document: "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-years from Sol, at
   the old limits of Terran expansion,
   and there's no knowing
   what we may turn up here. Alphard's
   was one of the first systems
   the Bees took over. It must
   have been one of the last to be
   abandoned when they pulled back
   to 70 Ophiuchi."
   
   "And I think you live for the
   day," Farrell said acidly, "when
   we'll stumble across a functioning
   dome of live, buzzing Hymenops.
   Damn it, Gib, the Bees
   pulled out a hundred years ago,
   before you and I were born—neither
   of us ever saw a Hymenop,
   and never will!"
   
   "But I saw them," Stryker
   said. "I fought them for the better
   part of the century they were
   here, and I learned there's no
   predicting nor understanding
   them. We never knew why they
   came nor why they gave up and
   left. How can we know whether
   they'd leave a rear-guard or
   booby trap here?"
   
   He put a paternal hand on
   Farrell's shoulder, understanding
   the younger man's eagerness
   and knowing that their close-knit
   team would have been the
   more poorly balanced without it.
   
   "Gib's right," he said. He
   nearly added as usual . "We're on
   rest leave at the moment, yes,
   but our mission is still to find
   Terran colonies enslaved and
   abandoned by the Bees, not to
   risk our necks and a valuable
   Reorientations ship by landing
   blind on an unobserved planet.
   We're too close already. Cut in
   your shields and find a reconnaissance
   spiral, will you?"
   
   Grumbling, Farrell punched
   coordinates on the Ringwave
   board that lifted the Marco Four out of her descent and restored
   the bluish enveloping haze of
   her repellors.
   
   Stryker's caution was justified
   on the instant. The speeding
   streamlined shape that had flashed
   up unobserved from below
   swerved sharply and exploded in
   a cataclysmic blaze of atomic
   fire that rocked the ship wildly
   and flung the three men to the
   floor in a jangling roar of
   alarms.
   
   
   
   "So the Handbook tacticians
   knew what they were about,"
   Stryker said minutes later. Deliberately
   he adopted the smug
   tone best calculated to sting Farrell
   out of his first self-reproach,
   and grinned when the navigator
   bristled defensively. "Some of
   their enjoinders seem a little
   stuffy and obvious at times, but
   they're eminently sensible."
   
   When Farrell refused to be
   baited Stryker turned to Gibson,
   who was busily assessing the
   damage done to the ship's more
   fragile equipment, and to Xavier,
   who searched the planet's
   surface with the ship's magnoscanner.
   The Marco Four , Ringwave
   generators humming gently,
   hung at the moment just
   inside the orbit of Alphard Six's
   single dun-colored moon.
   
   Gibson put down a test meter
   with an air of finality.
   
   "Nothing damaged but the
   Zero Interval Transfer computer.
   I can realign that in a couple
   of hours, but it'll have to be
   done before we hit Transfer
   again."
   
   
   
   Stryker looked dubious.
  "What if the issue is forced before
   the ZIT unit is repaired?
   Suppose they come up after us?"
   
   "I doubt that they can. Any
   installation crudely enough
   equipped to trust in guided missiles
   is hardly likely to have developed
   efficient space craft."
   
   Stryker was not reassured.
   
   "That torpedo of theirs was
   deadly enough," he said. "And
   its nature reflects the nature of
   the people who made it. Any race
   vicious enough to use atomic
   charges is too dangerous to
   trifle with." Worry made comical
   creases in his fat, good-humored
   face. "We'll have to find
   out who they are and why
   they're here, you know."
   
   "They can't be Hymenops,"
   Gibson said promptly. "First,
   because the Bees pinned their
   faith on Ringwave energy fields,
   as we did, rather than on missiles.
   Second, because there's no
   dome on Six."
   
   "There were three empty
   domes on Five, which is a desert
   planet," Farrell pointed out.
  "Why didn't they settle Six? It's
   a more habitable world."
   
   Gibson shrugged. "I know the
   Bees always erected domes on
   every planet they colonized, Arthur,
   but precedent is a fallible
   tool. And it's even more firmly
   established that there's no possibility
   of our rationalizing the
   motivations of a culture as alien
   as the Hymenops'—we've been
   over that argument a hundred
   times on other reclaimed
   worlds."
   
