similarity.

"They're all young," he said. "The oldest can't be more than twenty—twenty-five at most!"

Stryker scowled, puzzled without sharing Farrell's unease. "You're right. Where are the older ones?"

"Another of your precious little puzzles," Farrell said sourly. "I hope you enjoy unraveling it."

"Oh, we'll get to the bottom of it," Stryker said with assurance. "We'll have to, before we can leave them here."

They made a slow circuit of the lake, and the closer inspection offered a possible solution to the problem Stryker had posed. Chipped and weathered as the bones littering the mudflats were, their grisly shapings were unmistakable.

"I'd say that these are the bones of the older people," Stryker hazarded, "and that they represent the end result of another of these religio-economic control compulsions the Hymenops like to condition into their slaves. Men will go to any lengths to observe a tradition, especially when its origin is forgotten. If these people were once conditioned to look on old age as intolerable—"

"If you're trying to say that they kill each other off at maturity," Farrell interrupted, "the inference is ridiculous. In a hundred years they'd have outgrown a custom so hard to enforce. The balance of power would have rested with the adults, not with the children, and adults are generally fond of living.

Stryker looked to Gibson for support, received none, and found himself saddled with his own contention. "Economic necessity, then, since the valley can support only a limited number. Some of the old North American Indians followed a similar custom, the oldest son throttling the father when he grew too old to hunt."

"But even there infanticide was more popular than patricide," Farrell pointed out. "No group would practice decimation from the top down. It's too difficult to enforce."

Stryker answered him with a quotation from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook, maliciously taking the pontifical classmaster's tone best calculated to irritate Farrell.

"Chapter Four, Subsection One, Paragraph Nineteen: Any custom, fixation or compulsion accepted as the norm by one group of human beings can be understood and evaluated by any other group not influenced by the same ideology, since the basic perceptive abilities of 

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