Part 2

"Gib thinks I'm on the right track--periodic hypnosis. The Hymenops must have assigned a particular chamber and image to each slave. The images are mechanicals, robot mesmerists designed to keep the natives' compulsion-to-isolation renewed. Post-hypnotic suggestion kept the poor devils coming back every morning, and their children with them, even after the Hymenops pulled out. They couldn't break away until the _Marco's_ Ringwave forced a shutdown of the dome's power plant and deactivated the images. Not that they're any better off now that they're free; they don't know how--"

Farrell never heard the rest of it. Something struck him sharply across the back of the head.

* * * * *

When he regained consciousness, he was naked and weaponless and lost. The rustling of approach, bodiless and dreadful in darkness, panicked him completely and sent him fleeing through a sweating eternity that brought him finally to the dome's lowest level and the Hymenop power plant.

He went hesitantly toward the shadowy bulk of the Ringwave cylinder, drawn as much now by its familiarity as driven by the terror behind him. At the base of the towering machine, he made out a control board totally unrecognizable in design, studded with dials and switches clearly intended for alien handling.

The tinny whispering of Stryker's voice in the vaultlike quiet struck him with the frightening feeling that he had gone mad.

He saw his equipment pack then, lying undamaged at the foot of the control board. Stryker's voice murmured from its audicom unit: "We're in the dome, Arthur. Where are you? What level--"

Farrell caught up the audicom, swept by a sudden wild lift of hope. "I'm at the bottom of the dome, in the Ringwave chamber. They took my gun and torch. For God's sake, hurry!"

The darkness gave up a furtive scuffling of sandaled feet, the tight breathing of many men. Someone made a whimpering sound, doglike and piteous; a Sadrian voice hissed sharply, "_Quiet!_"

Stryker's metallic whisper said: "We're tracking your carrier, Arthur. Use the tools they left you. They brought you there to repair the Ringwave, to give back the power that kept their images going. Keep busy!"

Farrell, only half understanding, took up his instrument case. His movement triggered a tense rustle in the darkness; the voice whimpered again, a tortured sound that rasped Farrell's nerves like a file on glass.

"_Give me back my Voice. I am alone and afraid. I must have Counsel...._"

Beneath the crying, Farrell felt the terror, incredibly voiced, that weighted the darkness, the horror implicit in stilled breathing, the swelling sense of outrage.

There was a soft rush of bodies, a panting and struggling. The whimpering stopped.

The instrument case slipped out of Farrell's hands. On the heels of its nerve-shattering crash against the metal floor came Stryker's voice, stronger as it came closer.

"Steady, Arthur. They'll kill you if you make a scene. We're coming, Gib and Xav and I. Don't lose your head!"

Farrell crouched back against the cold curve of the Ringwave cylinder, straining against flight with an effort that left him trembling uncontrollably. A spasm of incipient screaming seized his throat and he bit it back savagely, stifling a terror that could not be seen, grasped, fought with.

He was giving way slowly when Xavier's inflectionless voice droned out of the darkness: "Quiet. Your Counsel will be restored."

There was a sudden flood of light, unbearable after long darkness. Farrell had a failing glimpse of Gibson, square face blocked with light and shadow from the actinic flare overhead, racing toward him through a silently dispersing throng of Sadrians.

Then he passed out.

* * * * *

He was strapped to his couch in the chart room when he awoke. The _Marco Four_ was already in space; on the visiscreen, Farrell could see a dwindling crescent of Sadr III, and behind it, in the black pit of space, the fiery white eye of Deneb and the pyrotechnic glowing of Albireo's blue-and-yellow twins.

"We're headed out," he said, bewildered. "What happened?"

Stryker came over and unstrapped him. Gibson, playing chess with Xavier across the chart-room plotting table, looked up briefly and went back to his gambit.

"We reset the Ringwave in the dome to phase with ours and lugged you out," Stryker explained genially. He was back in character again, his fat paunch quivering with the beginning of laughter. "We're through here. The rest is up to Reorientation."

Farrell gaped at him. "You're giving up on Sadr III?"

"We've done all we can. Those Sadrians need something that a preliminary expedition like ours can't give them. Right now they are willing victims of a rigid religious code that makes it impossible for any one of them to express his wants, hopes, ideals or misfortunes to another. Exchanging confidences, to them, is the ultimate sacrilege."

"Then they _are_ crazy. They'd have to be, with no more opportunity for emotional catharsis than that!"

"They're not insane, they're--adapted. Those robot images you found are everything to this culture: arbiters, commercial agents, monitors and confessors all in one. They not only relay physical needs from one native to another; they listen to all problems and give solutions. They're _Counselors_, remember? Man's gregariousness stems largely from his need to unload his troubles on someone else. The Hymenops came up with an efficient substitute here, and the natives accepted it as the norm."

Farrell winced with sudden understanding. "No wonder the poor devils cracked up right and left. With their Ringwave dead, they might as well have been struck blind and dumb! They couldn't even get together among themselves to figure a way out."

"There you have it," Stryker said. "They knew we were responsible for their catastrophe, but they couldn't bring themselves to ask us for help because we were human beings like themselves. So they went mad one by one and committed the ultimate blasphemy of shouting their misery in public, and their fellows had to kill them or countenance sacrilege. But they'll quiet down now. They should be easy enough to handle by the time the Reorientation lads arrive."

He began to chuckle. "We left their Counselors running, but we disconnected the hypnosis-renewal circuits. They'll get only what they need from now on, which is an outlet for shifting their personal burdens. And with the post-hypnotic compulsion gone, they'll turn to closer association with each other. Human gregariousness will reassert itself. After a couple of generations, the Reorientation boys can write them off as Terran Normal and move on to the next planetary madhouse we've dug up for them."

Farrell said wonderingly, "I never thought of the need to exchange confidences as being so important. But it is; everyone does it. You and I often talk over personal concerns, and Gib--"

He broke off to study the intent pair at the chessboard, comparing Gibson's calm selfsufficiency to the mechanical's bland competence.

"There's an exception for your theory, Lee. Iron Man Gibson never gave out with a confidence in his life!"

Stryker laughed. "You may be right. How about it, Gib? Do you ever feel the need of a wailing wall?"

Gibson looked up briefly from his game, his square face unsurprised.

"Well, sure. Why not? I tell my troubles to Xavier."

When they looked at each other blankly, he added, with the nearest approach to humor that either Farrell or Stryker had ever seen in him: "It's a reciprocal arrangement. Xav confides his to me."