cool shade, encountered several similar scenes. "Wet nurses," he breathed.

"Not mothers?"

"Doubt it. Saw one little fellow trade nannies back there."

Occasionally one of the nurses moved listlessly to gaze at them with empty eyes, only to fall back lazily to a more comfortable position without showing any real curiosity.

"It's horrible!" Alaia shuddered. "They're all idiots."

"Highly specialized breeding, probably. I imagine they're a distinct sub-species. Contented cattle, as opposed to the yoke oxen."

She murmured a protest. They moved on. The park was a garden spot, overgrown with fruit-bearing trees and vines. Alaia plucked a pulpy, pink-skinned fruit, but he caught her hand on its way to her mouth.

"It must be all right," she said. "I saw a nurse eating one."

He hesitated, then let her take a bite. "Good!" she smiled.

"I'll wait, thanks. If you put on a blank look and start nursing babies, then I'll know."

She sputtered and spat and tossed the rest of it away. "Go to hell!" she snapped, reddening furiously.

They came to a low wall and looked over it into another section of the nursery park. There were children of a higher age group, but no wet nurses. He caught sight of a saffron adult wandering among the trees—a man.

"Two to three-year-olds, Sahl. What is this place?"

"Stockyard, I think. Come on, let's see the whole thing."

Chapter IX

THE MESA proved to include about five square miles of land, and Sahl estimated that the park contained approximately four thousand children, ranging in age from a few weeks to eight years. No one molested them as they wandered, although the cold, objective stares of the supervisors made him feel somehow that they were control units of Eridanian masters. Indeed, the older children themselves seemed occasionally to move and gaze with a solemnity that was somehow unchildlike. He saw one incident that he could only interpret as a release-shock phenomenon.

The child, an eight-year-old, stood gravely by the wall at the far end of the enclosure, hands folded behind his back, feet spread slightly, head erect. He watched them with adult-seeing eyes, quietly observing a disinterested and interpretive silence. As Sahl crouched and leaped to pluck a fruit, the child's eyes seemed to measure the height of the jump, and he nodded slightly to himself. After they had passed, Sahl glanced back. The child had slumped to the ground, was clutching his head in his hands and moaning. A look of idiocy had spread across his face. The biologist remembered the reaction of the ship's crew to the death of the master, and he pursed his lips thoughtfully.

Alaia touched his arm suddenly. "Look—a stone building, there in the trees. It's covered with vines."

"First one we've seen," he murmured, coming to a halt. "Unless you count the unwalled rain-shelters. Let's have a closer look."

They wandered closer, but Sahl suddenly drew his gun and stiffened.

"What's wrong? What do you see?"

"Notice the door. Five feet tall, no more. Not built for human convenience."

"Look what's hanging over it." "One of the fur balls, like the thing we saw in the brush."

THEY ADVANCED slowly. The creature hung by a tentacle from a peg set in the wall. The other tentacle was coiled about a half devoured fruit that it had plucked from the vines. The single eye surveyed their approach unwinkingly. Suddenly it set the fruit on a small ledge over the door and thrust the tentacle through a small hole in the wall just beneath the ledge. The tentacle seemed to writhe for a moment, then withdrew and picked up the fruit again.

"Sahl, I heard a chime ring just then. Inside the building."

"So did I. The little fellow up there is apparently a doorman."

She stared at it for a moment. "It might be quaint, if I weren't so scared."

"Quaint? Mmmm—which is more advanced: a photoelectric warning rig, or a biomechanism whose only purpose in life is to do a task like that?"

"Rhetorical question. Shall we try the door."

"Why? It looks like it's opening for us."

They stopped a few feet away, guns ready, gazing into what appeared to be an empty anteroom.

"What opened it?"

"We'll find out."

Sahl thrust his head gingerly inside, glanced around quickly, then withdrew it. "Another fur ball," he muttered, "hanging on the inside wall. Some system."

"You are invited to enter," called a voice from inside the building.

"Sahl, there's one of them in there!"

"Maybe." He hesitated for a long moment, then shrugged. "We might as well go in, but keep that crystal-gun ready."

They stepped cautiously into the anteroom. The door swung slowly closed behind them. Light came from openings along the top of the wall. The ceiling nearly brushed the top of Sahl's head, touched when he stood on tiptoe. They faced an opposing door, but it remained closed. Briefly, he wondered if they had walked into a trap.

"If you will replace your weapons in your clothing, we shall permit you to pass. We cannot trust your impulsiveness."

"They are in there," he conceded to Alaia.

"Well, what next?"

He paused, then spoke to the voice. "I'll put my automatic away, but we won't give up the anaesthetic weapon."

The voice hesitated, then: "Agreed. But I advise you against its use."

A TENTACLE opened the door for them, and they approached slowly. Another room beyond it, this one richly furnished. The Eridanian sat on a softly padded couch, facing them with a calm, piercing gaze. Two eight-year-olds flanked him. Their weapons, and their coldly adult expressions, told Sahl that they were telecontrolled by the Eridanian. All remained motionless for a few seconds, and Sahl's eyes quickly swept the room. A young girl lay sleeping on a pallet, one of the parasite creatures rooted in her back. Twisted plants with fat protuberances grew in urns at each end of the Eridanian's couch. Similar parasites, with their pale-skinned fruit, grew tangled with the plants rooted in the protuberances. Sahl suppressed an exclamation of disgust.

