* * * * * "There's one reason why I'm edgy," Farrell said. "These Sadrians may be harmless, but they make a point of posting a guard over us. There's a sentry out there in the grass flats again tonight." He turned on Stryker uneasily. "I've watched on the infra-scanner while those sentries changed shifts, and they don't speak to each other. I've tracked them back to the village, but I've never seen one of them turn in a--" Down in the village a man screamed, a raw, tortured sound that brought both men up stiffly. A frantic drumming of running feet came to them, unmistakable across the little distance. The fleeing man came up from the dark huddle of cottages by the river and out across the grass flats, screaming. Pursuit overtook him halfway to the ship. There was a brief scuffling, a shadowy dispersal of silent figures. After that, nothing. "They did it again," Farrell said. "One of them tried to come up here to us. The others killed him, and who's to say what sort of twisted motive prompted them? They go to the dome together every morning, not speaking. They work all day in the fields without so much as looking at each other. But every night at least one of them tries to escape from the village and come up here--and this is what happens. We couldn't trust them, Lee, even if we could understand them!" "It's our job to understand them," Stryker said doggedly. "Our function is to find colonies disoriented by the Hymenops and to set them straight if we can. If we can't, we call in a long-term reorientation crew, and within three generations the culture will pass again for Terran. The fact that slave colonies invariably lose their knowledge of longevity helps; they don't get it back until they're ready for it. "I've seen some pretty foul results of Hymenop experimenting on human colonies, Arthur. There was the ninth planet of Beta Pegasi--rediscovered in 3910, I think it was--that developed a religious fixation on fertility, a mania fostered by the Hymenops to supply expendable labor for their mines. The natives stopped mining when the Hymenops gave up the invasion and went back to 70 Ophiuchi, but they were still multiplying like rabbits when we found them. They followed a cultural conviction something like that observed in Oriental races of ancient Terran history, but they didn't pursue the Oriental tradition of sacrosancts. They couldn't--there were too many of them. By the time they were found, they numbered fourteen _billions_ and they were eating each other. Still it took only three generations to set them straight." He took one of Farrell's cigarettes and puffed it placidly.