eagereyes, he begged, "Don't run away, _please_. I'll be back."
In the ship, Stryker's moon-face peered wryly at him from the maincontrol screen.
"Drew another blank," it said. "You were right after all, Arthur--thefourth dome was empty. Gib and I are coming in now. We can't riskstaying out longer if we're going to be on hand when the curtain riseson our little mystery."
"Mystery?" Farrell echoed blankly. Earlier discussions came back slowly,posing a forgotten problem so ridiculous that he laughed. "We were wrongabout all that. It's wonderful here."
* * * * *
Stryker's face on the screen went long with astonishment. "Arthur, haveyou lost your mind? _What's wrong there?_"
"Nothing is wrong," Farrell said. "It's _right_." Memory prodded himagain, disturbingly. "Wait--I remember now what it was we came here for.But we're not going through with it."
He thought of the festival to come, of the young men and girls runninglithe in the dusk, splashing in the lake and calling joyously to eachother across the pale sands. The joyous innocence of their play broughtan appalling realization of what would happen if the fat outsider on thescreen should have his way:
The quiet paradise would be shattered and refashioned in smoky facsimileof Earth, the happy people herded together and set to work in dustyfields and whirring factories, multiplying tensions and frustrations asthey multiplied their numbers.
For what? For whom?
"You've got no right to go back and report all this," Farrell saidplaintively. "You'd ruin everything."
The alternative came to him and with it resolution. "But you won't goback. I'll see to that."
He left the screen and turned on the control panel with fingers thatremembered from long habit the settings required. Stryker's voicebellowed frantically after him, unheeded, while he fed into the ship'sautopilot a command that would send her plunging skyward bare minuteslater.
Then, ignoring the waiting mechanical's passive stare, he went outside.
The valley beckoned. The elfin laughter of the people by the laketouched a fey, responsive chord in him that blurred his eyes withecstatic tears and sent him running down the slope, the Falakian girlkeeping pace beside him.
Before he reached the lake, he had dismissed from his mind the ship andthe men who had brought it there.
* * * * *
But they would not let him forget. The little gray jointed one followedhim through the dancing and the laughter and cornered him finallyagainst the sheer cliffside. With the chase over, it held him there,waiting with metal patience in the growing dusk.
The audicom box slung over its shoulder boomed out in Gibson's voice,the sound a noisy desecration of the scented quiet.
"Don't let him get away, Xav," it said. "We're going to try for the shipnow."
The light dimmed, the soft shadows deepened. The two great-winged mothsfloated nearer, humming gently, their eyes glowing luminous and intentin the near-darkness. Mist currents from their approach brushedFarrell's face, and he held out his arms in an ecstasy of anticipationthat was a consummation of all human longing.
"_Now_," he whispered.
The moths dipped nearer.
The mechanical sent out a searing beam of orange light that tore thegloom, blinding him briefly. The humming ceased; when he could seeagain, the moths lay scorched and blackened at his feet. Their dead eyeslooked up at him dully, charred and empty; their bright gauzy wingssmoked in ruins of ugly, whiplike ribs.
He flinched when the girl touched his shoulder, pointing. A moth dippedtoward them out of the mists, eyes glowing like round emerald lanterns.Another followed.
The mechanical flicked out its orange beam and cut them down.
A roar like sustained thunder rose across the valley, shaking the groundunderfoot. A column of white-hot fire tore the night.
"The ship," Farrell said aloud, remembering.
He had a briefly troubled vision of the sleek metal shell lancing uptoward a black void of space powdered with cold star-points whose nameshe had forgotten, marooning them all in Paradise.
The audicom boomed in Gibson's voice, though oddly shaken and strained."Made it. Is he still safe, Xav?"
"Safe," the mechanical answered tersely. "The natives, too, so far."
"No thanks to _him_," Gibson said. "If you hadn't canceled the blastofforder he fed into the autopilot...." But after a moment of raggedsilence: "No, that's hardly fair. Those damned moths beat down Lee'sresistance in the few minutes it took us to reach the ship, and nearlygot me as well. Arthur was exposed to their influence from the momentthey started coming out."
Stryker's voice cut in, sounding more shaken than Gibson's. "Stand fastdown there. I'm setting off the first flare now."
* * * * *
A silent explosion of light, searing and unendurable, blasted the night.Farrell cried out and shielded his eyes with his hands, his ecstasy ofanticipation draining out of him like heady wine from a broken urn. Fullmemory returned numbingly.
When he opened his eyes again, the Falakian girl had run away. Under themerciless glare of light, the valley was as he had first seen it--anauseous charnel place of bogs and brambles and mudflats littered withyellowed bones.