"Our feeding method disturbs you," came the voice from an opening in the wall behind the Eridanian's couch. "The process is biologically favorable, however. There are virtually no waste products in the milk of the wretr; hence, our digestive organs are much simpler and less subject to disturbance than your own. Your disgust is a primitive reaction."

"I wasn't aware than I had expressed it," he growled.

"I perceive it," said the Eridanian, through the mechanical voice. "You have not been bred for telepathetic aptitude, nor conditioned for it, but I can easily perceive your overall semantic state."

Sahl looked around again. "How did you get the translator up here without us noticing it?"

"We did not. It was taken to the nearest city. A . . . uh . . . saffron lies in the next room, responding in his own language to my statements. His voice is being transmitted to the city by radio and fed into the translator. The translation is rebroadcast to this station. That is what you hear. The method seems complicated, but within a few days we shall have conditioned our saffrons—several of them—to speak your tongue."

Sahl frowned thoughtfully."What frequencies—"

The creature on the couch seemed to purr, and Sahl somehow felt that it was a chuckle.

"You ask that, wondering if the signals are being picked up by your ship on our moon. That is very probable. We established communication with Wolek Parn as soon as we picked up the translator with its language-content. We have nothing to hide. I might mention that your leader seemed more disturbed by the death of our emissary than we have been."

"You aren't disturbed?" Sahl asked coldly.

"It was unfortunate," the creature conceded, "but we do not share your view of death. When a Piszjil—as the sub-species calls us —dies, he does not die in the same sense that you would understand. Because of telepathetic resonance conditions, the Piszjil focus of consciousness is not sharply limited to a single individual, but is to a certain extent distributed."

"A racial consciousness?"

"Not quite. I have a distinct personality, and the body you see is its central point. But it extends also to all of my kind within approximately a ten-mile radius. If you were to destroy me, my memories and thought-patterns and feelings would still live in the others. We are born as distinct individuals, you see, but as we grow older we 'become composite personalities, and even centuries after, death, some trace of awareness remains in others of our kind. Eventually, for all practical purposes, the individual ego dies out, or is subsumed by others—but there is no sharply defined death."

ALAIA MOVED a step closer and stared down at the small man-thing. The two guards swung their weapons toward her quietly. "For what are you going to use these children here on the mesa?" she demanded in a voice full of restrained hate.

The Piszjil blinked at her once with semi-transparent lids that covered yellow eyes with black slits for pupils. He drew a robe of pale green gauze more closely about his shoulders and studied her quietly before speaking.

"If your feelings become overt," he warned, "I shall have to anaesthetize you. Your question is an aggressive demand, but I shall answer nevertheless. The children are brought here at birth from the free villages on the plain—"

"Free?" Sahl interrupted.

"Yes. Theirs is a folk society, and quite fixed in cultural form. We do not interfere with their lives, except to levy a certain percentage of the birth rate, which is quite high. The percentage of males we take is such that the male-female ratio in the adult population of the villages remains one to seven."

"Seven wives apiece, eh?"

The Piszjil paused. "Their mating customs are rather free, but it works out about like that, usually. We make an occasional census, and it varies only slightly from year to year. They bring the children to us of their own accord. It is a religious ceremony for them, since they attach a sacredness to our race. The mother frequently objects, but the children that they keep are raised communally, and she soon transfers her affection to others. The priests bring our levy to us here at regular intervals."

"You haven't answered my question!" Alaia snapped.

The Piszjil ignored her, and continued: "You have seen the park, but have not understood its significance. This building is the center of influence. There are other rooms where Tutors sit in trance, continually exerting an effort to establish liaison with the growing children. It is established gradually at first, then reaches a sudden strongness of response at about eight years. When the liaison is perfectly achieved—if it is—the children are ready to leave the park."

"And if it isn't achieved?"

"There are failures, of course," said the Piszjil, gesturing with a fragile hand toward the girl who slept on the pallet, with the parasite rooted in her back. "But they are useful. The wretr's milk differs according to the nature of the host. Some hosts are vegetable, some animal. It provides a variety of diet—"

"Beast!" A sudden scream of rage from Alaia.

Sahl caught at her arms to restrain her, but she savagely tore herself free and darted toward the Piszjil's couch with obviously murderous intent. The weapons of the child-guards coughed together. She staggered a few steps, then crumpled with a sob at the foot of the couch.

Sahl had crouched and drawn his automatic. The child-guards kept their weapons trained on him, but did not fire. The Piszjil watched him without change of expression.

"In our cooperative world," it said slowly, "we have found lethal weapons unnecessary for many thousands of years. We are certainly capable of manufacturing them in a very short time, however."

The toneless voice seemed to contain a threat. Sahl straightened quietly and lowered the weapon, but kept it in hand. His scalp was bristling, and he fought an urge to kill the thing immediately.

"In fact," the Piszjil continued, "since the coming of your ship, we have assembled three rockets, well-armed and capable of destroying your Ark. Modify your behavior accordingly."

