"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.