“What’s the matter with it, then?” asked Major Grodski, eying the fruit with sleepy curiosity.
Dr. Pilar gave the thing a wry look and put it back in the specimen bag. “Except for the fact that it has killed every one of our test specimens, we don’t know what’s wrong with it.”
Colonel Fennister looked around the laboratory at the cages full of chittering animals—monkeys, white mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, and the others. Then he looked back at the scientist. “Don’t you know what killed them?”
Pilar didn’t answer; instead, he glanced at Dr. Smathers, the physician.
Smathers steepled his fingers over his abdomen and rubbed his fingertips together. “We’re not sure. Thus far, it looks as though death was caused by oxygen starvation in the tissues.”
“Some kind of anemia?” hazarded the colonel.
Smathers frowned. “The end results are similar, but there is no drop in the hemoglobin—in fact, it seems to rise a little. We’re still investigating that. We haven’t got all the answers yet, by any means, but since we don’t quite know what to look for, we’re rather hampered.”
The colonel nodded slowly. “Lack of equipment?”
“Pretty much so,” admitted Dr. Smathers. “Remember, we’re just here for preliminary investigation. When the ship brings in more men and equipment—”
His voice trailed off. Very likely, when the ship returned, it would find an empty base. The first-string team simply wasn’t set up for exhaustive work; its job was to survey the field in general and mark out the problems for the complete team to solve.
Establishing the base had been of primary importance, and that was the sort of equipment that had been carried on the ship. That—and food. The scientists had only the barest essentials to work with; they had no electron microscopes or any of the other complex instruments necessary for exhaustive biochemical work.
Now that they were engaged in a fight for survival, they felt like a gang of midgets attacking a herd of water-buffalo with penknives. Even if they won the battle, the mortality rate would be high, and their chances of winning were pretty small.
The Space Service officers and the scientists discussed the problem for over an hour, but they came to no promising conclusion.
At last, Colonel Fennister said: “Very well, Dr. Pilar; we’ll have to leave the food supply problem in your hands. Meanwhile, I’ll try to keep order here in the camp.”
SM/2 Broderick MacNeil may not have had a top-level grade of intelligence, but by the end of the second week, his conscience was nagging him, and he was beginning to wonder who was goofing and why. After much thinking—if we may so refer to MacNeil’s painful cerebral processes—he decided to ask a few cautious questions.
Going without food tends to make for mental fogginess, snarling tempers, and general physical lassitude in any group of men. And, while quarter rations were not quite starvation meals, they closely approached it. It was fortunate, therefore, that MacNeil decided to approach Dr. Pilar.
Dr. Petrelli’s temper, waspish by nature, had become positively virulent in the two weeks that had passed since the destruction of the major food cache. Dr. Smathers was losing weight from his excess, but his heretofore pampered stomach was voicelessly screaming along his nerve passages, and his fingers had become shaky, which is unnerving in a surgeon, so his temper was no better than Petrelli’s.
Pilar, of course, was no better fed, but he was calmer than either of the others by disposition, and his lean frame didn’t use as much energy. So, when the big hulking spaceman appeared at the door of his office with his cap in his hands, he was inclined to be less brusque than he might have been.
“Yes? What is it?” he asked. He had been correlating notes in his journal with the thought in the back of his mind that he would never finish it, but he felt that a small respite might be relaxing.
MacNeil came in and looked nervously around at the plain walls of the pre-fab plastic dome-hut as though seeking consolation from them. Then he straightened himself in the approved military manner and looked at the doctor.
“You Dr. Piller? Sir?”
“Pilar,” said the scientist in correction. “If you’re looking for the medic, you’ll want Dr. Smathers, over in G Section.”
“Oh, yessir,” said MacNeil quickly, “I know that. But I ain’t sick.” He didn’t feel that sick, anyway. “I’m Spaceman Second MacNeil, sir, from B Company. Could I ask you something, sir?”
Pilar sighed a little, then smiled. “Go ahead, spaceman.”
MacNeil wondered if maybe he’d ought to ask the doctor about his sacroiliac pains, then decided against it. This wasn’t the time for it. “Well, about the food. Uh… Doc, can men eat monkey food all right?”
Pilar smiled. “Yes. What food there is left for the monkeys has already been sent to the men’s mess hall.” He didn’t add that the lab animals would be the next to go. Quick-frozen, they might help eke out the dwindling food supply, but it would be better not to let the men know what they were eating for a while. When they got hungry enough, they wouldn’t care.
But MacNeil was plainly puzzled by Pilar’s answer. He decided to approach the stuff as obliquely as he knew how.
“Doc, sir, if I… I uh… well—” He took the bit in his teeth and plunged ahead. “If I done something against the regulations, would you have to report me to Captain Bellwether?”
Dr. Pilar leaned back in his chair and looked at the big man with interest. “Well,” he said carefully, “that would all depend on what it was. If it was something really… ah… dangerous to the welfare of the expedition, I’d have to say something about it, I suppose, but I’m not a military officer, and minor infractions don’t concern me.”
MacNeil absorbed that “Well, sir, this ain’t much, really—I ate something I shouldn’t of.”
Pilar drew down his brows. “Stealing food, I’m afraid, would be a major offense, under the circumstances.”
MacNeil looked both startled and insulted. “Oh, nossir! I never swiped no food! In fact, I’ve been givin’ my chow to my buddies.”
Pilar’s brows lifted. He suddenly realized that the man before him looked in exceptionally good health for one who had been on a marginal diet for two weeks. “Then what have you been living on?”
“The monkey food, sir.”
“Monkey food?”
“Yessir. Them greenish things with the purple spots. You know—them fruits you feed the monkeys on.”
Pilar looked at MacNeil goggle-eyed for a full thirty seconds before he burst into action.
“No, of course I won’t punish him,” said Colonel Fennister. “Something will have to go on the record, naturally, but I’ll just restrict him to barracks for thirty days and then recommend him for light duty. But are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” said Pilar, half in wonder.
Fennister glanced over at Dr. Smathers, now noticeably thinner in the face. The medic was looking over MacNeil’s record. “But if that fruit kills monkeys and rats and guinea pigs, how can a man eat it?”
“Animals differ,” said Smathers, without taking his eyes off the record sheets. He didn’t amplify the statement.
The colonel looked back at Pilar.
“That’s the trouble with test animals,” Dr. Pilar said, ruffling his gray beard with a fingertip. “You take a rat, for instance. A rat can live on a diet that would kill a monkey. If there’s no vitamin A in the diet, the monkey dies, but the rat makes his own vitamin A; he doesn’t need to import it, you might say, since he can synthesize it in his own body. But a monkey can’t.
“That’s just one example. There are hundreds that we know of and God alone knows how many that we haven’t found yet.”
Fennister settled his own body more comfortably in the chair and scratched his head thoughtfully. “Then, even after a piece of alien vegetation has passed all the animal tests, you still couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t kill a human?”