Chapter X

THE CONFERENCE continued, as if there had been no interruption. Alaia lay unconscious before the creature's couch, and Sahl watched her breathing. Her presence had become a handicap, for he could neither run nor fight as long as she lay helpless.

He remembered his own words about the possibility of spending Faron, and suddenly wondered if they had not sprung from an unconscious wish to see the chemist dead. He realized vaguely that he was attracted to Alaia, who was obviously devoted to Faron.

"We inform you of conditions as they exist, you see," the Piszjil was saying. "Understandably, your people will be horrified for a time. On the other hand, you must understand our position. Our ancestors brought specimens of the highest life-form on your planet at the time." It gestured toward the child-guards. "You have a common ancestry with them, but at the time of capture they were scarcely more than apes. Their language consisted of perhaps two hundred words. They used fire when they found it; clubs and levers and sharp sticks their only tools.

"To us, they were only animals, potentially useful. We bred them selectively, weeding out the ferocious, saving the placid, the clever, the telepathically apt. The hairlessness was a concession to the beauty-standards of our more egocentric ancestors. Look at them, Morgun Sahl. Your rather distant cousins—human, I think, but different in that they lack your aggressiveness and egotism. Their development has paralleled your own in some respects, in others it has differed. They belong to us now, by their own wish. Does it still horrify you?"

Sahl remained silent, knowing that the Piszjil could feel the flood of suppressed anger about him.

"As for this park," the creature went on, "we regard it as philanthropic. Our own young reach maturity in similar gardens on other tablelands. That should convey to you that we do not see our relationship with the sub-species as one of ruthless exploitation."

Be kind to your dog,Sahl thought bitterly, then stared at the Piszjil with sudden interest. "You are mammals?" he asked.

The yellow eyes narrowed slightly, and the Piszjil paused, as if sensing Sahl's shift in mood from frustrated anger to cautious interest. "No, we oviposit our young—in a symbiotic relationship with another species."

"I don't understand."

THE MAN-THING hesitated, lifted a slender arm, closed its eyes, and seemed to be in communication with some unseen person. A shutter clicked behind him, and a picture flashed into projection on the wall over the couch. It revealed a short, waddling creature with fat legs and a small head and a fat spherical body. Somehow, it reminded Sahl of a plucked chicken.

"A diulrul," the Piszjil said. "An egg-bearer. After fertilization, our eggs are transferred to these creatures to await birth." It paused to purr amusement. "An advantageous system for the females of our race."

"Yeah. Complete emancipation for women. I know some people who'd think it a great idea."

The scene shifted slowly, scanning over a waddling herd of the egg-carriers, then backing away for a view of the whole mesa. It appeared similar to the garden of children, except that a slender pylon arose in the center, marking it for what it was. The projection vanished suddenly.

"We have nothing to withhold, you see," the creature said. "Your species is intelligent enough to find out for itself eventually. So we will answer your questions honestly."

"Then suppose you tell us what you intend to do about our colony."

"Certainly. You will be permitted to land, but your spacecraft will be impounded. You will not be harmed, but you will submit to a period of indoctrination and comfortable detention. Then, everyone who is willing to cooperate will be allowed to go free."

"To do as we wish?"

"Yes."

"Will we be permitted to establish the colony in a geographically isolated area—such as an island group?"

There was a long silence. The Piszjil at first seemed to be reluctant to speak. His lids fell closed, and he communicated with another for a time. At last he looked up.

"We insist on assigning the areas ourselves. We will have you transported to them, of course. Afterwards, however, you may leave those places if you choose."

SAHL MUSED over the plural for a moment. Obviously they meant to break the colony up into groups. How small?

"What kind of places will they be?"

Again the Piszjil hesitated. "Your ignorance of our life-forms would permit you to survive nowhere except in the free villages of the subspecies. Naturally, however, we cannot inflict your whole group on a single native village."

A shred of suspicion flickered in his mind. "How many sub-groups?"

Silence. Sahl asked the question again.

"A large number. One couple to a village, perhaps."

"Neighboring villages?"

"Randomly selected. But as I said, if you are not content you may leave, after you have gained enough knowledge to survive. You may regroup again, if you wish."

"Uh-huh. And what kind of transportation for the regrouping?"

"Such as they have in the villages."

"Aircraft? Surface vehicles?"

"The latter."

"Powered by?"

"The villages have no technology. But the system of using domesticated life-forms is highly developed."

"The equivalent of horse-drawn vehicles, in other words."

The creature's mouth flickered open for an instant, revealing the retracted fangs. A grimace of irritation? he wondered.

"And what is the total land area over which these free villages are distributed?"

"About—" The Piszjil stopped suddenly, eyes narrowing. "The direction of your questioning becomes obvious. Perhaps we underestimated your cleverness. Very well, I'll give you the answer to what you want to know, before you ask it: We regard it as probable that your colony will not reassemble, once it is dispersed. But after a few generations, of course, a number of them will spring up."

"That wasn't to be my last question," Sahl growled.

The Piszjil leaned forward slightly, eyes glowing. "Very well. Then ask it."

