oval opening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He darted into it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice had been forced upon him.

It had been intended from the start that he should take this way. He had been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steady threat of action never quite realized. They had known where he was going, and why.

But there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel's aimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see—

He did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led him into a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whose central area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien and familiar.

He went toward it hesitantly, confused for the moment by a paramnesiac sense of repeated experience, the specious recognition of déjà vu.

It was a Ringwave generator, and it was the thing he had ventured into the dome to find.

His confusion stemmed from its resemblance to the disabled generator aboard the Marco Four, and from the stereo-sharp associations it evoked: Gibson working over the ship's power plant, his black-browed face scowling and intent, square brown body moving with a wrestler's easy economy of motion; Stryker, bald and fat and worried, wheezing up and down the companionway from engine bay to chart room, his concern divided between Gibson's task and Farrell's long silence in the dome.

Stryker at this moment would be regretting the congenital optimism that had prompted him to send his navigator where he himself could not go. Sweating anxiety would have replaced Stryker's pontifical assurance, dried up his smug pattering of socio-psychological truisms lifted from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook....

"So far as adaptability is concerned," Stryker had said an eternal evening before, "homo sapiens can be a pretty weird species. More given to mulish paradox, perhaps, than any alien life-form we're ever likely to run across out here."

He had shifted his bulk comfortably on the grass under the Marco Four's open port, undisturbed by the busy clatter of tools inside the ship where Gibson and Xavier, the Marco's mechanical, worked over the disabled power plant. He laced his fingers across his fat paunch and peered placidly through the dusk at Farrell, who lay on his back, smoking and watching the stars grow bright in the evening sky.

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