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?"
"That's right. That's why we ask for volunteers. But we haven't lost a
man so far. Sometimes a volunteer will get pretty sick, but if a food
passes all the other tests, you can usually depend on its not killing a
human being."
"I gather that this is a pretty unusual case, then?"
Pilar frowned. "As far as I know, yes. But if something kills all the
test animals, we don't ask for humans to try it out. We assume the worst
and forget it." He looked musingly at the wall. "I wonder how many
edible plants we've by-passed that way?" he asked softly, half to
himself.
"What are you going to do next?" the colonel asked. "My men are getting
hungry."
Smathers looked up from the report in alarm, and Pilar had a similar
expression on his face.
"For Pete's sake," said Smathers, "don't tell anyone--not
_anyone_--about this, just yet. We don't want all your men rushing out
in the forest to gobble down those things until we are more sure of
them. Give us a few more days at least."
The colonel patted the air with a hand. "Don't worry. I'll wait until
you give me the go-ahead. But I'll want to know your plans."
Pilar pursed his lips for a moment before he spoke. "We'll check up on
MacNeil for another forty-eight hours. We'd like to have him transferred
over here, so that we can keep him in isolation. We'll feed him more of
the ... uh ... what'd he call 'em, Smathers?"
"Banana-pears."
"We'll feed him more banana-pears, and keep checking. If he is still in
good shape, we'll ask for volunteers."
"Good enough," said the colonel. "I'll keep in touch."
* * * * *
On the morning of the third day in isolation, MacNeil rose early, as
usual, gulped down his normal assortment of vitamins, added a couple of
aspirin tablets, and took a dose of Epsom salts for good measure. Then
he yawned and leaned back to wait for breakfast. He was certainly
getting enough fresh fruit, that was certain. He'd begun to worry about
whether he was getting a balanced diet--he'd heard that a balanced diet
was very important--but he figured that the doctors knew what they were
doing. Leave it up to them.
He'd been probed and needled and tested plenty in the last couple of
days, but he didn't mind it. It gave him a feeling of confidence to know
that the doctors were taking care of him. Maybe he ought to tell them
about his various troubles; they all seemed like nice guys. On the other
hand, it wouldn't do to get booted out of the Service. He'd think it
over for a while.
He settled back to doze a little while he waited for his breakfast to be
served. Sure was nice to be taken care of.
* * * * *
Later on that same day, Dr. Pilar put out a call for volunteers. He
still said nothing about MacNeil; he simply asked the colonel to say
that it had been eaten successfully by a test animal.
The volunteers ate their banana-pears for lunch, approaching them warily
at first, but soon polishing them off with gusto, proclaiming them to
have a fine taste.
The next morning, they felt weak and listless.
Thirty-six hours later, they were dead.
"Oxygen starvation," said Smathers angrily, when he had completed the
autopsies.
Broderick MacNeil munched pleasantly on a banana-pear that evening,
happily unaware that three of his buddies had died of eating that
self-same fruit.
* * * * *
The chemist, Dr. Petrelli, looked at the fruit in his hand, snarled
suddenly, and smashed it to the floor. Its skin burst, splattering pulp
all over the gray plastic.
"It looks," he said in a high, savage voice, "as if that hulking idiot
will be the only one left alive when the ship returns!" He turned to
look at Smathers, who was peering through a binocular microscope.
"Smathers, what makes him different?"
"How do I know?" growled Dr. Smathers, still peering. "There's something
different about him, that's all."
Petrelli forcibly restrained his temper. "Very funny," he snapped.
"Not funny at all," Smathers snapped back. "No two human beings are
identical--you know that." He lifted his gaze from the eyepiece of the
instrument and settled in on the chemist. "He's got AB blood type, for
one thing, which none of the volunteers had. Is that what makes him
immune to whatever poison is in those things? I don't know.
"Were the other three allergic to some protein substance in the fruit,
while MacNeil isn't? I don't know.
"Do his digestive processes destroy the poison? I don't know.
"It's got something to do with his blood, I think, but I can't even be
sure of that. The leucocytes are a little high, the red cell count is a
little low, the hemoglobin shows a little high on the colorimeter, but
none of 'em seems enough to do any harm.
"It might be an enzyme that destroys the ability of the cells to utilize
oxygen. It might be _anything_!"
His eyes narrowed then, as he looked at the chemist. "After all, why
haven't you isolated the stuff from the fruit?"
"There's no clue as to what to look for," said Petrelli, somewhat less
bitingly. "The poison might be present in microscopic amounts. Do you
know how much botulin toxin it takes to kill a man? A fraction of a
milligram!"
Smathers looked as though he were about to quote the minimum dosage, so
Petrelli charged on: "If you think anyone could isolate an unknown
organic compound out of a--"
"Gentlemen! _Please!_" said Dr. Pilar sharply. "I realize that this is a
strain, but bickering won't help. What about your latest tests on
MacNeil, Dr. Smathers?"
"As far as I can tell, he's in fine health. And I can't understand why,"
said the physician in a restrained voice.