Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
Spawning Ground By LESTER DEL REY They weren't human. They were something more—and something less—they were, in short, humanity's hopes for survival! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from the waiting hordes on Earth. Straining metal plates twanged and echoed through her hallways. a big, rawboned man, barely forty but ten years of responsibility had pressed down his shoulders and put age-feigning hollows under his were rough on the men who traveled them now. He shuffled toward the control room, grumbling at the heavy gravity. during the night?" "About a dozen blobs held something like a convention a little ways north of us. They broke up about an hour ago and streaked off into the clouds." The blobs were a peculiarity of this planet about which nobody knew anything. They looked like overgrown fireballs, but seemed to have an almost sentient curiosity about anything moving on the ground. "And our two cadets sneaked out again. Barker followed them, but lost them Gwayne swore softly to himself. Earth couldn't turn out enough starmen in the schools, so promising kids were being shipped out for training as cadets on their twelfth birthday. The two he'd drawn, Kaufman and Pinelli, seemed to be totally devoid of any sense of caution. Of course there was no obvious need for caution here. The blobs hadn't seemed dangerous, and the local animals were apparently all herbivorous and harmless. They were ugly enough, looking like insects in spite of their internal skeletons, with anywhere from four to twelve legs each on their segmented bodies. None acted like dangerous beasts. But something glowed yellow-green. Motions around them suggested a herd of feeding animals. Details were impossible to see through the haze. Even the completely hidden by the fog. There were three of the blobs dancing about over the grazing animals trying to read sense into the things. If he had time to study them.... But there was no time. Earth had ordered him to detour here, after leaving his load of to the men who'd deserted their ship and its equipment, he'd have to report back. He saw the two cadets then, heading back to the waiting ship, just Gwayne grabbed the microphone, yelling into the radio toward the cadets. Then the mists cleared. Under the dancing blobs, a horde of things was heading for the cadets. Shaggy heads, brute bodies vaguely man-like! One seemed to be almost eight feet tall, leading the others directly toward the spacesuited cadets. Some of the horde were carrying spears or sticks. There was a agonizingly slow, but faster than climbing down. He ripped the door back at the exit deck. Men were dashing in, stumbling around in confusion. But someone was taking over now—one of the crew women. The There was no sign of the cadets at first. Then Gwayne spotted them surrounded by the menacing horde. Seen from here, the things looked horrible in a travesty of manhood. about, two of them grabbing up the cadets. The jeep was doing twenty miles an hour now, but the horde began to increase the distance, in spite of the load of the two struggling boys! The creatures dived downward into lower ground, beginning to disappear into the mists. "Follow the blobs," Gwayne yelled. He realized now he'd been a fool to leave his suit Then it cleared to show the mob of creatures doubling back on their own trail to confuse the pursuers. There was no time to stop. The jeep plowed through them. Gwayne had a glimpse of five-foot bodies tumbling out of the way. Monstrously coarse faces were half hidden by thick hair. A spear crunched against the to help. They'd have to get to the group with the cadets in a hurry or leader. The thing was standing directly ahead of him, a cadet on each The arms were thin and grotesque below the massively distorted shoulders, but amazingly strong. Gwayne felt them wrench at him as his Another jeep had drawn up, and men were examining the cadets. Pinelli The reports from the cadets were satisfactory enough. They'd been picked up and carried, but no harm had been done them. Now they were busy being little heroes. Gwayne sentenced them to quarters as soon as he could, knowing their stories would only get wilder and less informative with retelling. If they could get any story from the captured creature, they might save time and be better off than trying to dig through Hennessy's ship. That was almost certainly spoorless by now. The only possible answer seemed to be that the exploring expedition and Hennessy's rescue group had been overcome by the aliens. It was an answer, but it left a lot of questions. How could the these creatures that a space ship's metal finders could be fooled by a little more than a hundred feet of solid rock? They'd buried the ship cunningly, and only the accidental slippage had undone their work. Maybe there would never be a full answer, but he had to find something—and find it fast. Earth needed every world she could make remotely habitable, or mankind was probably doomed to extinction. The race had blundered safely through its discovery of atomic weapons It wouldn't be much of an explosion, as such things go—but it would render the whole Solar System uninhabitable for millenia. To survive, man had to colonize. And there were no worlds perfect for him, as Earth had been. The explorers went out in desperation to find what they could the terraforming teams did what they could. And then the big starships began filling worlds with colonists, carried in deep sleep to conserve space. If this world could be used, it would be nearer than most. If not, as it now seemed, no more time could be wasted here. Primitives could be overcome, maybe. It would be ruthless and unfair to strip them of their world, but the first law was survival. But how could primitives do what these must have done? laminated. The point was of delicately chipped flint, done as no human hand had been able to do for centuries. "Beautiful primitive work," he muttered. They were perhaps a thousand yards away, waiting patiently. For what? For the return of their leader—or for something that would give the ship to them? The captive was sitting on the bunk, unbound and oddly unmenacing. The "How many barmaids in the Cheshire Cat? How many pups did your oldest kid's dog have? How many were brown?" spread out. Three. Seven. Zero. The answers were right. When it was finished, Gwayne and Barker sat for long minutes in set the combinations and pressed the studs. There was a hiss and gurgle as the great tanks of fuel discharged their contents out onto the ground where no ingenuity could ever recover it to bring life to the however much they might hate it at first. But there was no putting off giving the gist of it to Jane. "It was the blobs," he summarized it. "They seem to be amused by men. They don't require anything from us, but they like us around. Hennessy doesn't know why. They can change our cells, adapt us. Before men came, all life here had twelve legs. Now they're changing that, as we've seen. "And they don't have to be close to do it. We've all been outside the know." Nobody would know. Their children—odd children who matured in eight years—would be primitive savages in three generations. The Earth tools would be useless, impossible for the hands so radically changed. Nothing from the ship would last. Books could never be read by the new that seed for generation after generation. Some worlds already were becoming uncertain. Here, though, the blobs had adapted men to the alien world instead of men having to adapt the whole planet to their needs. Here, the strange children of man's race could grow, develop and begin the long trek back to civilization. The gadgets would be lost for a time. But perhaps some of the attitudes of civilized man would remain to make the next

<question>:
Why were the cadets outside alone?

<options>:
A They were lost.
B They were young and untrained.
C They were on a mission.
D They were insubordinate.

<answer>:

B