   "But this was never an unreclaimed
   world," Farrell said
   with the faint malice of one too
   recently caught in the wrong.
  "Alphard Six was surveyed and
   seeded with Terran bacteria
   around the year 3000, but the
   Bees invaded before we could
   colonize. And that means we'll
   have to rule out any resurgent
   colonial group down there, because
   Six never had a colony in
   the beginning."
   
   "The Bees have been gone for
   over a hundred years," Stryker
   said. "Colonists might have migrated
   from another Terran-occupied
   planet."
   
   Gibson disagreed.
   
   "We've touched at every inhabited
   world in this sector, Lee,
   and not one surviving colony has
   developed space travel on its
   own. The Hymenops had a hundred
   years to condition their human
   slaves to ignorance of
   everything beyond their immediate
   environment—the motives
   behind that conditioning usually
   escape us, but that's beside the
   point—and they did a thorough
   job of it. The colonists have had
   no more than a century of freedom
   since the Bees pulled out,
   and four generations simply
   isn't enough time for any subjugated
   culture to climb from
   slavery to interstellar flight."
   
   Stryker made a padding turn
   about the control room, tugging
   unhappily at the scanty fringe
   of hair the years had left him.
   
   "If they're neither Hymenops
   nor resurgent colonists," he said,
  "then there's only one choice remaining—they're
   aliens from a
   system we haven't reached yet,
   beyond the old sphere of Terran
   exploration. We always assumed
   that we'd find other races out
   here someday, and that they'd
   be as different from us in form
   and motivation as the Hymenops.
   Why not now?"
   
   Gibson said seriously, "Not
   probable, Lee. The same objection
   that rules out the Bees applies
   to any trans-Alphardian
   culture—they'd have to be beyond
   the atomic fission stage,
   else they'd never have attempted
   interstellar flight. The Ringwave
   with its Zero Interval Transfer
   principle and instantaneous communications
   applications is the
   only answer to long-range travel,
   and if they'd had that they
   wouldn't have bothered with
   atomics."
   
   Stryker turned on him almost
   angrily. "If they're not Hymenops
   or humans or aliens, then
   what in God's name are they?"
   
   
   
   "Aye, there's the rub," Farrell
   said, quoting a passage
   whose aptness had somehow seen
   it through a dozen reorganizations
   of insular tongue and a
   final translation to universal
   Terran. "If they're none of those
   three, we've only one conclusion
   left. There's no one down there
   at all—we're victims of the first
   joint hallucination in psychiatric
   history."
   
   Stryker threw up his hands in
   surrender. "We can't identify
   them by theorizing, and that
   brings us down to the business
   of first-hand investigation.
   Who's going to bell the cat this
   time?"
   
   "I'd like to go," Gibson said
   at once. "The ZIT computer can
   wait."
   
   Stryker vetoed his offer as
   promptly. "No, the ZIT comes
   first. We may have to run for it,
   and we can't set up a Transfer
   jump without the computer. It's
   got to be me or Arthur."
   
   Farrell felt the familiar chill
   of uneasiness that inevitably
   preceded this moment of decision.
   He was not lacking in courage,
   else the circumstances under
   which he had worked for the
   past ten years—the sometimes
   perilous, sometimes downright
   charnel conditions left by the
   fleeing Hymenop conquerors—would
   have broken him long
   ago. But that same hard experience
   had honed rather than
   blunted the edge of his imagination,
   and the prospect of a close-quarters
   stalking of an unknown
   and patently hostile force was
   anything but attractive.
   
   "You two did the field work
   on the last location," he said.
  "It's high time I took my turn—and
   God knows I'd go mad if
   I had to stay inship and listen
   to Lee memorizing his Handbook
   subsections or to Gib practicing
   dead languages with Xavier."
   
   Stryker laughed for the first
   time since the explosion that
   had so nearly wrecked the Marco
   Four .
   
   "Good enough. Though it
   wouldn't be more diverting to
   listen for hours to you improvising
   enharmonic variations on
   the Lament for Old Terra with
   your accordion."
   