"I'll state it instead!" he snapped. "A simple knowledge of our language, and the translator's ability to handle it, indicates that you acquired knowledge of the semantic content of our words when you extracted the words from us. Otherwise, the translator could only supply literal word-exchanges. Ergo: you must know the semantic content of the word 'incest,' know it's taboo."

"Go on."

"You know that if you settle one couple in a village, the children will be likely to shun brother-sister marriages, at least as long as the parents are alive. You know that they would grow up among the natives and probably regard them as the `norm', since our children would be outnumbered. It is inevitable that those children would merge into the native culture, intermarry, lose interest in things outside the settlement. In a couple of generations you would have the hybrids that you apparently want, and they would respect you just as the natives do—as their demi-gods. You could then transplant them—the hybrids—to isolated colonies and do with them as you saw fit. And that would be?"

HE WAITED for an answer. The man-thing inclined its head slightly toward him, and purred softly. "A logical analysis of our motives, Morgun Sahl. We respect the abilities of your young race. Your abilities make you both valuable and a threat to us." He gesed toward the saffron children again. "Our selective breeding developed a certain amount of intelligence in them. But nature, using the same raw material, apparently did a better job—in your people. We think that a hybrid species, combining the docility with higher intelligence and initiative, would be of more use to us, you see. In performing difficult tasks, these folk require constant telepathic control. We think an increase in intelligence would relieve us of some of the burdens of constant supervision."

Sahl laughed humorlessly. "One creature supplies you with food. Another carries your young. Another opens your doors and rings your bells. Others do your labor. Don't you realize that you're heading toward complete dependence? Parasitism, when your descendants will be utterly worthless."

"The symbiosis is beneficial to all concerned," the Piszjil said stiffly. "The sub-species benefit by direction, which we supply."

The biologist shook his head. "We won't accept. The colony will make the trip back to Earth rather than agree."

"I spoke of the weapons we built," warned the Piszjil. "We will destroy you rather than let you leave. Your race is beginning a space expansion. We cannot let you carry back knowledge of our world to your home."

"Then you'll have to destroy us!" the biologist said harshly.

A purr. "But one of your numbers has already accepted."

"Faron Qun!" he gasped, "I don't believe it!"

"You'll see him soon. And, of course, we have the female here." He gestured toward the girl on the floor. "And you as well. A small beginning, perhaps, but if we have to destroy the ship . . ." He seemed to shrug.

Sahl's face went expressionless. "We're prisoners? You said—"

A long, quavering purr—and the creature's lips spread in what could only be the equivalent of mocking laughter.

SAHL LIFTED the automatic and shot it through the brain-case. It looked startled, and its fangs flicked out full length. He shot it again in the belly. The child-guards went into shock. One of them shrieked.

A weapon coughed behind him, and crystals stung his neck. His final impression of his surroundings was a blurred perception of the couch's motion. It was bleeding where the bullet had entered it after passing through the master's body. It lifted a small, rodent-like head which had been retracted, turtle-fashion. It squealed with pain and started staggering toward Sahl on short thick legs. Dimly, he saw that it meant to attack him.

But it was, badly wounded. It managed to collapse on top of him, then died. The breath, and the awareness, went out of him.

Chapter XI

"HELLO SAHL. Isn't it wonderful?"

"Who is this? Who's talking? I can't see you."

"Of course you can't. We're talking by wire. This is Faron or, as my wives call me, Faroon. Isn't it beautiful here?"

"What are you talking about?" Sahl growled weakly as he lay on something soft and stared at a. blue-lighted ceiling.

The chemist laughed heartily. "The planet! The scenery! The people! And—the Piszjil!" He paused, and his voice went reverent. "Yes, especially the Piszjil!"

"What's wrong with you?" The biologist trembled with anger. "You crazy or something? Where's Alaia? Where are you? And how did I get here?"

"Don't you know?" Faron called enthusiastically. "Aren't you aware? Oh, but they'll help you be aware, really aware. Of purpose, Sahl! Of high purpose!"

"Yeah?"

"Yes! I'm in a village, Sahl! A dozen beautiful wives! Wonderful, wonderful, everything's wonderful!"

"That's nice." He hesitated, feeling something tie a knot in his stomach. "Where's Alaia?"

"Who?"

"Alaia, Alaia!" he barked. "A-LA-I-A.Where is she? What's wrong? Have you completely lost your mind?"

"Who?" Faron's voice was baffled.

Sahl shivered violently. "The girl you were probably going to marry, you maniac! What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing! Nothing ever!" The chemist giggled. "Marry? I'm married a dozen times."

Sahl licked his lips, found himself panting. "Faron! Are you drugged? Doped? Or just insane? What day is it? Is the Ark all right?"

There was a long pause, then: "I think it's you that's out of your head, Sahl. Ark? What do you mean by 'Ark'? Noah's Ark? Arc of a circle? Say—you give me the creeps! So long, fellow!"

A sharp click.

"Hello! Hello!" he bellowed.

"Hello!" said quite another voice, one that was in the room.

He rolled his head and stared at a saffron servant who sat impassively in the corner, arms folded across his chest, eyes closed. Automaton, he realized, a control unit.

"Well?" he demanded.