In the near distance, a haggard mob of natives cowered like gaping,witless caricatures of humanity, faces turned from the descending blazeof the parachute flare. There was no more music or laughter. The greatmoths fluttered in silent frenzy, stunned by the flood of light.
"_So that's it_," Farrell thought dully. "_They come out with the winterdarkness to breed and lay their eggs, and they hold over men the samesort of compulsion that Terran wasps hold over their host tarantulas.But they're nocturnal. They lose their control in the light._"
Incredulously, he recalled the expectant euphoria that had blinded him,and he wondered sickly: "_Is that what the spider feels while it watchesits grave being dug?_"
A second flare bloomed far up in the fog, outlining the criss-crossnetwork of bridging in stark, alien clarity. A smooth minnow-shapedipped past and below it, weaving skilfully through the maze. Themechanical's voice box spoke again.
"Give us a guide beam, Xav. We're bringing the _Marco_ down."
The ship settled a dozen yards away, its port open. Farrell, with Xavierat his heels, went inside hastily, not looking back.
Gibson crouched motionless over his control panel, too intent on hisreadings to look up. Beside him, Stryker said urgently: "Hang on. We'vegot to get up and set another flare, quickly."
The ship surged upward.
* * * * *
Hours later, they watched the last of the flares glare below in asteaming geyser of mud and scum. The ship hovered motionless, its onlysound a busy droning from the engine room where her mass-synthesizerdischarged a deadly cloud of insecticide into the crater.
"There'll be some nasty coughing among the natives for a few days afterthis," Gibson said. "But it's better than being food for larvae....Reorientation will pull them out of that pesthole in a couple of months,and another decade will see them raising cattle and wheat again outside.The young adapt fast."
"The young, yes," Stryker agreed uncomfortably. "Personally, I'm gettingtoo old and fat for this business."
He shuddered, his paunch quaking. Farrell guessed that he was thinkingof what would have happened to them if Gibson had been as susceptible asthey to the overpowering fascination of the moths. A few more chrysalidsto open in the spring, an extra litter of bones to puzzle the nextReclamations crew....
"That should do it," Gibson said. He shut off the flow of insecticideand the mass-converter grew silent in the engine room below. "Exitanother Hymenop experiment in bastard synecology."
"I can understand how they might find, or breed, a nocturnal moth withbreeding-season control over human beings," Farrell said. "And howthey'd balance the relationship to a time-cycle that kept the hostspecies alive, yet never let it reach
maturity. But what sort ofprinciple would give an instinctive species compulsive control over anintelligent one, Gib? And what did the Bees get out of the arrangementin the first place?"
Gibson shrugged. "We'll understand the principle when--or if--we learnhow the wasp holds its spider helpless. Until then, we can only guess.As for identifying the motive that prompted the Hymenops to set up sucha balance, I doubt that we ever will. Could a termite understand why menbuild theaters?"
"There's a possible parallel in that," Stryker suggested. "Maybe thiswas the Hymenop idea of entertainment. They might have built the bridgeas balconies, where they could see the show."
"It could have been a business venture," Farrell suggested. "Maybe theyraised the moth larvae or pupae for the same reason we raise poultry. Asort of insectile chicken ranch."
"Or a kennel," Gibson said dryly. "Maybe they bred moths for pets, as webreed dogs."
Farrell grimaced sickly, revolted by the thought. "A pet farm? God, whata diet to feed them!"
* * * * *
Xavier came up from the galley, carrying a tray with three steamingcoffee-bulbs. Farrell, still pondering the problem of balance betweendominant and dominated species, found himself wondering for thethousandth time what went on in the alert positronic brain behind themechanical's featureless face.
"What do you think, Xav?" he demanded. "What sort of motive would yousay prompted the Hymenops to set up such a balance?"
"_Evaluation of alien motivations, conversely_," the mechanical said,finishing the Reclamations Handbook quotation which Stryker had begunmuch earlier, "_is essentially impossible because there can be no commonground of comprehension_."
It centered the tray neatly on the charting table and stood back inpolite but unmenial deference while they sucked at their coffee-bulbs.
"A greater mystery to me," Xavier went on, "is the congenitalrestlessness that drives men from their own comfortable worlds to suchdangers as you have met with here. How can I understand the motivationsof an alien people? I do not even understand those of the race thatbuilt me."
The three men looked at each other blankly, disconcerted by the ancientproblem so unexpectedly posed.
It was Stryker who sheepishly answered it.
"That's nothing for you to worry about, Xav," he said wryly. "Neither dowe."
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