.

At his rising, a white-smocked fat man with anachronistic spectacles and
close-cropped gray hair came into the room, moving with the professional
assurance of a medic. The man stopped short at Farrell's stare and
spoke; his words were utterly unintelligible, but his gesture was
unmistakable.

Farrell followed him dumbly out of the infirmary and down a bare
corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the
corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of
reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how
long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw
Xavier's scouter lying, port open and undefended, on the square outside.

The mechanical had been as easily taken as himself, then. Stryker and
Gibson, for all their professional caution, would fare no better--they
could not have overlooked the capture of Farrell and Xavier, and when
they tried as a matter of course to rescue them the _Marco_ would be
struck down in turn by the same weapon.

The fat medic turned and said something urgent in his unintelligible
tongue. Farrell, dazed by the enormity of what had happened, followed
without protest into an intersecting way that led through a bewildering
succession of storage rooms and hydroponics gardens, through a small
gymnasium fitted with physical training equipment in graduated sizes and
finally into a soundproofed place that could have been nothing but a
nursery.

The implication behind its presence stopped Farrell short.

"A _creche_," he said, stunned. He had a wild vision of endless
generations of children growing up in this dim and stuffy room, to be
taught from their first toddling steps the functions they must fulfill
before the venture of which they were a part could be consummated.

One of those old ventures _had_ succeeded, he thought, and was awed by
the daring of that thousand-year odyssey. The realization left him more
alarmed than before--for what technical marvels might not an isolated
group of such dogged specialists have developed during a millennium of
application?

Such a weapon as had brought down the helihopper and scouter was
patently beyond reach of his own latter-day technology. Perhaps, he
thought, its possession explained the presence of these people here in
the first stronghold of the Hymenops; perhaps they had even fought and
defeated the Bees on their own invaded ground.

He followed his white-smocke