"I am the Piszjil, Fyff, semanticist and psycho-logician. I am not in the room with you; no need to look."

"What's going on?"

"Your memory has been blanked for the past eight days. How do you feel?"

"Weak."

"A result of the conditioning process, perhaps. You experienced considerable pain."

"I was talking to Faron Qun. What happened?"

"The conversation with him was arranged as a demonstration for you. He was subjected to our conditioning methods, and the experiment was a complete success. He has been stripped of large patches of memory. He thinks he is still on Earth somewhere. He is confused, of course, by the blank-spots, but we filled them in with pseudo memories. He was an easy subject."

SAHL FELT the heat flooding his face. His lips twisted, but the curse wilted in his throat. Suddenly his voice was gone. He gasped and strangled, and struggled against his bonds. Dizziness, exhaustion, then nausea that left him drained. Slowly he relaxed, slowly the rage drained away. Then he lifted his hands easily to his face. There were no bonds! But he had felt them!

The fellow in the corner made a cackling sound, possibly a response to Fyff's amusement. "With you we could not achieve complete success. Your memory is nearly intact. You clung very stubbornly to recollections, no matter how unpleasant we managed to make them for you. Given time, we could probably succeed. But time is short, and we can use you better as you are."

Another flood of anger, another choked off curse, followed by the sensation of strangulation and fear and sickness. He could not move. When at last he subsided, the fellow cackled again.

"Is something wrong, Morgun Sahl?"

He sucked in a slow breath and kept himself calm. "What have you done to me?"

"Conditioned you against overt aggression in any form toward our race. That, at least, was successful. You will not be able to attack, condemn, or harm a Piszjil in any way. If you persist in trying, you will only find yourself stricken by convulsion, perhaps unconsciousness."

Sahl suppressed a surge of anger about to burst forth. He lay breathing heavily, too stricken to speak.

"You'll also find that it's impossible for you to express an opinion that runs contrary to our wishes. You may feel it, but you can't express it. Eventually it'll probably frustrate you to such an extent that you'll have to come around to our way of thinking or go mad. The conditioning won't last forever, but by the time it dies out you'll be either a conformist or insane, like Qun."

It won't last forever, It won't last forever—his mind caught at the phrase and clung.

"I wonder if most of your people are as stubborn as you, or as flexible as Qun. We shall soon know, of course."

Good, he thought, they hadn't gotten the others off the moon yet, at least. And if he knew Wolek Parn, they wouldn't manage to do it. They'd have to destroy Ark, colony and all.

"What do you plan to do with me?" he asked aloud.

"Use you as an agent to Wolek Parn."

"I don't understand."

"Parn remains stubborn, even though we broadcast your messages to him. He is half-convinced, but not quite. He insists on talking to you in person before he agrees to your proposals."

"Messages?" he gasped. "Proposals? I didn't—" The denial choked off into a low wheeze. Dizzyness again, and fright. He couldn't say it. The words refused to come, and he stammered gibberish.

The spokesman cackled. "A taboo statement, Morgun Sahl."

His helplessness enraged him, and the rage made the situation worse. He blacked out for a few moments. Then he lay weakly struggling to keep some sort of mental balance.

"Try saying, 'I recommend that the whole colony land on the planet without further delay.' "

"I—I—" He swallowed hard. The statement fascinated him strangely. No harm in seeing what happens, he thought. Then he said it. "I recommend that the whole colony land ..."

THE REACTION was immediate. A feeling of warmth, of relief, a sense of security and of relaxation spread over him. For a moment there was perfect contentment and peace. From this too he recovered gradually, and icy fear replaced it. He was beginning to see.

"Is that the state of mind Faron Qun is in?" he gasped.

"Yes! Precisely! Wouldn't that be pleasant?"

He wanted to bellow a fierce negative, but he checked the impulse before he strangled on it. "You know my answer," he said quietly.

"Indeed I know it, but you can't make it. Now, as to your task—"

"I won't .. . Won't . . . uhg! . ."

The Piszjil waited until he finished choking, then continued: "A ship will take you to the Ark. Your task is to convince Wolek Parn to send the colony down at once, in a place we'll specify. You'll perform the task, because by that time you'll be fully aware of your limitations, and awareness will actually serve to strengthen the block. You'll be consciously frightened as well as subconsciously. You can't help doing it, and you might as well face it."

Sahl remained silent, fearful of another spasm.

The Piszjil paused briefly, then continued slowly: "Consider this. After it's done, you'll be well rewarded. You'll have a pleasant life, in pleasant surroundings. Peace. Relative freedom. Eventually, you'll be content with it. Man, what more do you want? Why insist upon dominion?"

The biologist moistened his lips. He lay staring blankly at the ceiling, refusing to speak, trying not to think. He could not risk any reaction lest it prove to be a dead-end of despair. If I blunder into too many forbidden responses, he thought, I'll really get confused. I'll save it until I get to Parn, he continued, and then I'll throw a sputtering convulsion all over his command deck. He'll know something's wrong.

"Now," said his tormentor. "Would you like to see Alaia Dazille?"

He sat up quickly. "May I?"

"Out the door, three rooms down the scorridor, and down the short incline to the seats. Go ahead."

"I'm not locked in?"