   Gibson, characteristically, had
   a refinement to offer.
   
   "They'll be alerted down there
   for a reconnaissance sally," he
   said. "Why not let Xavier take
   the scouter down for overt diversion,
   and drop Arthur off in
   the helihopper for a low-level
   check?"
   
   Stryker looked at Farrell. "All
   right, Arthur?"
   
   "Good enough," Farrell said.
   And to Xavier, who had not
   moved from his post at the magnoscanner:
  "How does it look,
   Xav? Have you pinned down
   their base yet?"
   
   The mechanical answered him
   in a voice as smooth and clear—and
   as inflectionless—as a 'cello
   note. "The planet seems uninhabited
   except for a large island
   some three hundred miles in
   diameter. There are twenty-seven
   small agrarian hamlets surrounded
   by cultivated fields.
   There is one city of perhaps a
   thousand buildings with a central
   square. In the square rests
   a grounded spaceship of approximately
   ten times the bulk
   of the Marco Four ."
   
   They crowded about the vision
   screen, jostling Xavier's jointed
   gray shape in their interest. The
   central city lay in minutest detail
   before them, the battered
   hulk of the grounded ship glinting
   rustily in the late afternoon
   sunlight. Streets radiated away
   from the square in orderly succession,
   the whole so clearly
   depicted that they could see the
   throngs of people surging up
   and down, tiny foreshortened
   faces turned toward the sky.
   
   "At least they're human,"
   Farrell said. Relief replaced in
   some measure his earlier uneasiness.
  "Which means that they're
   Terran, and can be dealt with
   according to Reclamations routine.
   Is that hulk spaceworthy,
   Xav?"
   
   Xavier's mellow drone assumed
   the convention vibrato that
   indicated stark puzzlement. "Its
   breached hull makes the ship incapable
   of flight. Apparently it
   is used only to supply power to
   the outlying hamlets."
   
   The mechanical put a flexible
   gray finger upon an indicator
   graph derived from a composite
   section of detector meters. "The
   power transmitted seems to be
   gross electric current conveyed
   by metallic cables. It is generated
   through a crudely governed
   process of continuous atomic
   fission."
   
   
   
   Farrell, himself appalled by
   the information, still found himself
   able to chuckle at Stryker's
   bellow of consternation.
   
   " Continuous fission? Good
   God, only madmen would deliberately
   run a risk like that!"
   
   Farrell prodded him with
   cheerful malice. "Why say mad men ? Maybe they're humanoid
   aliens who thrive on hard radiation
   and look on the danger of
   being blown to hell in the middle
   of the night as a satisfactory
   risk."
   
   "They're not alien," Gibson
   said positively. "Their architecture
   is Terran, and so is their
   ship. The ship is incredibly
   primitive, though; those batteries
   of tubes at either end—"
   
   "Are thrust reaction jets,"
   Stryker finished in an awed
   voice. "Primitive isn't the word,
   Gib—the thing is prehistoric!
   Rocket propulsion hasn't been
   used in spacecraft since—how
   long, Xav?"
   
   Xavier supplied the information
   with mechanical infallibility.
  "Since the year 2100 when
   the Ringwave propulsion-communication
   principle was discovered.
   That principle has served
   men since."
   
   Farrell stared in blank disbelief
   at the anomalous craft on
   the screen. Primitive, as Stryker
   had said, was not the word
   for it: clumsily ovoid, studded
   with torpedo domes and turrets
   and bristling at either end with
   propulsion tubes, it lay at the
   center of its square like a rusted
   relic of a past largely destroyed
   and all but forgotten. What a
   magnificent disregard its builders
   must have had, he thought,
   for their lives and the genetic
   purity of their posterity! The
   sullen atomic fires banked in
   that oxidizing hulk—
   
   Stryker said plaintively, "If
   you're right, Gib, then we're
   more in the dark than ever. How
   could a Terran-built ship eleven
   hundred years old get here ?"
   
   Gibson, absorbed in his chess-player's
   contemplation of alternatives,
   seemed hardly to hear
   him.
   
