PAGE 5
Control Group
by
* * * * *
Gibson shrugged. “We can only eliminate the least likely alternatives and accept the simplest one remaining.”
“Then we can eliminate this one now,” Farrell said flatly. “It entails a thousand-year voyage, which is an impossibility for any gross reaction drive; the application of suspended animation or longevity or a successive-generation program, and a final penetration of Hymenop-occupied space to set up a colony under the very antennae of the Bees. Longevity wasn’t developed until around the year 3000–Lee here was one of the first to profit by it, if you remember–and suspended animation is still to come. So there’s one theory you can forget.”
“Arthur’s right,” Stryker said reluctantly. “An atomic-powered ship couldn’t have made such a trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant project couldn’t have lasted through forty generations, speculative fiction to the contrary–the later generations would have been too far removed in ideology and intent from their ancestors. They’d have adapted to shipboard life as the norm. They’d have atrophied physically, perhaps even have mutated–“
“And they’d never have fought past the Bees during the Hymenop invasion and occupation,” Farrell finished triumphantly. “The Bees had better detection equipment than we had. They’d have picked this ship up long before it reached Alphard Six.”
“But the ship wasn’t here in 3000,” Gibson said, “and it is now. Therefore it must have arrived at some time during the two hundred years of Hymenop occupation and evacuation.”
Farrell, tangled in contradictions, swore bitterly. “But why should the Bees let them through? The three domes on Five are over two hundred years old, which means that the Bees were here before the ship came. Why didn’t they blast it or enslave its crew?”
“We haven’t touched on all the possibilities,” Gibson reminded him. “We haven’t even established yet that these people were never under Hymenop control. Precedent won’t hold always, and there’s no predicting nor evaluating the motives of an alien race. We never understood the Hymenops because there’s no common ground of logic between us. Why try to interpret their intentions now?”
Farrell threw up his hands in disgust. “Next you’ll say this is an ancient Terran expedition that actually succeeded! There’s only one way to answer the questions we’ve raised, and that’s to go down and see for ourselves. Ready, Xav?”
* * * * *
But uncertainty nagged uneasily at him when Farrell found himself alone in the helihopper with the forest flowing beneath like a leafy river and Xavier’s scouter disappearing bulletlike into the dusk ahead.
We never found a colony so advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose this is a Hymenop experiment that really paid off? The Bees did some weird and wonderful things with human guinea pigs–what if they’ve created the ultimate booby trap here, and primed it with conditioned myrmidons in our own form?
Suppose, he thought–and derided himself for thinking it–one of those suicidal old interstellar ventures did succeed?
Xavier’s voice, a mellow drone from the helihopper’s Ringwave-powered visicom, cut sharply into his musing. “The ship has discovered the scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly varying frequency. The operation seems pointless.”
Stryker’s voice followed, querulous with worry: “I’d better pull Xav back. It may be something lethal.”
“Don’t,” Gibson’s baritone advised. Surprisingly, there was excitement in the engineer’s voice. “I think they’re trying to communicate with us.”
Farrell was on the point of demanding acidly to know how one went about communicating by means of a fluctuating electric field when the unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in its plunging ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying of shadowy figures.