mming gently, hung
at the moment just inside the orbit of Alphard Six's single dun-colored
moon.

Gibson put down a test meter with an air of finality.

"Nothing damaged but the Zero Interval Transfer computer. I can realign
that in a couple of hours, but it'll have to be done before we hit
Transfer again."

* * * * *

Stryker looked dubious. "What if the issue is forced before the ZIT unit
is repaired? Suppose they come up after us?"

"I doubt that they can. Any installation crudely enough equipped to
trust in guided missiles is hardly likely to have developed efficient
space craft."

Stryker was not reassured.

"That torpedo of theirs was deadly enough," he said. "And its nature
reflects the nature of the people who made it. Any race vicious enough
to use atomic charges is too dangerous to trifle with." Worry made
comical creases in his fat, good-humored face. "We'll have to find out
who they are and why they're here, you know."

"They can't be Hymenops," Gibson said promptly. "First, because the Bees
pinned their faith on Ringwave energy fields, as we did, rather than on
missiles. Second, because there's no dome on Six."

"There were three empty domes on Five, which is a desert planet,"
Farrell pointed out. "Why didn't they settle Six? It's a more habitable
world."

Gibson shrugged. "I know the Bees always erected domes on every planet
they colonized, Arthur, but precedent is a fallible tool. And it's even
more firmly established that there's no possibility of our rationalizing
the motivations of a culture as alien as the Hymenops'--we've been over
that argument a hundred times on other reclaimed worlds."

"But this was never an unreclaimed world," Farrell said with the faint
malice of one too recently caught in the wrong. "Alphard Six was
surveyed and seeded with Terran bacteria around the year 3000, but the
Bees invaded before we could colonize. And that means we'll have to rule
out any resurgent colonial group down there, because Six never had a
colony in the beginning."

"The Bees have been gone for over a hundred years," Stryker said.
"Colonists might have migrated from another Terran-occupied planet."

Gibson disagreed.

"We've touched at every inhabited world in this sector, Lee, and not one
surviving colony has developed space travel on its own. The Hymenops had
a hundred years to condition their human slaves to ignorance of
everything beyond their immediate e