   "Logic or not-logic," Gibson
   said. "If it's a Terran artifact,
   we can discover the reason for
   its presence. If not—"
   
   " Any problem posed by one
   group of human beings ," Stryker
   quoted his Handbook, " can be
   resolved by any other group, regardless
   of ideology or conditioning,
   because the basic
   perceptive abilities of both must
   be the same through identical
   heredity ."
   
   "If it's an imitation, and this
   is another Hymenop experiment
   in condition ecology, then we're
   stumped to begin with," Gibson
   finished. "Because we're not
   equipped to evaluate the psychology
   of alien motivation. We've
   got to determine first which case
   applies here."
   
   
   
   He waited for Farrell's expected
   irony, and when the
   navigator forestalled him by remaining
   grimly quiet, continued.
   
   "The obvious premise is that
   a Terran ship must have been
   built by Terrans. Question: Was
   it flown here, or built here?"
   
   "It couldn't have been built
   here," Stryker said. "Alphard
   Six was surveyed just before the
   Bees took over in 3025, and there
   was nothing of the sort here
   then. It couldn't have been built
   during the two and a quarter
   centuries since; it's obviously
   much older than that. It was
   flown here."
   
   "We progress," Farrell said
   dryly. "Now if you'll tell us how ,
   we're ready to move."
   
   "I think the ship was built on
   Terra during the Twenty-second
   Century," Gibson said calmly.
  "The atomic wars during that
   period destroyed practically all
   historical records along with the
   technology of the time, but I've
   read well-authenticated reports
   of atomic-driven ships leaving
   Terra before then for the nearer
   stars. The human race climbed
   out of its pit again during the
   Twenty-third Century and developed
   the technology that gave
   us the Ringwave. Certainly no
   atomic-powered ships were built
   after the wars—our records are
   complete from that time."
   
   Farrell shook his head at the
   inference. "I've read any number
   of fanciful romances on the
   theme, Gib, but it won't stand
   up in practice. No shipboard society
   could last through a thousand-year
   space voyage. It's a
   physical and psychological impossibility.
   There's got to be
   some other explanation."
   
   
   
   Gibson shrugged. "We can
   only eliminate the least likely
   alternatives and accept the simplest
   one remaining."
   
   "Then we can eliminate this
   one now," Farrell said flatly. "It
   entails a thousand-year voyage,
   which is an impossibility for any
   gross reaction drive; the application
   of suspended animation
   or longevity or a successive-generation
   program, and a final
   penetration of Hymenop-occupied
   space to set up a colony under
   the very antennae of the
   Bees. Longevity wasn't developed
   until around the year 3000—Lee
   here was one of the first to
   profit by it, if you remember—and
   suspended animation is still
   to come. So there's one theory
   you can forget."
   
   "Arthur's right," Stryker said
   reluctantly. "An atomic-powered
   ship couldn't have made such a
   trip, Gib. And such a lineal-descendant
   project couldn't have
   lasted through forty generations,
   speculative fiction to the
   contrary—the later generations
   would have been too far removed
   in ideology and intent from
   their ancestors. They'd have
   adapted to shipboard life as the
   norm. They'd have atrophied
   physically, perhaps even have
   mutated—"
   
   "And they'd never have
   fought past the Bees during the
   Hymenop invasion and occupation,"
   Farrell finished triumphantly.
  "The Bees had better
   detection equipment than we
   had. They'd have picked this
   ship up long before it reached
   Alphard Six."
   
   "But the ship wasn't here in
  3000," Gibson said, "and it is
   now. Therefore it must have arrived
   at some time during the
   two hundred years of Hymenop
   occupation and evacuation."
   
   Farrell, tangled in contradictions,
   swore bitterly. "But
   why should the Bees let them
   through? The three domes on
   Five are over two hundred years
   old, which means that the Bees
   were here before the ship came.
   Why didn't they blast it or enslave
   its crew?"
   
   "We haven't touched on all the
   possibilities," Gibson reminded
   him. "We haven't even established
   yet that these people were
   never under Hymenop control.
   Precedent won't hold always, and
   there's no predicting nor evaluating
   the motives of an alien
   race. We never understood the
   Hymenops because there's no
   common ground of logic between
   us. Why try to interpret their
   intentions now?"
   
