e came to the motivation and the means
of transportation that placed the Arzians in pairs on the islet, when
his whole fabric of speculation fell into a tangled snarl of
inconsistencies. He gave it up finally; how could any Earthman
rationalize the outlandish compulsions that actuated so alien a race?

He went inside again, and the sound of Stryker's muffled snoring fanned
his restlessness. He made his decision abruptly, laying aside the
magnoscanner for a hand-flash and a pocket-sized audicom unit which he
clipped to the belt of his shorts.

He did not choose a weapon because he saw no need for one. The torch
would show him how the natives reached the outcrop, and if he should
need help the audicom would summon Stryker. Investigating without
Stryker's sanction was, strictly speaking, a breach of Terran
Regulations, but--

"Damn Terran Regulations," he muttered. "I've got to _know_."

Farrell snapped on the torch at the edge of the thorn forest and entered
briskly, eager for action now that he had begun. Just inside the edge of
the bramble he came upon a pair of Arzians curled up together on the
mossy ground, sleeping soundly, their triangular faces wholly blank and
unrevealing.

He worked deeper into the underbrush and found other sleeping couples,
but nothing else. There were no humming insects, no twittering
night-birds or scurrying rodents. He had worked his way close to the
center of the island without further discovery and was on the point of
turning back, disgusted, when something bulky and powerful seized him
from behind.

A sharp sting burned his shoulder, wasp-like, and a sudden overwhelming
lassitude swept him into a darkness deeper than the Arzian night. His
last conscious thought was not of his own danger, but of Stryker--asleep
and unprotected behind the _Marco's_ open port....

* * * * *

He was standing erect when he woke, his back to the open sea and a
prismatic glimmer of early-dawn rainbow shining on the water before him.
For a moment he was totally disoriented; then from the corner of an eye
he caught the pinkish blur of an Arzian fisher standing beside him, and
cried out hoarsely in sudden panic when he tried to turn his head and
could not.

He was on the coral outcropping offshore, and except for the involuntary
muscles of balance and respiration his body was paralyzed.

The first red glow of sunrise blurred the reflected rainbow at his feet,
but for some