been a storage section. Empty now, with dust everywhere except in the corridors the natives use when they come in, mornings. No sign of Hymenops yet."

Stryker's voice turned worried. "Look sharp for traps, Arthur. The place may be mined."

The upper part of the dome, Farrell knew from previous experience, would have been given over in years past to Hymenop occupation, layer after rising layer of dormitories tiered like honeycombs to conserve space. He followed a spiral ramp downward to the level immediately below surface, and felt his first excitement of discovery when he found himself in the audience chambers that, until the Marco's coming, had been the daily goal of the Sadrian natives.

The level was entirely taken up with bare ten-foot cubicles, each cramped chamber dominated by a cryptic metal-and-crystal likeness of the Hymenop head set into the metal wall opposite its corridor entrance. From either side of a circular speaking-grill, the antennae projected into the room, rasplike and alert, above faceted crystal eyes that glowed faintly in the near-darkness. The craftsmanship was faultless, stylized after a fashion alien to Farrell's imagining and personifying with disturbing realism the soulless, arrogant efficiency of the Hymenop hive-mind. To Farrell, there was about each image a brooding air of hypnotic fixity.

"Something new in Hymenop experiments," he reported to Stryker. "None of the other domes we found had anything like this. These things have some bearing on the condition of the natives, Lee—there's a path worn through the dust to every image, and I can see where the people knelt. I don't like it. I've got a hunch that whatever these damned idols were used for succeeded too well."

"They can't be idols," Stryker said. "The Hymenops would have known how hard it is to displace anthropomorphism entirely from human worship. But I think you're right about the experiment's working too well. No ordinary compulsion would have stuck so long. Periodic hypnosis? Wait, Arthur, that's an angle I want to check with Gibson...."

He was back a moment later, wheezing with excitement.

"Gib thinks I'm on the right track—periodic hypnosis. The Hymenops must have assigned a particular chamber and image to each slave. The images are mechanicals, robot mesmerists designed to keep the natives' compulsion-to-isolation renewed. Post-hypnotic suggestion kept the poor devils coming back every morning, and their children with 

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