   Farrell threw up his hands in
   disgust. "Next you'll say this is
   an ancient Terran expedition
   that actually succeeded! There's
   only one way to answer the
   questions we've raised, and
   that's to go down and see for
   ourselves. Ready, Xav?"
   
   
   
   But uncertainty nagged uneasily
   at him when Farrell found
   himself alone in the helihopper
   with the forest flowing beneath
   like a leafy river and Xavier's
   scouter disappearing bulletlike
   into the dusk ahead.
   
   We never found a colony so
   advanced, Farrell thought. Suppose
   this is a Hymenop experiment
   that really paid off? The
   Bees did some weird and wonderful
   things with human
   guinea pigs—what if they've
   created the ultimate booby trap
   here, and primed it with conditioned
   myrmidons in our own
   form?
   
   Suppose, he thought—and derided
   himself for thinking it—one
   of those suicidal old interstellar
   ventures did succeed?
   
   Xavier's voice, a mellow
   drone from the helihopper's
   Ringwave-powered visicom, cut
   sharply into his musing. "The
   ship has discovered the scouter
   and is training an electronic
   beam upon it. My instruments
   record an electromagnetic vibration
   pattern of low power but
   rapidly varying frequency. The
   operation seems pointless."
   
   Stryker's voice followed, querulous
   with worry: "I'd better
   pull Xav back. It may be something
   lethal."
   
   "Don't," Gibson's baritone advised.
   Surprisingly, there was
   excitement in the engineer's
   voice. "I think they're trying to
   communicate with us."
   
   Farrell was on the point of
   demanding acidly to know how
   one went about communicating
   by means of a fluctuating electric
   field when the unexpected
   cessation of forest diverted his
   attention. The helihopper scudded
   over a cultivated area
   of considerable extent, fields
   stretching below in a vague random
   checkerboard of lighter and
   darker earth, an undefined cluster
   of buildings at their center.
   There was a central bonfire that
   burned like a wild red eye
   against the lower gloom, and in
   its plunging ruddy glow he made
   out an urgent scurrying of shadowy
   figures.
   
   "I'm passing over a hamlet,"
   Farrell reported. "The one nearest
   the city, I think. There's
   something odd going on
   down—"
   
   Catastrophe struck so suddenly
   that he was caught completely
   unprepared. The helihopper's
   flimsy carriage bucked and
   crumpled. There was a blinding
   flare of electric discharge, a
   pungent stink of ozone and a
   stunning shock that flung him
   headlong into darkness.
   
   
   
   He awoke slowly with a brutal
   headache and a conviction of
   nightmare heightened by the
   outlandish tone of his surroundings.
   He lay on a narrow bed in
   a whitely antiseptic infirmary,
   an oblong metal cell cluttered
   with a grimly utilitarian array
   of tables and lockers and chests.
   The lighting was harsh and
   overbright and the air hung
   thick with pungent unfamiliar
   chemical odors. From somewhere,
   far off yet at the same
   time as near as the bulkhead
   above him, came the unceasing
   drone of machinery.
   
   Farrell sat up, groaning,
   when full consciousness made his
   position clear. He had been shot
   down by God knew what sort of
   devastating unorthodox weapon
   and was a prisoner in the
   grounded ship.
   
   At his rising, a white-smocked
   fat man with anachronistic spectacles
   and close-cropped gray
   hair came into the room, moving
   with the professional assurance
   of a medic. The man stopped
   short at Farrell's stare and
   spoke; his words were utterly
   unintelligible, but his gesture
   was unmistakable.
   
   Farrell followed him dumbly
   out of the infirmary and down
   a bare corridor whose metal
   floor rang coldly underfoot. An
   open port near the corridor's end
   relieved the blankness of wall
   and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian
   sunlight; Farrell slowed
   to look out, wondering how
   long he had lain unconscious,
   and felt panic knife at him
   when he saw Xavier's scouter lying,
   port open and undefended,
   on the square outside.
   
