What had that youth, Varnett, said? Perhaps they had deliberately broken down the system?

Skander’s face had a frown as he removed the last of his pressure suit. Ideas like that marked brilliance and creativity—but they were unsafe thoughts for a civilization like the one the boy had come from. It revived those old religious ideas that after perfection came true death.

Where could he have gotten an idea like that? And why had he not been caught and stopped?

Skander looked after their naked young bodies as they filed through the tunnel toward the showers and dorm.

Only barbarians thought that way.

Had the Confederacy guessed what he was up to here? Was Varnett not the innocent student he was supposed to be, but the agent of his nightmares?

Did they suspect?

Suddenly he felt very chilly, although the temperature was constant.

Suppose they all were…

* * *

Three months passed. Skander looked at the picture on his television screen, an electron micrograph of the cellular tissue brought up a month before by the core drill.

It was the same pattern as the older discoveries—that same fine cellular structure, but infinitely more complex inside than any human or animal cell—and so tremendously alien.

And a six-sided cell, at that. He had often wondered about the why of that—had even their cells been hexagonal? Somehow be doubted it, but the way that number kept popping up he wouldn’t disbelieve it, either.

He stared and stared at the sample. Finally, he reached over and turned up the magnification to full and put on the special filters he had developed and refined in over nine years on this barren planet.

The screen suddenly came alive. Little sparks darted from one point in the cell to another. There was a minor electrical storm in the cell. He sat, fascinated as always, at the view only he had ever seen.