alted him and he stood with the Falakian girl beside
him, looking back through the mists and savoring the sweet, quiet
mystery of the valley. Motion stirred there; the pair of them laughed
like anticipant children when two wide-winged moths swam into sight and
floated toward them, eyes glowing like veiled emeralds.

Footsteps followed, disembodied in the dusk.

"It is only Xavier," a voice said. Its mellow uninflection evoked a
briefly disturbing memory of a slight gray figure, jointed yet curiously
flexible, and a featureless oval of face.

It came out of the mists and halted a dozen yards away, and he saw that
it spoke into a metallic box slung over one shoulder.

"He is unharmed," it said. "Directions?"

Xavier? Directions? From whom?

Another voice answered from the shoulder-box, bringing a second mental
picture of a face--square and brown, black-browed and taciturnly
humorless--that he had known and forgotten.

Whose, and where?

"Hold him there, Xav," it said. "Stryker and I are going to try to reach
the ship now."

The moths floated nearer, humming gently.

"You're too late," Farrell called. "Go away. Let me wait in peace."

"If you knew what you're waiting for," a third voice said, "you'd go
screaming mad." It was familiar, recalling vaguely a fat, good-natured
face and ponderous, laughter-shaken paunch. "If you could see the place
as you saw it when we first landed...."

The disturbing implications of the words forced him reluctantly to
remember a little of that first sight of Falak.

... The memory was sacrilege, soiling and cheapening the ecstasy of his
anticipation.

But it _had_ been different.

* * * * *

His first day on Falak had left Farrell sick with disgust.

He had known from the beginning that the planet was small and arid,
non-rotating, with a period of revolution about its primary roughly
equal to ten Earth years. The _Marco Four_'s initial sweep of
reconnaissance, spiraling from pole to pole, had supplied further
information without preparing him at all for what the three-man
Reclamations team was to find later.

The weed-choked fields and crumbled desolation of Terran slave barracks
had been depressing enough. The inevitable scattering of empty domes
abandoned a hundred years before by the Hymenop conquerors had completed
a familiar and unpromising pattern, a workaday blueprint that differed
from previous experience only in one significant de