   The mechanical had been as
   easily taken as himself, then.
   Stryker and Gibson, for all their
   professional caution, would fare
   no better—they could not have
   overlooked the capture of Farrell
   and Xavier, and when they
   tried as a matter of course to
   rescue them the Marco would be
   struck down in turn by the same
   weapon.
   
   The fat medic turned and
   said something urgent in his
   unintelligible tongue. Farrell,
   dazed by the enormity of what
   had happened, followed without
   protest into an intersecting way
   that led through a bewildering
   succession of storage rooms and
   hydroponics gardens, through a
   small gymnasium fitted with
   physical training equipment in
   graduated sizes and finally into
   a soundproofed place that could
   have been nothing but a nursery.
   
   The implication behind its
   presence stopped Farrell short.
   
   "A creche ," he said, stunned.
   He had a wild vision of endless
   generations of children growing
   up in this dim and stuffy room,
   to be taught from their first
   toddling steps the functions they
   must fulfill before the venture
   of which they were a part could
   be consummated.
   
   One of those old ventures had succeeded, he thought, and was
   awed by the daring of that thousand-year
   odyssey. The realization
   left him more alarmed than
   before—for what technical marvels
   might not an isolated group
   of such dogged specialists have
   developed during a millennium
   of application?
   
   Such a weapon as had brought
   down the helihopper and scouter
   was patently beyond reach of his
   own latter-day technology. Perhaps,
   he thought, its possession
   explained the presence of these
   people here in the first stronghold
   of the Hymenops; perhaps
   they had even fought and defeated
   the Bees on their own invaded
   ground.
   
   He followed his white-smocked
   guide through a power room
   where great crude generators
   whirred ponderously, pouring
   out gross electric current into
   arm-thick cables. They were
   nearing the bow of the ship
   when they passed by another
   open port and Farrell, glancing
   out over the lowered rampway,
   saw that his fears for Stryker
   and Gibson had been well
   grounded.
   
   The Marco Four , ports open,
   lay grounded outside.
   
   
   
   Farrell could not have said,
   later, whether his next move
   was planned or reflexive. The
   whole desperate issue seemed to
   hang suspended for a breathless
   moment upon a hair-fine edge of
   decision, and in that instant he
   made his bid.
   
   Without pausing in his stride
   he sprang out and through the
   port and down the steep plane
   of the ramp. The rough stone
   pavement of the square drummed
   underfoot; sore muscles
   tore at him, and weakness was
   like a weight about his neck. He
   expected momentarily to be
   blasted out of existence.
   
   He reached the Marco Four with the startled shouts of his
   guide ringing unintelligibly in
   his ears. The port yawned; he
   plunged inside and stabbed at
   controls without waiting to seat
   himself. The ports swung shut.
   The ship darted up under his
   manipulation and arrowed into
   space with an acceleration that
   sprung his knees and made his
   vision swim blackly.
   
   He was so weak with strain
   and with the success of his coup
   that he all but fainted when
   Stryker, his scanty hair tousled
   and his fat face comical with bewilderment,
   stumbled out of his
   sleeping cubicle and bellowed at
   him.
   
   "What the hell are you doing,
   Arthur? Take us down!"
   
   Farrell gaped at him, speechless.
   
   Stryker lumbered past him
   and took the controls, spiraling
   the Marco Four down. Men
   swarmed outside the ports when
   the Reclamations craft settled
   gently to the square again. Gibson
   and Xavier reached the ship
   first; Gibson came inside quickly,
   leaving the mechanical outside
   making patient explanations
   to an excited group of Alphardians.
   
   Gibson put a reassuring hand
   on Farrell's arm. "It's all right,
   Arthur. There's no trouble."
   
   Farrell said dumbly, "I don't
   understand. They didn't shoot
   you and Xav down too?"
   
   It was Gibson's turn to stare.
   
   "No one shot you down! These
   people are primitive enough to
   use metallic power lines to
   carry electricity to their hamlets,
   an anachronism you forgot
   last night. You piloted the helihopper
   into one of those lines,
   and the crash put you out for
   the rest of the night and most
   of today. These Alphardians are
   friendly, so desperately happy to
   be found again that it's really
   pathetic."
   
