consciousness a primal uneasiness nagged at him, whispering in wordless warning that there was more to his mounting restlessness than simple impatience. Something inside him was changing, burgeoning in strange and disturbing growth.

A pale suggestion of movement, wavering and uncertain in the eddying fog, caught his eye. A moment of puzzled watching told him that it was the bedraggled young woman they had seen earlier by the lake, and that she was approaching the ship timorously and under cover.

"But why?" he wondered aloud, recalling her bovine lack of curiosity. "What the devil can she want here?"

A shadow fell across the valley. Farrell, startled, looked up sharply to see the last of the Falakian sun's magenta glare vanishing below the crater's southern rim. A dusky forerunner of darkness settled like a tangible cloud, softening the drab outlines of bramble thickets and slime pools. The change that followed was not seen but felt, a swelling rush of glad arousal like the joy of a child opening its eyes from sleep.

To Farrell, the valley seemed to stir, waking in sympathy to his own restlessness and banishing his unease.

The girl ran to him through the dusk on quick, light feet, timidity forgotten, and he saw with a pleasant shock of astonishment that she was no longer the filthy creature he had first seen by the lakeside. She was pretty and nubile, eyes and soft mouth smiling together in a childlike eagerness that made her at once infinitely desirable and untouchably innocent.

"Who are you?" he asked shakily.

Her hesitant voice was music, rousing in Farrell a warm and expectant euphoria that glowed like old wine in his veins.

"Koaele," she said. "Look—"

Behind her, the valley lay wrapped like a minor paradise in soft pearly mists and luminous shadows, murmurous with the far sound of running water and the faint chiming of voices that drifted up from the little blue lake to whisper back in cadenced echo from the fairy maze of bridging overhead. Over it all, like a deep, sustained cello note, rose the muted humming of great flame-winged moths dipping and swaying over bright tropical flowers.

"Moths?" he thought. And then, "Of course."

The chrysalids under the sod, their eclosion time completed, were coming into their own—bringing perfection with them. Born in gorgeous iridescent imago, they were beautiful in a way that hurt with the yearning pain of perfection, the sorrow that imperfection existed at all—the joy of finally experiencing flawlessness.

An imperative buzzing from the ship behind him made a rude intrusion. A familiar voice, polite but without inflection, called from an open port: "Captain Stryker in the scoutboat, requesting answer."

Farrell hesitated. To the girl, who followed him with puzzled, eager eyes, he begged, "Don't run away, please. I'll be back."

In the ship, Stryker's moon-face peered wryly at him from the main control screen.

"Drew another blank," it said. "You were right after all, Arthur—the fourth dome was empty. Gib and I are coming in now. We can't risk staying out longer if we're going to be on hand when the curtain rises on our little mystery."

"Mystery?" Farrell echoed blankly. Earlier discussions came back slowly, posing a forgotten problem so ridiculous that he laughed. "We were wrong about all that. It's wonderful here."

Stryker's face on the screen went long with astonishment. "Arthur, have you lost your mind? What's wrong there?"

"Nothing is wrong," Farrell said. "It's right." Memory prodded him again, disturbingly. "Wait—I remember now what it was we came here for. But we're not going through with it."

He thought of the festival to come, of the young men and girls running lithe in the dusk, splashing in the lake and