how to fight them."

He looked at Xavier's silent plastoid figure with something like affection. "We'd have lost that war without Xave's kind. We couldn't match wits with Hymenop hive-minds, any more than a swarm of grasshoppers could stand up to a colony of wasps. But we made mechanicals that could. Cybernetic brains and servo-crews, ships that thought for themselves...."

He squinted at the visiscreen with its cryptic, star-streaked dome. "But they don't think as we do. They may have left a rear guard here, or they may have boobytrapped the dome."

"One of us will have to find out which it is," Farrell said. He took a restless turn about the chart room, weighing the probabilities. "It seems to fall in my department."

Stryker stared. "You? Why?"

"Because I'm the only one who can go. Remember what Gib said about changing the Marco's Ringwave to resonate with the interfering generator? Gib can make the change; I can't. You're—"

"Too old and fat," Stryker finished for him. "And too damned slow and garrulous. You're right, of course."

They let it go at that and put Xavier on guard for the night. The mechanical was infinitely more alert and sensitive to approach than any of the crew, but the knowledge did not make Farrell's sleep the sounder.

He dozed fitfully, waking a dozen times during the night to smoke cigarettes and to speculate fruitlessly on what he might find in the dome. He was sweating out a nightmare made hideous by monstrous bees that threatened him in buzzing alien voices when Xavier's polite monotone woke him for breakfast.

Farrell was halfway down the grassy slope to the village when he realized that the Marco was still under watch. Approaching close enough for recognition, he saw that the sentry this time was Tarvil, the Sadrian who had first approached the ship. The native's glance took in Farrell's shoulder-pack of testing tools and audiphone, brushed the hand-torch and blast gun at the Terran's belt, and slid away without trace of expression.

"I'm going into the dome," Farrell said. He tried to keep the uncertainty out of his voice, and felt a rasp of irritation when he failed. "Is there a taboo against that?"

The native fell in beside him without speaking and they went down together, walking a careful ten feet 

 Prev. P 8/14 next