   " Friendly? That torpedo—"
   
   "It wasn't a torpedo at all,"
   Stryker put in. Understanding
   of the error under which Farrell
   had labored erased his
   earlier irritation, and he chuckled
   commiseratingly. "They had
   one small boat left for emergency
   missions, and sent it up to
   contact us in the fear that we
   might overlook their settlement
   and move on. The boat was
   atomic powered, and our shield
   screens set off its engines."
   
   Farrell dropped into a chair at
   the chart table, limp with reaction.
   He was suddenly exhausted,
   and his head ached dully.
   
   "We cracked the communications
   problem early last night,"
   Gibson said. "These people use
   an ancient system of electromagnetic
   wave propagation called
   frequency modulation, and once
   Lee and I rigged up a suitable
   transceiver the rest was simple.
   Both Xav and I recognized the
   old language; the natives reported
   your accident, and we came
   down at once."
   
   "They really came from Terra?
   They lived through a thousand
   years of flight?"
   
   "The ship left Terra for
   Sirius in 2171," Gibson said.
  "But not with these people
   aboard, or their ancestors. That
   expedition perished after less
   than a light-year when its
   hydroponics system failed. The
   Hymenops found the ship derelict
   when they invaded us, and
   brought it to Alphard Six in
   what was probably their first experiment
   with human subjects.
   The ship's log shows clearly
   what happened to the original
   complement. The rest is deducible
   from the situation here."
   
   Farrell put his hands to his
   temples and groaned. "The crash
   must have scrambled my wits.
   Gib, where did they come from?"
   
   "From one of the first peripheral
   colonies conquered by the
   Bees," Gibson said patiently.
  "The Hymenops were long-range
   planners, remember, and masters
   of hypnotic conditioning. They
   stocked the ship with a captive
   crew of Terrans conditioned to
   believe themselves descendants
   of the original crew, and
   grounded it here in disabled
   condition. They left for Alphard
   Five then, to watch developments.
   
   "Succeeding generations of
   colonists grew up accepting the
   fact that their ship had missed
   Sirius and made planetfall here—they
   still don't know where
   they really are—by luck. They
   never knew about the Hymenops,
   and they've struggled along
   with an inadequate technology in
   the hope that a later expedition
   would find them. They found the
   truth hard to take, but they're
   eager to enjoy the fruits of Terran
   assimilation."
   
   Stryker, grinning, brought
   Farrell a frosted drink that tinkled
   invitingly. "An unusually
   fortunate ending to a Hymenop
   experiment," he said. "These
   people progressed normally because
   they've been let alone. Reorienting
   them will be a simple
   matter; they'll be properly spoiled
   colonists within another generation."
   
   Farrell sipped his drink appreciatively.
   
   "But I don't see why the Bees
   should go to such trouble to deceive
   these people. Why did they
   sit back and let them grow as
   they pleased, Gib? It doesn't
   make sense!"
   
   "But it does, for once," Gibson
   said. "The Bees set up this
   colony as a control unit to study
   the species they were invading,
   and they had to give their
   specimens a normal—if obsolete—background
   in order to determine
   their capabilities. The fact
   that their experiment didn't tell
   them what they wanted to know
   may have had a direct bearing
   on their decision to pull out."
   
   Farrell shook his head. "It's
   a reverse application, isn't it of
   the old saw about Terrans being
   incapable of understanding an
   alien culture?"
   
   "Of course," said Gibson, surprised.
  "It's obvious enough,
   surely—hard as they tried, the
   Bees never understood us
   either."
   
   
   THE END
question_text: What is the significance of the Ringwave technology?
response: The Ringwave technology allowed humans to explore the neighboring systems of planets, find new habitable territories, and colonize them. It also partially leads to the invasion of the Bees and allows humans to fight with them. The knowledge about the history of the Ringwave propulsion-communication principle, especially the fact that it was discovered in 2100, also helps the crew realize that the spaceship on planet Alphard Six is atomic-powered and thus prehistoric. It’s eleven hundred years old, also Terran, and was brought here from somewhere else. 
  