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."