tail: There was no
shaggy, disoriented remnant of descendants from the original colonists.

The valley, a mile-wide crater sunk between thousand-foot cliffs,
floored with straggling bramble thickets and grass flats pocked with
stagnant pools and quaking slime-bogs, had been infinitely worse. The
cryptic three-dimensional maze of bridges spanning the pit had made
landing there a ticklish undertaking. Stryker and Farrell and Gibson,
after a conference, had risked the descent only because the valley
offered a last possible refuge for survivors.

Their first real hint of what lay ahead of them came when Xavier, the
ship's mechanical, opened the personnel port against the heat and humid
stink of the place.

"Another damned tropical pesthole," Farrell said, shucking off his
comfortable shorts and donning booted coveralls for the preliminary
survey. "The sooner we count heads--assuming there are any left to
count--and get out of here, the better. The long-term Reorientation boys
can have this one and welcome."

Stryker, characteristically, had laughed at his navigator's prompt
disgust. Gibson, equally predictable in his way, had gathered his gear
with precise efficiency, saying nothing.

"It's a routine soon finished," Stryker said. "There can't be more than
a handful of survivors here, and in any case we're not required to do
more than gather data from full-scale recolonization. Our main job is to
prepare Reorientation if we can for whatever sort of slave-conditioning
deviltry the Hymenops practiced on this particular world."

Farrell grunted sourly. "You love these repulsive little puzzles, don't
you?"

* * * * *

Stryker grinned at him with good-natured malice. "Why not, Arthur? You
can play the accordion and sketch for entertainment, and Gib has his
star-maps and his chess sessions with Xavier. But for a fat old man,
rejuvenated four times and nearing his fifth and final, what else is
left except curiosity?"

He clipped a heat-gun and audicom pack to the belt of his bulging
coveralls and clumped to the port to look outside. Roiling gray fog
hovered there, diffusing the hot magenta point of Falak's sun to a
liverish glare half-eclipsed by the crater's southern rim. Against the
light, the spidery metal maze of foot-bridging stood out dimly, tracing
a random criss-cross pattern that dwindled to invisibility in the mists.

"That network is a Hymenop experiment of some sort," Stryker s