apart, through dew-drenched grass flats that gleamed like fields of diamonds under the early morning sun. From the village, as they approached, straggled the inevitable exodus of adults and half-grown children, moving silently out to the fields.

"Weird beggars," Farrell said into his audiphone button. "They don't even rub elbows at work. You'd think they were afraid of being contaminated."

Stryker's voice came tinnily in his ear. "They won't seem so strange once we learn their motivations. I'm beginning to think this aloofness of theirs is a religious concomitant, Arthur, a hangover from slave-controls designed to prevent rebellion through isolation. Considering what they must have suffered under the Hymenops, it's a wonder they're even sane."

"I'll grant the religious origin," Farrell said. "But I wouldn't risk a centicredit on their sanity. I think the lot of them are nuts."

The village was not deserted, but so far as Farrell's coming was concerned, it might as well have been. The few women and children he saw on the streets ignored him—and Tarvil—completely.

He met with only one sign of interest, when a naked boy perhaps six years old stared curiously and asked something in a childish treble of the woman accompanying him. The woman answered with a single sharp word and struck the child across the face, sending him sprawling.

Farrell relayed the incident. "She said 'Quiet!' and slapped him down, Lee. They start their training early."

"Their sort of indifference couldn't be congenital," Stryker said. His tinny murmur took on a puzzled sound. "But they've been free for four generations. It's hard to believe that any forcibly implanted control mechanism could remain in effect so long."

A shadow blocked the sun, bringing a faint chill to Farrell when he looked up to see the great rounded hump of the dome looming over him.

"I'm going into the dome now," he said. "It's like all the others—no openings except at ground level, where it's riddled with them."

Tarvil did not accompany him inside. Farrell, looking back as he thumbed his hand-torch alight in the nearest entranceway, saw the native squatting on his heels and looking after him without a single trace of interest.

"I'm at ground level," Farrell said later, "in what seems to have 

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