Aye, 'tis a difficult thing to be a lady on a far world--but
who needs them there?
* * * * *
There are exceptions to almost every rule and Xenon was one of them.
The rule in this particular case was the old cataloguers' adage that
cataloguing duty was never pleasant, often dangerous and always hard.
Xenon is the fourth planet of one of the stars investigated some seven
or eight years ago by the battleship _Terra_ on her swing around the
edge of the Black Hole.
Unequipped for exploration, the _Terra_ hadn't bothered to land on the
planet, but instead had taken only the usual gravitational and
atmosphere readings and then had continued on her long mapping patrol.
She had slowed just long enough to send back her report on tight beam
to Venus Relay Station and propose the name of Xenon, "the unknown."
After all, a planet with point nine Earth gravity and almost twenty
per cent oxygen in its atmosphere was well worth a name rather than a
number.
About a year later, the preliminary exploration ship arrived and spent
several weeks mapping and testing this, that and the other thing.
Then she went home and wrote her report--and what a report it was! The
thing read like a Chamber of Commerce bulletin that had been sponsored
by a subdivider. All it needed was a couple of ads offering some
choice business locations for sale and it would have been complete.
The planet was perfect, the climate was perfect, the soil fertile.
There were no natives or hostile life to bother a man. The forests
were wide, the plains were broad and the numerous rivers were not only
full of fish but also emptied into blue seas that were just as full of
fish as the rivers. That report was enough to make a man quit his job
and go to Xenon to start a chicken ranch or grow oranges.
* * * * *
The bureau of Colonization acted with its usual speed. Three years
later, a cataloguing group landed from the supply ship _Hunter_. The
duties of the groups are simple enough; they determine which of the
food crops known to Man can best adapt themselves to the conditions
found on the particular planet under examination. They list the native
flora and fauna, minerals and resources. They chart the weather and
its cycles and, in general, try to determine if Man can exist there
and, if so, if the planet is worth the expense, trouble and danger of
colonization.
Most planets are not worth it, but Xenon was.
And now the group had returned with its final report and its
recommendations. The report? Xenon was perfect, just perfect. The
recommendations? Immediate colonization, but be careful who is sent so
that place isn't spoiled by a bunch of land-grabbing exploiters who
might not appreciate the place.
They had been back nearly a week before Lee Spencer had time to come
to my place for the weekend. Due to a combination of my wife's cooking
and a sedentary desk job with the Bureau, I was beginning to have a
bit of difficulty in bending over far enough to zip on my shoes in the
mornings, but Lee was still as lean and fit as he was the day he
blasted off for Xenon nearly four years before.
He had been given the full returned-hero treatment, complete with
press conferences, testimonial dinner, audience with the
Coordinator--everything. He hadn't had a waking moment to himself
since he landed, so I suppose that might have been one reason that he
relaxed so completely in front of the library fire after dinner and
talked more than he perhaps should have. Or the generous slug of the
old brandy my grandfather left me may have had something to do with
it.
At any rate, he was in an expansive mood that night after Martha had
filled him with one of her always excellent dinners and I had nearly
floated him in Grandfather's brandy.
We had a lot of "do you remember" man talk to catch up on and after
enduring nearly two hours of conversation about people and happenings
of which she knew nothing, Martha gave up and headed for the stairs.
"You two can talk all night if you want," she announced over her
shoulder, "but I'm going to bed. Breakfast on the patio about nine or
so, Lee."
"I'll be there, Marty. Sleep tight."
"Not as tight as you will, I'll bet," she grinned. "There's another
jug in the kitchen if you think you may need it."
* * * * *
We heard her bedroom door hiss as it slid closed and sat for a moment
looking into the fire and listening to it whispering secrets to
itself.
"She's a pretty nice wife, Sam," he told me.
"Thanks. I like her, too."
"Not at all like Prunella."
"Prunella?" I said. "I don't think--"
"Well, that's what the boys at the station began calling her a couple
of days after she landed. Behind her back, of course."
"I still don't know who--"
"You know, the niece of that windbag in World Congress that you
featherheads in the front office sent out to replace Pop Jensen when
he fell out of that tree and had to be sent back to Earth for
hospitalization."
"Oh, _that_ one. Look, Lee, I didn't have anything to do with her
selection. She was appointed by the Old Man himself. Understand there
was some kind of pressure on him from the top."
"I forgive you, Sam, but I rather doubt if some of the other people of
the group will for a while."
"How come she didn't stay?" I asked. "Political pressure or not, I
can't imagine the supervisors sending out an incompetent replacement."
