An enormous weapon is forcing people to keep
their troubles to themselves—it's dynamite!

Numb with the terror that had dogged him from the moment he regainedconsciousness and found himself naked and weaponless, Farrell had noidea how long he had been lost in the honeycombed darkness of theHymenop dome.

The darkness and damp chill of air told him that he was farunderground, possibly at the hive's lowest level. Somewhere abovehim, the silent audience chambers lay shrouded in lesser gloom, heavywith the dust of generations and peopled only by cryptic apian images.Outside the dome, in a bend of lazy silver river, sprawled the Sadr IIIvillage with its stoic handful of once-normal Terran colonists and, onthe hillside above the village, Gibson and Stryker and Xavier would bewaiting for him in the disabled Marco Four.

Waiting for him....

They might as well have been back on Terra, five hundred light-yearsaway.

Six feet away on either side, the corridor walls curved up faintly, aflattened oval of tunneling designed for multiple alien feet, lightedfor faceted eyes demanding the merest fraction of light necessaryfor an Earthman's vision. For two yards Farrell could see dimly, asthrough a heavy fog; beyond was nothing but darkness and an outlandishlabyrinth of cross-branching corridors that spiraled on forever withoutend.

Behind him, his pursuers—human natives or Hymenop invaders, he hadno way of knowing which—drew nearer with a dry minor rustling whosesuggestion of imminent danger sent Farrell plunging blindly on into themaze.

—To halt, sweating, when a sound exactly similar came to him fromahead.

It was what he had feared from the beginning. He could not go on, andhe could not go back.

He made out the intersecting corridor to his right, then a vague ovalopening that loomed faintly grayer than the wall about it. He dartedinto it as into a sanctuary, and realized too late that the choice hadbeen forced upon him.

It had been intended from the start that he should take this way. Hehad been herded here like a halterless beast, driven by the steadythreat of action never quite realized. They had known where he wasgoing, and why.

But there was light down there somewhere at the end of the tunnel'saimless wanderings. If, once there, he could see—

He did not find light, only a lesser darkness. The tunnel led himinto a larger place whose outer reaches were lost in shadow, but whosecentral area held a massive cylindrical machine at once alien andfamiliar.

He went toward it hesitantly, confused for the moment by a paramnesiacsense of repeated experience, the specious recognition of déjà vu.

It was a Ringwave generator, and it was the thing he had ventured intothe dome to find.

His confusion stemmed from its resemblance to the disabled generatoraboard the Marco Four, and from the stereo-sharp associations itevoked: Gibson working over the ship's powe