ap here, and primed it with conditioned myrmidons in
our own form?

Suppose, he thought--and derided himself for thinking it--one of those
suicidal old interstellar ventures _did_ succeed?

Xavier's voice, a mellow drone from the helihopper's Ringwave-powered
visicom, cut sharply into his musing. "The ship has discovered the
scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments
record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly
varying frequency. The operation seems pointless."

Stryker's voice followed, querulous with worry: "I'd better pull Xav
back. It may be something lethal."

"Don't," Gibson's baritone advised. Surprisingly, there was excitement
in the engineer's voice. "I think they're trying to communicate with
us."

Farrell was on the point of demanding acidly to know how one went about
communicating by means of a fluctuating electric field when the
unexpected cessation of forest diverted his attention. The helihopper
scudded over a cultivated area of considerable extent, fields stretching
below in a vague random checkerboard of lighter and darker earth, an
undefined cluster of buildings at their center. There was a central
bonfire that burned like a wild red eye against the lower gloom, and in
its plunging ruddy glow he made out an urgent scurrying of shadowy
figures.

"I'm passing over a hamlet," Farrell reported. "The one nearest the
city, I think. There's something odd going on down--"

Catastrophe struck so suddenly that he was caught completely unprepared.
The helihopper's flimsy carriage bucked and crumpled. There was a
blinding flare of electric discharge, a pungent stink of ozone and a
stunning shock that flung him headlong into darkness.

* * * * *

He awoke slowly with a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmare
heightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on a
narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cell
cluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers and
chests. The lighting was harsh and overbright and the air hung thick
with pungent unfamiliar chemical odors. From somewhere, far off yet at
the same time as near as the bulkhead above him, came the unceasing
drone of machinery.

Farrell sat up, groaning, when full consciousness made his position
clear. He had been shot down by God knew what sort of devastating
unorthodox weapon and was a prisoner in the grounded ship