of
waste to any chemical compound, and gave it up in annoyance when he
found that all such operational details were filed with infallible
exactness in Xavier's plastoid head.

The return of Stryker and Gibson only aggravated his impatience. He had
expected them to discover concealed approaches to the maze of bridging
overhead, tunnelings in the cliff-face to hidden caverns complete with
bloodstained altars and caches of sacrificial weapons, or at least some
ominous sign of preparation among the natives. But there was nothing.

"No more than yesterday," Stryker said. Failure had cost him a share of
his congenital good-humor, leaving him restless and uneasy. "There's
nothing to find, Arthur. We've seen it all."

Surprisingly, Gibson disagreed.

"We'll know what we're after when darkness falls," he said. "But that's
a good twelve hours away. In the meantime, there's a possibility that
our missing key is _outside_ the crater, rather than here inside it."

* * * * *

They turned on him together, both baffled and apprehensive.

"What do you mean, outside?" Farrell demanded. "There's nothing there
but grassland. We made sure of that at planetfall."

"We mapped four Hymenop domes on reconnaissance," Gibson reminded him.
"But we only examined three to satisfy ourselves that they were empty.
The fourth one--"

Farrell interrupted derisively. "That ancient bogey again? Gib, the
domes are _always_ empty. The Bees pulled out a hundred years ago."

Gibson said nothing, but his black-browed regard made Farrell flush
uncomfortably.

"Gib is right," Stryker intervened. "You're too young in Colonial
Reclamations to appreciate the difficulty of recognizing an alien logic,
Arthur, let alone the impossibility of outguessing it. I've knocked
about these ecological madhouses for the better part of a century, and
the more I see of Hymenop work, the more convinced I am that we'll never
equate human and Hymenop ideologies. It's like trying to add quantities
of dissimilar objects and expressing the result in a single symbol; it
can't be done, because there's no possible common denominator for
reducing the disparate elements to similarity."

* * * * *

When Farrell kept silent, he went on, "Our own reactions, and
consequently our motivations, are based on broad attributes of love,
hate, fear, greed and curiosity. We might empathize with another species
that reacts as we