Stryker threw up his hands in surrender. "We can't identify them by theorizing, and that brings us down to the business of first-hand investigation. Who's going to bell the cat 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 may have to run for it, and we can't set up a Transfer jump without the computer. It's got to be me or Arthur." Farrell felt the familiar chill of uneasiness that inevitably preceded this moment of decision. He was not lacking in courage, else the circumstances under which he had worked for the past ten years--the sometimes perilous, sometimes downright charnel conditions left by the fleeing Hymenop conquerors--would have broken him long ago. But that same hard experience had honed rather than blunted the edge of his imagination, and the prospect of a close-quarters stalking of an unknown and patently hostile force was anything but attractive. "You two did the field work on the last location," he said. "It's high time I took my turn--and God knows I'd go mad if I had to stay inship and listen to Lee memorizing his Handbook subsections or to Gib practicing dead languages with Xavier." Stryker laughed for the first time since the explosion that had so nearly wrecked the _Marco Four_. "Good enough. Though it wouldn't be more diverting to listen for hours to 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 drop Arthur 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 his post at the magnoscanner: "How does it look, Xav? Have you pinned down their base yet?" The mechanical answered him in a voice as smooth and clear--and as inflectionless--as a 'cello note. "The planet seems uninhabited except for a large island some three hundred miles in diameter. There are twenty-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 the bulk of the _Marco Four_." They crowded about the vision screen, jostling Xavier's jointed gray shape in their interest. The central city lay in minutest detail before them, the battered hulk of the grounded ship glinting rustily in the late afternoon sunlight. Streets radiated away from the square in orderly succession, the whole so clearly depicted that they could see the throngs of people surging up and down, tiny foreshortened faces turned toward the sky.