"No. Go anywhere you like—if you can."

If you can. He had a fair idea of what would happen if he tried to escape. He refused to try. He would save it all up for Wolek Parn, and then rebellion. He left the room and followed the Piszjil's directions. Was he making a mistake? I must suppress all possibly forbidden responses, he thought, lest I make the whole situation worse.

He walked down the incline and through a sound-proofed door. As soon as he opened it, he heard her scream. He froze for a moment, looking beyond the door. Nothing but a tier of seats next to a railing, and beyond the rail a pit. It reminded him of an operating room. Somehow it looked familiar. He advanced slowly toward the rail.

As Alaia's scream died, a monotonous voice echoed through the huge room. "Repeat the incident again."

He heard a faint sob. Alaia's. What were they doing to her? The same thing they had done to him—and to Faron with more success. He knew it vaguely, as he knew he had been in this room before. He reached the rail and looked down. She lay on her back in the center of a metal-plated floor far below. A Piszjil sat at a control-panel watching her coldly, while his saffron spokesman sat as if asleep behind him.

"Repeat the incident again," the voice insisted, as the creature touched a control.

A humming sound filled the room. She spoke slowly, as if in a trance, and he had to listen closely to understand her words.

"Sahl, put that rod down! For God's sake! No...!" A pause, then a more frantic note: "You hit him! Sahl! You broke his leg! Faron, get out of his way! He's gone berserk!"

SAHL'S KNUCKLES whitened on the rail. He clenched his teeth to keep from shouting a denial that he knew could never pass the block. They were forging memories, rooting out old ones, making new ones! Had they done the same to him?

"Sahl, I've got a gun . . . Put the rod down . . . Put it down, and let him alone . . . Sahl! Get away from me . I ... Get back or I'll shoot! ... Sahl! All right! I warned you! Now it's too—"

Her voice stopped suddenly. She made a choking sound. Then: "It's a lie, it's a lie, it's a lie! You're making me imagine this. I didn't kill him. I didn't kill . . ."

drrrnnnnnnngggggg—

A sudden drone of surging power. As he stared, an aura of corona discharge flickered around her body like pale phosphorescence. Her screams were wild, insane, piercing. Sahl's belly was a sick knot. He hung panting on the rail, unable to draw himself away. The corona shimmered and flared and hissed—and subsided a little.

"All right!" she shrieked. "All right! Anything! I killed him! Okay! Make it stop!"

Abruptly the corona disappeared. The Eridanian pressed another control. He heard a faint buzz of power, but there was no glow display. Alaia moaned—apparently with relief.

"Thank God!" she kept saying. "Thank God! Don't let it stop. Ohhhhh . . ." And then her voice became a low mumble of relief.

The buzz of power died. He saw her stiffen.

"Repeat the incident again," said the calm voice.

She was silent for a moment, then spoke nervously. "I really didn't kill him; the gun went off accidentally"

A long pause. Then the operator said, "Repeat the incident again, as you recall it."

Sahl gritted his teeth. They were making her invent a false memory. He listened to her going through the imaginary scene again as if she were actually feeling, seeing, hearing it.

"Alaia!" he shouted. "Alaia! Up here!"

Nothing happened. No response either from the girl or from his internal system of blocks. She continued the reenactment.

"Alaia! It's a lie—oh! Uhg!" His voice choked off, and he gasped for air. Crying hysterically, he slipped to the floor—and knew he had lost. They hadn't managed to blank his memory, but they had made him helpless.

He knew dismally that he would do exactly what they wanted him to. Maybe it would be better to wind up like Faron. Faron at least didn't have to realize his condition. And it would be easy, just to let the unwanted things slip away into oblivion. To forget, and accept.

That thought too was planted in you, warned the voice of sanity.

Suddenly Alaia was screaming again that it was all a lie, a rotten lie, and it had never really happened. Then the terrifying drrrnngg of the pain-making aura that seared every nerve ending without numbing or damaging tissue. Her screams came to him this time as inevitable effect of known cause. She was trying to hang on the way he had done —but could do no longer.

He picked himself up slowly and crept back to his cage. And something had slipped away, although he was not quite aware of what he had lost.

Chapter XII

IT'S GOOD to see you back, Sahl," Wolek Parn said wearily as they entered the Captain's cabin on the Ark, "even though I can't say you were much of a diplomat—killing two of them, behaving like a wild animal." He paused to glance back at the biologist with mixed emotion, most of it carefully restrained. "You look worn out, worried. I suppose your visit was pretty unnerving in spots."

Sahl nodded thoughtfully, felt a constriction in his throat, and muttered, "Not bad."

The captain sat, down and remained silent for a moment. Sahl stood quietly facing him and waiting. He dared make no long speeches, nor any unfavorable comment about the planet, or its keepers. He knew what he could say, and what was unspeakable. Over a week had passed since his first experience with the conditioned blocks, and he had learned the limitations.

"How's Alaia?" Parn asked.

"Fine," he said casually. Lying face down, he thought, with a baby parasite burrowing into her back. They had done that for him. If he convinced Parn to bring the colony down, they'd remove the parasite from her before its roots grew too deep. If he failed, they said they'd let it stay.