"Incompetent?" he almost snorted. "Prunella was the most belligerently
competent female that it has ever been my misfortune to run across.
Prunella was efficiency personified, make no mistake about that. She
was--or is--a top-flight botanist and had led several expeditions here
on Earth, but she couldn't realize that Xenon wasn't Earth. She tried
to live by the book as she had here, but in spite of the general
excellence of the _Spaceman's Handbook_, her methods didn't work so
well."
I primed him with another two fingers out of the bottle and sat back
to listen.
"Good brandy," he said. "I made some once on Xenon, but Prunella put a
halt to that in a hurry, just as she did a lot of other things. The
trouble with her was that she was always insufferably right. Every
blasted time! And she was right again when she pointed out that if we
were to come under attack, the products of the little distillery might
impair our efforts to defend ourselves. My still went under the ax."
* * * * *
He sighed and then went on. "She neglected to say what might attack us
or where this enemy might come from, since men are the only animals to
achieve space flight thus far and there was nothing on Xenon that was
hostile to us.
"But I'm getting ahead of my story," he told his glass. "It probably
all started when she arrived. We had been looking forward to the day,
but none of us more than Joe, our cook. Joe was that rare find, a man
who took pride in his work and worked with pride. Joe, I firmly
believe, could barbecue a spaceman's boot so that it would taste like
steak. He considered Prunella and her arrival a fine opportunity to
show what he could do when he really wanted to.
"For her first meal with us, Joe had prepared Prunella a feed from
every edible native fruit, vegetable and meat that he could lay his
hands on. It was the same stuff that we had been getting fat on for
nearly two years, but did we eat any of his cooking that night? Not a
bite," he answered himself. "I thought she was going to toss a fit
right there and then.
"'Gentlemen,' she said, 'you know as well as I that consumption of any
native product of a strange planet is expressly forbidden by the
_Spaceman's Handbook of Survival_ until these products have been
thoroughly investigated and passed upon by the proper authorities.
Therefore, we shall eat the synthetics that have been provided for us
until these have been examined by the labs on Earth.'
"She was right, of course," Lee went on. "Many poor devils have died
in agony because they were foolish enough to eat some luscious-looking
fruit before it had been checked. We tried to tell her that our lab
monkeys and cats had eaten and liked everything on the table, as had
we, but we still had to send samples to Earth. That was two years
ago and they still haven't handed back a report."
[Illustration]
He sighed again and this time didn't wait for me to pour for him.
"So we ate synthetics, but you know how they are--every morsel filled
to the brim with everything a man needs to live on indefinitely,
except one thing--taste. It almost broke Joe's spirit, he fixed the
stuff for us in every way known to mortal Man. No matter how thin he
sliced it, it was still synthetic and still had that flavor of a
well-aged glue-pot."
Lee ran his tongue over his lips, as though the taste were still in
his mouth. "There were countless little incidents such as that," he
said, "none of them important, but they all added up to a constant
irritation and resentment among the men. Maybe it was easygoing Pop
Jensen who spoiled us. I don't know."
* * * * *
Lee thought for a moment or two. "Then there was the time a water-pup
nuzzled Prunella while she was taking a lone swim in the river that
ran near the station. She spent all morning on a sandbar in the middle
of the river before the school of pups tired of their play and left
long enough for her to consider it safe enough to swim back to the
river bank."
He grinned to himself. "Sam, those pups are as harmless and friendly
and playful as any pups of Earth, but Prunella didn't know that and
none of us could convince her of it. She said that the pups might be
dangerous, under some unknown circumstances which she didn't define,
then quoted us a passage from the _Handbook_ which prohibited
fraternization with any native life-forms until friendly relations
were established. She evidently didn't consider being nuzzled a
friendly act. Ergo, no more swimming and that was an order."
He made another trip to the brandy bottle, then sank back into the
deep chair again. "But the most exasperating thing Prunella pulled on
us was the inspections every morning before we left on our daily field
trips. We had all been on Xenon long enough to know what equipment we
needed to carry, right down to the last specimen box, but what we
carried and what the _Survival Handbook_ said to carry were two
different things. That is, they were two different things before
Prunella began her inspections. We had found long before that all of
the gear prescribed by the _Handbook_ was heavy, most of it was
useless, none of it necessary on Xenon. It might be of some use on
some other planet, but we didn't need it there. So, as a consequence,
we didn't lug much of that junk around over the landscape with us."
"None of it?" I said.
