_He went toward it hesitantly, confused for the moment by a paramnesiac sense of repeated experience, the specious recognition of_ déjà vu. _It was a Ringwave generator, and it was the thing he had ventured into the dome to find._ _His confusion stemmed from its resemblance to the disabled generator aboard the_ Marco Four, _and from the stereo-sharp associations it evoked: Gibson working over the ship's power plant, his black-browed face scowling and intent, square brown body moving with a wrestler's easy economy of motion; Stryker, bald and fat and worried, wheezing up and down the companionway from engine bay to chart room, his concern divided between Gibson's task and Farrell's long silence in the dome._ _Stryker at this moment would be regretting the congenital optimism that had prompted him to send his navigator where he himself could not go. Sweating anxiety would have replaced Stryker's pontifical assurance, dried up his smug pattering of socio-psychological truisms lifted from the Colonial Reclamations Handbook...._ * * * * * "So far as adaptability is concerned," Stryker had said an eternal evening before, "_homo sapiens_ can be a pretty weird species. More given to mulish paradox, perhaps, than any alien life-form we're ever likely to run across out here." He had shifted his bulk comfortably on the grass under the _Marco Four's_ open port, undisturbed by the busy clatter of tools inside the ship where Gibson and Xavier, the _Marco's_ mechanical, worked over the disabled power plant. He laced his fingers across his fat paunch and peered placidly through the dusk at Farrell, who lay on his back, smoking and watching the stars grow bright in the evening sky. "Isolate a human colony from its parent planet for two centuries, enslave it for half that time to a hegemony as foreign as the Hymenops' hive-culture before abandoning it to its own devices, and anything at all in the way of eccentric social controls can develop. But men remain basically identical, Arthur, in spite of acquired superficial changes. They are inherently incapable of evolving any system of control mechanisms that cannot be understood by other men, provided the environmental circumstances that brought that system into being are known. At bottom, these Sadr III natives are no different from ourselves. Heredity won't permit it." Farrell, half listening, had been staring upward between the icy white brilliance of Deneb and the twin blue-and-yellow jewels of Albireo, searching for a remote twinkle of Sol. Five hundred light-years away out there, he was thinking, lay Earth. And from Earth all this gaudy alien glory was no more than another point of reference for backyard astronomers, a minor configuration casually familiar and unremarkable.