"How's Faron?"

"Fine," he lied in the same tone. Parn sighed deeply. "I'm a little disappointed in you, Sahl. But then —we won't go into that. Results count, I guess—and they apparently aren't bitter about the two dead ones, nor about your behavior. All I wanted you back here for was to confirm what you said on the telecast. I was a little suspicious that you might be coerced, or hypnotized, and made to say it. You weren't, were you?"

"No." They had told him what he had said on the telecast, but he hoped he wouldn't have to repeat any of it now. Ridiculous position I'm in, he thought, with the only club inside my head. What was worse, he knew a way to attack, a way to strike out at the Piszjil, but he could neither do it, nor reveal it to Parn. A weapon, but it couldn't be used. He had known about it in a general way for quite a while, but now the knowledge was more specific. And useless.

"You confirm, everything you said in the broadcast then?"

For a time, he tried to remain silent. But the silence itself was forbidden, and after a moment he had to choke it out.

"I confirm it all."

Parn was staring at him peculiarly. "You feel all right? You look pale. There's nothing wrong with you now, is there?"

"Nothing, nothing at all."

Parn's hand slipped unobtrusively to a panel of buttons. He pressed one of them quietly, then folded his hands under his chin and put on a sour smile. He spent the next five minutes talking about the hard time he had endured trying to handle the restless colonists during the delegation's absence.

THE HATCH opened suddenly, two men entered: Doctor Roli Karme and a burly colonist. They glanced at Parn, then at the biologist. Karme put out a big hand and spoke with a friendly half-grin.

"Glad to see you, Sahl."

The biologist noticed that he was carrying a medical kit in his other hand. He frowned slightly and wondered.

"How much time?" Karme muttered mysteriously to the Captain.

Parn gestured toward the screen. "There's their ship waiting for him. It's obviously armed this time. They wanted to come with him, but I refused. They may come anyway, if we take too long."

What were they talking about? He began to feel frightened.

Karme turned to him with the friendly smile. "Would you stretch out on that cot, Sahl. I want to examine you. Won't take long."

"Wh-why?" He couldn't do it, if it were for a forbidden purpose. But then, he shouldn't have asked.

"Just want to see that you're all right."

Physically? He bore no physical marks. He nodded slightly and obeyed. Karme made a very cursory inspection, then produced a hypo syringe. He pulled at Sahl's sleeve.

"What's that for? What—?"

"Just a sedative. Won't affect you for long."

"I don't need—" But Karme had deftly stung him with it and emptied the barrel in a moment.

He began to feel warm and relaxed. The doctor slipped something around his arm and pulled it tight.

"Blood pressure?"

"Same kind of thing, isn't it?" came the non-committal answer.

But then Karme had another syringe, and this time he probed for a vein. When Sahl protested, the burly colonist came in and sat on him, and Parn held his arm. The lights went dimmer by degree, and the room swirled about him.

"Let's go back to the telecast," said a distant voice. "Sahl, you're telecasting to Captain Parn about the planet . . ."

Events became a tide of confusion. Questions. Answers. Shouts. There was fear, and deep retreat into blackness, so deep that answering became impossible, and consciousness was briefly gone. How long did it last? There was no spacing of events called "time" in the confusion. Events came and went, but there was no order among them. Voices plagued him, demanded the impossible of him, and finally let him alone.

THE FIRST voice he heard and was Parn's. He lay with his eyes closed and listened. "I can't understand it, Roli. Sahl always seemed like a fairly stable fellow, sour sometimes, and chilly. I just can't see him making an impassioned speech; it's out of character."

"He made it all right. The memory's there somewhere, because snatches of it came out. He made the telecast, but—"

"What?"

"The way it came out this time was . . . well, mechanical, and frantic. Didn't it strike you that way?"

"Yeah, and this other thing bothers me too."

"The sensitive areas? I can't understand it either, Skipper. Why should he put up such a howl when I put him through the killing of that second Piszjit again? He couldn't have reacted that way while he did it. He was—"

Sahl sat up with a sudden shudder. "I couldn't kill one of them!" he shouted. "I couldn't!"

The three of them turned to watch him for a moment, and exchanged quiet glances among themselves. He slumped, covering his face with his hands. Something had slipped away from him for a time, but now he remembered. There had been a time when he could kill the things if need be. But now—it was different.

"Listen to me, Sahl," Karme said quietly, and waited for the biologist to look up. "We know something's wrong. Your response mechanisms arc fouled up in spots. Speech and motor areas are affected. You block to certain things, refuse a response, and retreat. Not now, but under the drug. Now you're conscious, and you can choose alternate responses —cover up for the blocks. Under the drug, you didn't. Now, do you understand what I mean?"

He understood perfectly, but he could only say, "Nothing happened. I'm all right."

A long silence, then Karme said, "I want you to respond to my next questions by saying just the opposite of what you mean. If you mean `yes' say 'no'. If you mean 'good', say "bad'. All right?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

"First question: was the telecast authentically yours?"

He opened his mouth, but no sound came. The block was literal, and he couldn't say 'no'. But the block was also interpretive, and he couldn't communicate the facts by saying 'yes'. But if he remained silent they would know something was wrong, and that also was forbidden. He screamed.

