“All right,” Hellman said sulkily.
Casker watched his partner wander off among the cans, bottles and cases. He wondered vaguely where Hellman got the energy, and decided that he was just too cerebral to know when he was starving.
“Here’s something,” Hellman called out, standing in front of a large yellow vat.
“What does it say?” Casker asked.
“Little bit hard to translate. But rendered freely, it reads: Morishille’s Voozy, with lacto-ecto added for a new taste sensation. Everyone drinks Voozy. Good before and after meals, no unpleasant aftereffects. Good for children! The drink of the universe!”
“That sounds good,” Casker admitted, thinking that Hellman might not be so stupid after all.
“This should tell us once and for all if their meat is our meat,” Hellman said. “This Voozy seems to be the closest thing to a universal drink I’ve found yet.”
“Maybe,” Casker said hopefully, “maybe it’s just plain water!”
“We’ll see.” Hellman pried open the lid with the edge of the burner.
Within the vat was a crystal-clear liquid.
“No odor,” Casker said, bending over the vat.
The crystal liquid lifted to meet him.
Casker retreated so rapidly that he fell over a box. Hellman helped him to his feet, and they approached the vat again. As they came near, the liquid lifted itself three feet into the air and moved toward them.
“What’ve you done now?” Casker asked, moving back carefully. The liquid flowed slowly over the side of the vat. It began to flow toward him.
“Hellman!” Casker shrieked.
Hellman was standing to one side, perspiration pouring down his face, reading his dictionary with a preoccupied frown.
“Guess I bumbled the translation,” he said.
“Do something!” Casker shouted. The liquid was trying to back him into a corner.
“Nothing I can do,” Hellman said, reading on. “Ah, here’s the error. It doesn’t say ‘Everyone drinks Voozy.’ Wrong subject. ‘Voozy drinks everyone.’ That tells us something! The Helgans must have soaked liquid in through their pores. Naturally, they would prefer to be drunk, instead of to drink.”
Casker tried to dodge around the liquid, but it cut him off with a merry gurgle. Desperately he picked up a small bale and threw it at the Voozy. The Voozy caught the bale and drank it. Then it discarded that and turned back to Casker.
Hellman tossed another box. The Voozy drank this one and a third and fourth that Casker threw in. Then, apparently exhausted, it flowed back into its vat.
Casker clapped down the lid and sat on it, trembling violently.
“Not so good,” Hellman said. “We’ve been taking it for granted that the Helgans had eating habits like us. But, of course, it doesn’t necessarily—”
“No, it doesn’t. No, sir, it certainly doesn’t. I guess we can see that it doesn’t. Anyone can see that it doesn’t—”
“Stop that,” Hellman ordered sternly. “We’ve no time for hysteria.”
“Sorry.” Casker slowly moved away from the Voozy vat.
“I guess we’ll have to assume that their meat is our poison,” Hellman said thoughtfully. “So now we’ll see if their poison is our meat.”
Casker didn’t say anything. He was wondering what would have happened if the Voozy had drunk him.
In the corner, the rubbery block was still giggling to itself.
“Now here’s a likely-looking poison,” Hellman said, half an hour later.
Casker had recovered completely, except for an occasional twitch of the lips.
“What does it say?” he asked.
Hellman rolled a tiny tube in the palm of his hand. “It’s called Pvastkin’s Plugger. The label reads: Warning! Highly dangerous! Pvastkin’s Plugger is designed to fill holes or cracks of not more than two cubic vims. However—the Plugger is not to be eaten under any circumstances. The active ingredient, ramotol, which makes Pvastkin’s so excellent a plugger renders it highly dangerous when taken internally.”
“Sounds great,” Casker said. “It’ll probably blow us sky-high.”
“Do you have any other suggestions?” Hellman asked.
Casker thought for a moment. The food of Helg was obviously unpalatable for humans. So perhaps was their poison … but wasn’t starvation better than this sort of thing?
After a moment’s communion with his stomach, he decided that starvation was not better.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Hellman slipped the burner under his arm and unscrewed the top of the little bottle. He shook it.
Nothing happened.
“It’s got a seal,” Casker pointed out.
Hellman punctured the seal with his fingernail and set the bottle on the floor. An evil-smelling green froth began to bubble out.
Hellman looked dubiously at the froth. It was congealing into a glob and spreading over the floor.
“Yeast, perhaps,” he said, gripping the burner tightly.
“Come, come. Faint heart never filled an empty stomach.”
“I’m not holding you back,” Hellman said.
The glob swelled to the size of a man’s head.
“How long is that supposed to go on?” Casker asked.
“Well,” Hellman said, “it’s advertised as a Plugger. I suppose that’s what it does—expands to plug up holes.”
“Sure. But how much?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t know how much two cubic vims are. But it can’t go on much—”
Belatedly, they noticed that the Plugger had filled almost a quarter of the room and was showing no signs of stopping.
“We should have believed the label!” Casker yelled to him, across the spreading glob. “It is dangerous!”
As the Plugger produced more surface, it began to accelerate in its growth. A sticky edge touched Hellman, and he jumped back.
“Watch out!”
He couldn’t reach Casker, on the other side of the gigantic sphere of blob. Hellman tried to run around, but the Plugger had spread, cutting the room in half. It began to swell toward the walls.
“Run for it!” Hellman yelled, and rushed to the door behind him.
He flung it open just as the expanding glob reached him. On the other side of the room, he heard a door slam shut. Hellman didn’t wait any longer. He sprinted through and slammed the door behind him.
He stood for a moment, panting, the burner in his hand. He hadn’t realized how weak he was. That sprint had cut his reserves
