Stryker insisted. "It balanced well enough, as long as they were isolated. They accepted it because it was all they knew, and an abrupt reversal that negated their accustomed habits would create an impossible societal conflict. They were reoriented after the Fourth War, and succeeding generations adjusted to normal living without difficulty."

A sound from overhead made them look up. Gibson was standing in the Marco's open port.

"Conference," Gibson said in his heavy baritone, and went back inside.

They followed Gibson quickly and without question, more disturbed by the terse order than by the killing in the grass flats. Knowing Gibson, they realized that he would not have wasted even that one word unless emergency justified it.

They found him waiting in the chart room with Xavier. For the thousandth time, seeing the two together, Farrell found himself comparing them: the robot, smoothly functional from flexible gray plastoid body to featureless oval faceplate, blandly efficient, totally incapable of emotion; Gibson, short and dark and competent heavy-browed and humorless. Except for initiative, Farrell thought, the two of them could have traded identities and no one would have been able to notice any difference.

"Xav and I found our Ringwave trouble," Gibson said. "The generator is functioning, but the warp isn't going out. Something here on Sadr III is neutralizing it."

They stared at him as if he had just told them the planet was flat.

"But a Ringwave can't be stopped completely, once it is started," Stryker protested. "You'd have to dismantle it to shut it off, Gib!"

"The warping field can be damped out, though," Gibson said. "Adjacent generators operating at different phase levels will heterodyne at a frequency representing the mean variance between levels. The resulting beat-phase will be too low to maintain either field, and one or the other, or both, will blank out. If you remember, all Terran-designed power plants are set to the same phase for that reason."

"But these natives can't have a Ringwave plant!" Farrell argued. "There's only this one village on Sadr III, Gib, an insignificant little agrarian township! If they had the Ringwave, they'd be mechanized. They'd have vehicles, landing ports...."

"The Hymenops had the Ringwave," Gibson interrupted. "And they left the 

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