"You're too late," Farrell called. "Go away. Let me wait in peace." "If you knew what you're waiting for," a third voice said, "you'd go screaming mad." It was familiar, recalling vaguely a fat, good-natured face and ponderous, laughter-shaken paunch. "If you could see the place as you saw it when we first landed...." The disturbing implications of the words forced him reluctantly to remember a little of that first sight of Falak. ... The memory was sacrilege, soiling and cheapening the ecstasy of his anticipation. But it _had_ been different. * * * * * His first day on Falak had left Farrell sick with disgust. He had known from the beginning that the planet was small and arid, non-rotating, with a period of revolution about its primary roughly equal to ten Earth years. The _Marco Four_'s initial sweep of reconnaissance, spiraling from pole to pole, had supplied further information without preparing him at all for what the three-man Reclamations team was to find later. The weed-choked fields and crumbled desolation of Terran slave barracks had been depressing enough. The inevitable scattering of empty domes abandoned a hundred years before by the Hymenop conquerors had completed a familiar and unpromising pattern, a workaday blueprint that differed from previous experience only in one significant detail: There was no shaggy, disoriented remnant of descendants from the original colonists. The valley, a mile-wide crater sunk between thousand-foot cliffs, floored with straggling bramble thickets and grass flats pocked with stagnant pools and quaking slime-bogs, had been infinitely worse. The cryptic three-dimensional maze of bridges spanning the pit had made landing there a ticklish undertaking. Stryker and Farrell and Gibson, after a conference, had risked the descent only because the valley offered a last possible refuge for survivors. Their first real hint of what lay ahead of them came when Xavier, the ship's mechanical, opened the personnel port against the heat and humid stink of the place. "Another damned tropical pesthole," Farrell said, shucking off his comfortable shorts and donning booted coveralls for the preliminary survey. "The sooner we count heads--assuming there are any left to count--and get out of here, the better. The long-term Reorientation boys can have this one and welcome." Stryker, characteristically, had laughed at his navigator's prompt disgust. Gibson, equally predictable in his way, had gathered his gear with precise efficiency, saying nothing. "It's a routine soon finished," Stryker said. "There can't be more than a handful of survivors here, and in any case we're not required to do more than gather data from full-scale recolonization. Our main job is to prepare Reorientation if we can for whatever sort of slave-conditioning deviltry the Hymenops practiced on this particular world." Farrell grunted sourly. "You love these repulsive little puzzles, don't you?"