he colony willing to deal with
them secretly, and the natives are clever enough to circumvent any
discipline I aim against them."

"What else can you do, short of--genocide?"

"Why rule out genocide? Sam, face it! Race extermination is the only
permanent and satisfactory solution."

The thought was abhorrent to me, but he argued, "If we don't eliminate
them entirely they'll always be around to plague us. Just picture what
this or any future colony would look like after a year or two of
uninhibited mingling and loafing and swilling down that tala. Is that
the civilization that Earth sent us out here to establish?"

In every part of the universe where living conditions have been too kind
and discipline too lax, men have been known to _go native_, and suddenly
I felt that Benson had been much more acute in his apprehensions than I,
a graduate psychologist who was supposed to understand human nature.

Somewhat subdued I said, "How do you plan to accomplish a complete
extermination? If we start hunting them down they'll just fade into the
woods. Besides, you'd have a devil of a time getting agreement among our
people to take on such a messy project."

"It has to be done, that's all. I want you to keep completely quiet
about what we've learned until I can think about it. Bromley should have
some ideas. He's a biologist."

When Benson said, "biologist", the obvious solution popped into my head.
"If we could sterilize them--all the males, anyway--they have such a
short life-span--"

"Too slow. Besides, how are you going to coax all the males to lie down
and--" His eyes opened wider, "Radiation!"

"Exactly. We take them for a tour of the ship, including the X-ray
booth, and pour on the power."

"Might be done at that. But it would be so slow."

* * * * *

Slow or not, no better plan was conceived among six of us who met
secretly that night in Benson's new ship quarters. Donnegan brought his
fellow biologist, Terrence Frost, and I had contacted the two medics. We
reached swift agreement as to the necessity of taking steps, and decided
to work on my rough plan. It was also voted not to divulge our
intentions to the others, and then the meeting broke up.

When I returned to my hut, Jane was sitting cross-legged just outside my
door visiting with Susan. I thought she would be curious about the
confidential nature of the meeting from which she was excluded, but she
had other things on he