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Stryker turned on him almost angrily. “If they’re not Hymenops or humans or aliens, then what in God’s name are they?”

* * * * *

“Aye, there’s the rub,” Farrell said, quoting a passage whose aptness had somehow seen it through a dozen reorganizations of insular tongue and a final translation to universal Terran. “If they’re none of those three, we’ve only one conclusion left. There’s no one down there at all–we’re victims of the first joint hallucination in psychiatric history.”

Stryker threw up his hands in surrender. “We can’t identify them by theorizing, and that brings us down to the business of first-hand investigation. Who’s going to bell the cat this time?”

“I’d like to go,” Gibson said at once. “The ZIT computer can wait.”

Stryker vetoed his offer as promptly. “No, the ZIT comes first. We may have to run for it, and we can’t set up a Transfer jump without the computer. It’s got to be me or Arthur.”

Farrell felt the familiar chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years–the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors–would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of an unknown and patently hostile force was anything but attractive.

“You two did the field work on the last location,” he said. “It’s high time I took my turn–and God knows I’d go mad if I had to stay inship and listen to Lee memorizing his Handbook subsections or to Gib practicing dead languages with Xavier.”

Stryker laughed for the first time since the explosion that had so nearly wrecked the Marco Four.

“Good enough. Though it wouldn’t be more diverting to listen for hours to you improvising enharmonic variations on the Lament for Old Terra with your accordion.”

Gibson, characteristically, had a refinement to offer.

“They’ll be alerted down there for a reconnaissance sally,” he said. “Why not let Xavier take the scouter down for overt diversion, and drop Arthur off in the helihopper for a low-level check?”

Stryker looked at Farrell. “All right, Arthur?”

“Good enough,” Farrell said. And to Xavier, who had not moved from his post at the magnoscanner: “How does it look, Xav? Have you pinned down their base yet?”

The mechanical answered him in a voice as smooth and clear–and as inflectionless–as a ‘cello note. “The planet seems uninhabited except for a large island some three hundred miles in diameter. There are twenty-seven small agrarian hamlets surrounded by cultivated fields. There is one city of perhaps a thousand buildings with a central square. In the square rests a grounded spaceship of approximately ten times the bulk of the Marco Four.”

They crowded about the vision screen, jostling Xavier’s jointed gray shape in their interest. The central city lay in minutest detail before them, the battered hulk of the grounded ship glinting rustily in the late afternoon sunlight. Streets radiated away from the square in orderly succession, the whole so clearly depicted that they could see the throngs of people surging up and down, tiny foreshortened faces turned toward the sky.

“At least they’re human,” Farrell said. Relief replaced in some measure his earlier uneasiness. “Which means that they’re Terran, and can be dealt with according to Reclamations routine. Is that hulk spaceworthy, Xav?”

Xavier’s mellow drone assumed the convention vibrato that indicated stark puzzlement. “Its breached hull makes the ship incapable of flight. Apparently it is used only to supply power to the outlying hamlets.”

The mechanical put a flexible gray finger upon an indicator graph derived from a composite section of detector meters. “The power transmitted seems to be gross electric current conveyed by metallic cables. It is generated through a crudely governed process of continuous atomic fission.”