left undone and finding nothing. He even went so far as to make a below-decks check on the ship's matter-synthesizer, an indispensable unit designed for the conversion of waste to any chemical compound, and gave it up in annoyance when he found that all such operational details were filed with infallible exactness in Xavier's plastoid head.

The return of Stryker and Gibson only aggravated his impatience. He had expected them to discover concealed approaches to the maze of bridging overhead, tunnelings in the cliff-face to hidden caverns complete with bloodstained altars and caches of sacrificial weapons, or at least some ominous sign of preparation among the natives. But there was nothing.

"No more than yesterday," Stryker said. Failure had cost him a share of his congenital good-humor, leaving him restless and uneasy. "There's nothing to find, Arthur. We've seen it all."

Surprisingly, Gibson disagreed.

"We'll know what we're after when darkness falls," he said. "But that's a good twelve hours away. In the meantime, there's a possibility that our missing key is outside the crater, rather than here inside it."

They turned on him together, both baffled and apprehensive.

"What do you mean, outside?" Farrell demanded. "There's nothing there but grassland. We made sure of that at planetfall."

"We mapped four Hymenop domes on reconnaissance," Gibson reminded him. "But we only examined three to satisfy ourselves that they were empty. The fourth one—"

Farrell interrupted derisively. "That ancient bogey again? Gib, the domes are always empty. The Bees pulled out a hundred years ago."

Gibson said nothing, but his black-browed regard made Farrell flush uncomfortably.

"Gib is right," Stryker intervened. "You're too young in Colonial Reclamations to appreciate the difficulty of recognizing an alien logic, Arthur, let alone the impossibility of outguessing it. I've knocked about these ecological madhouses for the better part of a century, and the more I see of Hymenop work, the more convinced I am that we'll never equate human and Hymenop ideologies. It's like trying to add quantities of dissimilar objects and expressing the result in a single symbol; it can't be done, because there's no possible common denominator for reducing the disparate elements to similarity."

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