"Grab him, quick!" Parn bellowed.

Someone was shaking him back to consciousness and he fought them. But the light was strong in his eyes, and the taste of neurodrine was in his mouth.

"You've got to send the colony down," he babbled. "It's fine, everything's fine."

A palm crashed hard across his face in a brutal slap. "Nothing personal, Sahl," Parn growled. "But if you don't snap out of it, I'm going to beat hell out of you."

SAHL HOPED he would do it. Anything, if it would help release the flood of pent-up knowledge and the unspeakable plan for attack. Mentioning the plan wasn't blocked literally, for the Piszjil hadn't thought of it specifically, but he couldn't talk about it because of his own intent to use it against them. He lay panting and staring at Parn.

"Let him alone, Skipper," Karme said quietly. "He wants to say something, but he can't."

"I've seen enough!" the Captain grunted. "It's obvious that something's been done to him. We can't go down." He turned to watch the screen. "They're waiting out there for an answer. They haven't made any threats, but damned if I like the looks of that armament. The first ship didn't have it. They put it on for something."

"Why do they want us down there?" Karme complained. "Why should they invite a wild wolf to come wandering through their tame flocks?"

Sahl lay forcing the immediacy of the situation out of his mind, tried to force away the present, tried to think of nothing. Wolf, sheep, dog, rabbit

"Rabbit," he said. "Somebody introduced rabbits into Australia."

"What's he babbling about?"

Karme fell thoughtful. "Historical incident. Intercontinental tampering with fauna. Introduction of a rabbit pest."

"So?"

Karme shrugged. "Means nothing to me."

It had meant a spasm of agony for Sahl. He tried again, rejecting the present, keeping only a vague notion in mind.

"Japanese beetles—huhhh!"

"He's choking!"

"He's trying to say something." Karme paused. "What do we have in the stocking lockers besides rabbits and rats?"

"Bees, weasels, blacksnakes, foxes —oh hell!—everything small and wild. Not to mention the seeds and nuts and bacteria cultures. He was supposed to decide which, if any, of the Earth-forms should be cut loose on the alien planet."

Karme turned to Sahl. "What is the answer to that, by the way?"

Just one small word. One small word would do it. And then it would be done. His jaw worked frantically, and his breathing was agonized. The conditioning. It had to wear off sometime, Fyff had said.

Just a word!

"Well?" the doctor insisted. "Which species should be released here?"

It came out in a scream of rage.

"Everything! EVERYTHING!"

Particularly the weasels to attack the fat little egg carriers, and the foxes to kill the fur balls, and the rats to infest the cities, and the rabbits to gnaw on something vital until a flora sickened and shrank back from the rank aggressive grasses and the rampant weeds, until the towering trees arose to rob the modest gardens of sunlight. Villages would suffer famine and either wander or die, and there would be hell to pay for the designers of a tailored system. And Man? He could not safely enter the planet of peace, but a world in turmoil was just his meat. Famines made nomads, and someone had to lead a village in flight. It would be touch and go, for awhile, but as a wandering savage, Man would have a chance. The colony had wanted nothing more in the beginning.

"Something cracked!" Karme snapped. "He's slipping into gibberish."

"What to do?"

"Find out what he's trying to say. I can take him down to the lab, try everything from hypnosis to insulin shock. It'll be pretty tough on him though. May not be much left when it's over."

"You have my permission to kill him," Parn said pleasantly.

Karme bent over the stricken biologist and frowned. "Now what the hell made him grin like that?"

Chapter XIII

THE LAUNCHES flew at low altitude, streaking through the night toward the dawn-line, and only an occasional creature looked up, or opened the palm of his hand skyward to see if the faint rattling in the brush was rain. Beyond the dawn-line and over the day-zone, and past the place where the landing was assigned, where a delegation waited, and turned, and frowned after the departing rockets.

No matter. They were foolish to try to escape, these launches. There was no place that they could land and make a break for freedom, for the world was subdued and orderly. The world was cut to a pattern, and the world would capture the colonists quickly, no matter where they tried to run.

The rockets landed on the night-side, two of them did. Two others disgorged their "colonists" in different places on the day-side. When the "colonists" were out, and scurrying away through the brush, the pilots emerged to wait.

A voice came from seven thousand miles away, and it spoke mockingly from the moon. "You have been pested," it said. "Your garden is full of weeds. And we are still up here."

"You will be destroyed immediately," came the curt cold answer.

"The pests are our pests, and we know how to deal with them," the mocker replied. "Do you?"

There was a worried silence. "Refuel our launches and send them back up," demanded the moon-voice. "We're coming down." Wolek Parn bracketed the microphone and grinned at the dazed man who lay on the cot.

"Brace up, Sahl. The worst pests that ever infested anyplace will be down there soon. Us. One of the pilots demanded that they let Alaia go, and Faron—if he wants to. I think they will."

Sahl's hand slipped over his forehead. There was a lot that he couldn't remember. Blank spaces. "You got the idea across. I know it tore you up. You'll pull out okay, though. Of course, humans are still in for a rough go down there for awhile. But then—when haven't they been? We'll make out all right. We always have ..."

THE END