"Well, almost none. But after Little Miss Efficiency began making her
morning spot checks, we left the compound each day looking like a
picture of what the well-dressed man on a strange planet will wear. We
carried everything in the book and a few more that Pruny thought up
all by her little self. In addition to all the survival, signaling and
first-aid equipment that dangled and jangled from various parts of us,
we also carried enough offensive and defensive weapons to start and
maintain a war of no small size.
"Granted, the first-aid and radio paraphernalia might be handy in some
way, but blasters, needle-guns, knives, defense shields and all the
other apparatus struck as being a little on the ridiculous side,
especially since neither we nor the men before us had found a single
life-form on Xenon that would attack Man. Or rather, with one
exception, none of them would and a blaster or needle-gun was of no
use on _that_ one."
* * * * *
I followed my cue. "Really? And what was this mysterious exception?" I
thought I was playing straight man for some elaborate joke, but Lee
was serious.
"Damn it all, don't you people even read your own directives? I'm
talking about the powder puffs. Does _that_ mean anything to you?"
Seeing my blank look, he explained resignedly, "The powder puffs are
the way the Xenon equivalent of Earthly mushrooms takes to spread its
spores. They have some unpronounceable Latin name, but we called them
powder puffs because, oddly enough, that's what they looked like. The
puffs are little round balls of a very light fluffy material, with the
spores adhering to small fibers on the surface. The things are carried
by the winds over great distances and when they finally come down,
they bump along, leaving a dusting of spores on anything they touch."
"They don't sound very dangerous," I told him.
"They aren't then. It's the next step in their life cycle that makes
them a nuisance. You see, Sam, if they don't come in contact with some
substance containing moisture and a high percentage of nitrogen, the
spores lie dormant. Can you think of any substance fitting those
requirements better than a nice warm mess of living protein?"
He grinned at me ghoulishly. "Don't look so horrified, Sam. I'll bet
credits against chalk that you're host to at least one kind of fungus
right now. Do you have athlete's foot?"
He was thirsty again and took steps to remedy such a deplorable
situation. "The puffs are only another type of fungus, even though
they do cause more trouble than most. The animals on Xenon are immune
from them, but when they land on a man, they send out tiny rootlets
that are like minute hairs. These go into the nearest capillary and
start taking the nitrogen they need from the blood. After a week or
so, they drop off and continue their cycle. I'm told that a man can be
practically covered with the varmints and his nitrogen balance won't
be disturbed enough to bother him."
"Then why worry about them?" I asked as he paused a moment.
He didn't seem to hear me. "Those puffs would be just another
annoyance except for the fact that those little rootlets evidently
work on the nerve endings of the body just enough so they don't hurt
but itch instead and, brother, how they do itch! Makes you wish you
had four more hands and someone else to help scratch."
He squirmed in remembrance. "I understand some of the earlier men dug
out divots of flesh to get rid of the intolerable itch and to keep
from going crazy. It's that bad. Good thing, though, that the spores
can't live inside the body. Can you imagine having an itch like that
in your lungs?"
* * * * *
Another sip and then he continued. "You'll forgive me if I seem to
wander from La Prunella, but you have to understand the powder puffs
to know why she left our bed and board so suddenly.
"Of course, it's true all of the old-timers on Xenon had been puffed
at one time or another, but just to prevent a repeat performance, we
all, including Prunella, wore that protective goo you people sent out
to us a few years ago. Works pretty well. You build up a considerable
immunity after the first attack of puffs and more after each
succeeding one, but that's the hard way. The goo is easier." His voice
trailed off as, with a surprised look, he noticed his glass, was again
empty. This time he brought the bottle back with him. "But to get back
to Pruny. Well, the men were getting pretty fed up with Prunella's
arbitrary ways and her morning inspections, but the last straw was
when she shot Johnny, the station's pet Me-too bird that we had raised
from almost an egg. Same as humans, Johnny had his little faults and
foibles, but we loved him in spite of them.
"One of those faults was the reason Johnny lived outside the dome
instead of inside with the rest of us, as he would have liked. We
never let him stay inside for any length of time because he was never
able to understand why floors should be clean and kept that way. So
Johnny's nest was on top of the ultra-wave tower and that's where he
spent most of his time when he wasn't lazily riding around on the
shoulders of one of us or pan-handling Joe, the cook, for something
extra to eat.
"He was in his nest when Prunella got him with that delicate-looking,
deadly little needle-gun of hers. I'll bet he had a hundred of those
tiny slivers of steel in him. One would have been enough, but she must
have set the gun on full automatic and then let it spew itself empty."