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“I’m passing over a hamlet,” Farrell reported. “The one nearest the city, I think. There’s something odd going on down–“

Catastrophe struck so suddenly that he was caught completely unprepared. The helihopper’s flimsy carriage bucked and crumpled. There was a blinding flare of electric discharge, a pungent stink of ozone and a stunning shock that flung him headlong into darkness.

* * * * *

He awoke slowly with a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmare heightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cell cluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers and chests. The lighting was harsh and overbright and the air hung thick with pungent unfamiliar chemical odors. From somewhere, far off yet at the same time as near as the bulkhead above him, came the unceasing drone of machinery.

Farrell sat up, groaning, when full consciousness made his position clear. He had been shot down by God knew what sort of devastating unorthodox weapon and was a prisoner in the grounded ship.

At his rising, a white-smocked fat man with anachronistic spectacles and close-cropped gray hair came into the room, moving with the professional assurance of a medic. The man stopped short at Farrell’s stare and spoke; his words were utterly unintelligible, but his gesture was unmistakable.

Farrell followed him dumbly out of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor’s end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier’s scouter lying, port open and undefended, on the square outside.

The mechanical had been as easily taken as himself, then. Stryker and Gibson, for all their professional caution, would fare no better–they could not have overlooked the capture of Farrell and Xavier, and when they tried as a matter of course to rescue them the Marco would be struck down in turn by the same weapon.

The fat medic turned and said something urgent in his unintelligible tongue. Farrell, dazed by the enormity of what had happened, followed without protest into an intersecting way that led through a bewildering succession of storage rooms and hydroponics gardens, through a small gymnasium fitted with physical training equipment in graduated sizes and finally into a soundproofed place that could have been nothing but a nursery.

The implication behind its presence stopped Farrell short.

“A creche,” he said, stunned. He had a wild vision of endless generations of children growing up in this dim and stuffy room, to be taught from their first toddling steps the functions they must fulfill before the venture of which they were a part could be consummated.

One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was awed by the daring of that thousand-year odyssey. The realization left him more alarmed than before–for what technical marvels might not an isolated group of such dogged specialists have developed during a millennium of application?

Such a weapon as had brought down the helihopper and scouter was patently beyond reach of his own latter-day technology. Perhaps, he thought, its possession explained the presence of these people here in the first stronghold of the Hymenops; perhaps they had even fought and defeated the Bees on their own invaded ground.

He followed his white-smocked guide through a power room where great crude generators whirred ponderously, pouring out gross electric current into arm-thick cables. They were nearing the bow of the ship when they passed by another open port and Farrell, glancing out over the lowered rampway, saw that his fears for Stryker and Gibson had been well grounded.