this time?"
"I'd like to go," Gibson said at once. "The ZIT computer can wait."
Stryker vetoed his offer as promptly. "No, the ZIT comes first. We mayhave to run for it, and we can't set up a Transfer jump without thecomputer. It's got to be me or Arthur."
Farrell felt the familiar chill of uneasiness that inevitably precededthis moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else thecircumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years--thesometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by thefleeing Hymenop conquerors--would have broken him long ago. But thatsame hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of hisimagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of an unknownand patently hostile force was anything but attractive.
"You two did the field work on the last location," he said. "It's hightime I took my turn--and God knows I'd go mad if I had to stay inshipand listen to Lee memorizing his Handbook subsections or to Gibpracticing dead languages with Xavier."
Stryker laughed for the first time since the explosion that had sonearly wrecked the _Marco Four_.
"Good enough. Though it wouldn't be more diverting to listen for hoursto you improvising enharmonic variations on the _Lament for Old Terra_with your accordion."
Gibson, characteristically, had a refinement to offer.
"They'll be alerted down there for a reconnaissance sally," he said."Why not let Xavier take the scouter down for overt diversion, and dropArthur off in the helihopper for a low-level check?"
Stryker looked at Farrell. "All right, Arthur?"
"Good enough," Farrell said. And to Xavier, who had not moved from hispost at the magnoscanner: "How does it look, Xav? Have you pinned downtheir base yet?"
The mechanical answered him in a voice as smooth and clear--and asinflectionless--as a 'cello note. "The planet seems uninhabited exceptfor a large island some three hundred miles in diameter. There aretwenty-seven small agrarian hamlets surrounded by cultivated fields.There is one city of perhaps a thousand buildings with a central square.In the square rests a grounded spaceship of approximately ten times thebulk of the _Marco Four_."
They crowded about the vision screen, jostling Xavier's jointed grayshape in their interest. The central city lay in minutest detail beforethem, the battered hulk of the grounded ship glinting rustily in thelate afternoon sunlight. Streets radiated away from the square inorderly succession, the whole so clearly depicted that they could seethe throngs of people surging up and down, tiny foreshortened facesturned toward the sky.
"At least they're human," Farrell said. Relief replaced in some measurehis earlier uneasiness. "Which means that they're Terran, and can bedealt with according to Reclamations routine. Is that hulk spaceworthy,Xav?"
Xavier's mellow drone assumed the convention vibrato that indicatedstark puzzlement. "Its breached hull makes the ship incapable of flight.Apparently it is used only to supply power to the outlying hamlets."
The mechanical put a flexible gray finger upon an indicator graphderived from a composite section of detector meters. "The powertransmitted seems to be gross electric current conveyed by metalliccables. It is generated through a crudely governed process of continuousatomic fission."
* * * * *
Farrell, himself appalled by the information, still found himself ableto chuckle at Stryker's bellow of consternation.
"_Continuous fission?_ Good God, only madmen would deliberately run arisk like that!"
Farrell prodded him with cheerful malice. "Why say mad _men_? Maybethey're humanoid aliens who thrive on hard radiation and look on thedanger of being blown to hell in the middle of the night as asatisfactory risk."
"They're not alien," Gibson said positively. "Their architecture isTerran, and so is their ship. The ship is incredibly primitive, though;those batteries of tubes at either end--"
"Are thrust reaction jets," Stryker finished in an awed voice."Primitive isn't the word, Gib--the thing is prehistoric! Rocketpropulsion hasn't been used in spacecraft since--how long, Xav?"
Xavier supplied the information with mechanical infallibility. "Sincethe year 2100 when the Ringwave propulsion-communication principle wasdiscovered. That principle has served men since."
Farrell stared in blank disbelief at the anomalous craft on the screen.Primitive, as Stryker had said, was not the word for it: clumsily ovoid,studded with torpedo domes and turrets and bristling at either end withpropulsion tubes, it lay at the center of its square like a rusted relicof a past largely destroyed and all but forgotten. What a magnificentdisregard its builders must have had, he thought, for their lives andthe genetic purity of their posterity! The sullen atomic fires banked inthat oxidizing hulk--
Stryker said plaintively, "If you're right, Gib, then we're more in thedark than ever. How could a Terran-built ship eleven hundred years oldget _here_?"
Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's contemplation of alternatives,seemed hardly to hear him.
"Logic or not-logic," Gibson said. "If it's a Terran artifact, we candiscover the reason for its presence. If not--"
"_Any problem posed by one group of human beings_," Stryker quoted hisHandbook, "_can be resolved by any other group, regardless of ideologyor conditioning, because the basic perceptive abilities of both must bethe same through identical heredity_."
"If it's an imitation, and this is another Hymenop experiment incondition ecology, then we're stumped to begin with," Gibson finished."Because we're not equipped to evaluate the psychology of alienmotivation. We've got to determine first which case applies here."
* * * * *
He waited for Farrell's expected irony, and when the navigatorforestalled him by remaining grimly quiet, continued.
"The obvious premise is that a Terran ship must have been built byTerrans. Question: Was it flown here, or built here?"
"It couldn't have been built here," Stryker said. "Alphard Six wassurveyed just before the Bees took over in 3025, and there was nothingof the sort here then. It couldn't have been built during the two and aquarter centuries since; it's obviously much older than that. It wasflown here."
"We progress," Farrell said dryly. "Now if you'll tell us _how_, we'reready to move."
"I think the ship was built on Terra during the Twenty-second Century,"Gibson said calmly. "The atomic wars during that period destroyedpractically all historical records along with the technology of thetime, but I've read well-authenticated reports of atomic-driven shipsleaving Terra before then for the nearer stars. The human race climbedout of its pit again during the Twenty-third Century and developed thetechnology that gave us the Ringwave. Certainly no atomic-powered shipswere built after the wars--our records are complete from that time."
Farrell shook his head at the inference. "I've read any number offanciful romances on the theme, Gib, but it won't stand up in practice.No shipboard society could last through a thousand-year space voyage.It's a physical and psychological impossibility. There's got to be someother explanation."
* * * * *
Gibson shrugged. "We can only eliminate the least likely alternativesand accept the simplest one remaining."
"Then we can eliminate this one now," Farrell said flatly. "It entails athousand-year voyage, which is an impossibility for any gross reactiondrive; the application of suspended animation or longevity or asuccessive-generation program, and a final penetration ofHymenop-occupied space to set up a colony under the very antennae of theBees. Longevity wasn't developed until around the year 3000--Lee herewas one of the first to profit by it, if you remember--and suspendedanimation is still to come. So there's one theory you can forget."
"Arthur's right," Stryker said reluctantly. "An atomic-powered ship_couldn't_ have made such a trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendantproject couldn't have lasted through forty generations, speculativefiction to the contrary--the later generations would have been too farremoved in ideology and intent from their ancestors. The
y'd have adaptedto shipboard life as the norm. They'd have atrophied physically, perhapseven have mutated--"
"And they'd never have fought past the Bees during the Hymenop invasionand occupation," Farrell finished triumphantly. "The Bees had betterdetection equipment than we had. They'd have picked this ship up longbefore it reached Alphard Six."
"But the ship wasn't here in 3000," Gibson said, "and it is now.Therefore it must have arrived at some time during the two hundredyears of Hymenop occupation