to come up here to us. The others killed him, and who's to say what sort of twisted motive prompted them? They go to the dome together every morning, not speaking. They work all day in the fields without so much as looking at each other. But every night at least one of them tries to escape from the village and come up here—and this is what happens. We couldn't trust them, Lee, even if we could understand them!"

"It's our job to understand them," Stryker said doggedly. "Our function is to find colonies disoriented by the Hymenops and to set them straight if we can. If we can't, we call in a long-term reorientation crew, and within three generations the culture will pass again for Terran. The fact that slave colonies invariably lose their knowledge of longevity helps; they don't get it back until they're ready for it.

"I've seen some pretty foul results of Hymenop experimenting on human colonies, Arthur. There was the ninth planet of Beta Pegasi—rediscovered in 3910, I think it was—that developed a religious fixation on fertility, a mania fostered by the Hymenops to supply expendable labor for their mines. The natives stopped mining when the Hymenops gave up the invasion and went back to 70 Ophiuchi, but they were still multiplying like rabbits when we found them. They followed a cultural conviction something like that observed in Oriental races of ancient Terran history, but they didn't pursue the Oriental tradition of sacrosancts. They couldn't—there were too many of them. By the time they were found, they numbered fourteen billions and they were eating each other. Still it took only three generations to set them straight."

He took one of Farrell's cigarettes and puffed it placidly.

"For that matter, Earth had her own share of eccentric cultures. I recall reading about one that existed as late as the twentieth century and equaled anything we're likely to find here. Any society should be geared to a set of social controls designed to furnish it, as a whole with a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of discomfort, but these ancient Terrestrial Dobuans—island aborigines, as I remember it—had adjusted to their total environment in a manner exactly opposite. They reversed the norm and became a society of paranoiacs, hating each other in direct ratio to nearness of relationship. Husbands and wives detested each other, sons and fathers—"

"Now you're pulling my leg," Farrell protested. "A society like that would be too irrational to function."

"But the system worked," 

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