The Project Gutenberg EBook of Control Group, by Roger Dee

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Title: Control Group

Author: Roger Dee

Release Date: March 29, 2008 [EBook #24949]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_"Any problem posed by one group of
human beings can be resolved by any
other group." That's what the Handbook
said. But did that include primitive
humans? Or the Bees? Or a ..._

CONTROL GROUP

By ROGER DEE

The cool green disk of Alphard Six on the screen was infinitely welcome
after the arid desolation and stinking swamplands of the inner planets,
an airy jewel of a world that might have been designed specifically for
the hard-earned month of rest ahead. Navigator Farrell, youngest and
certainly most impulsive of the three-man Terran Reclamations crew,
would have set the _Marco Four_ down at once but for the greater caution
of Stryker, nominally captain of the group, and of Gibson, engineer, and
linguist. Xavier, the ship's little mechanical, had--as was usual and
proper--no voice in the matter.

"Reconnaissance spiral first, Arthur," Stryker said firmly. He chuckled
at Farrell's instant scowl, his little eyes twinkling and his naked
paunch quaking over the belt of his shipboard shorts. "Chapter One,
Subsection Five, Paragraph Twenty-seven: _No planetfall on an
unreclaimed world shall be deemed safe without proper--_"

Farrell, as Stryker had expected, interrupted with characteristic
impatience. "Do you _sleep_ with that damned Reclamations Handbook, Lee?
Alphard Six isn't an unreclaimed world--it was never colonized before
the Hymenop invasion back in 3025, so why should it be inhabited now?"

Gibson, who for four hours had not looked up from his interminable chess
game with Xavier, paused with a beleaguered knight in one blunt brown
hand.

"No point in taking chances," Gibson said in his neutral baritone. He
shrugged thick bare shoulders, his humorless black-browed face unmoved,
when Farrell included him in his scowl. "We're two hundred twenty-six
light-y