"I don't believe the planet has ever had any contact with Earth,"
Hellman said. "This dictionary isn't Helg-English. It's
Helg-Aloombrigian."
Casker remembered that Aloombrigia was the home planet of a small,
adventurous reptilian race, out near the center of the Galaxy.
"How come you can read Aloombrigian?" Casker asked.
"Oh, being a librarian isn't a completely useless profession," Hellman
said modestly. "In my spare time--"
"Yeah. Now how about--"
"Do you know," Hellman said, "the Aloombrigians probably helped the
Helgans leave their planet and find another. They sell services like
that. In which case, this building very likely is a food cache!"
"Suppose you start translating," Casker suggested wearily, "and maybe
find us something to eat."
They opened boxes until they found a likely-looking substance.
Laboriously, Hellman translated the symbols on it.
"Got it," he said. "It reads:--'USE SNIFFNERS--THE BETTER ABRASIVE.'"
"Doesn't sound edible," Casker said.
"I'm afraid not."
They found another, which read: VIGROOM! FILL ALL YOUR STOMACHS, AND
FILL THEM RIGHT!
"What kind of animals do you suppose these Helgans were?" Casker
asked.
Hellman shrugged his shoulders.
The next label took almost fifteen minutes to translate. It read:
ARGOSEL MAKES YOUR THUDRA ALL TIZZY. CONTAINS THIRTY ARPS OF RAMSTAT
PULZ, FOR SHELL LUBRICATION.
"There must be _something_ here we can eat," Casker said with a note
of desperation.
"I hope so," Hellman replied.
* * * * *
At the end of two hours, they were no closer. They had translated
dozens of titles and sniffed so many substances that their olfactory
senses had given up in disgust.
"Let's talk this over," Hellman said, sitting on a box marked:
VORMITISH--GOOD AS IT SOUNDS!
"Sure," Casker said, sprawling out on the floor. "Talk."
"If we could deduce what kind of creatures inhabited this planet, we'd
know what kind of food they ate, and whether it's likely to be edible
for us."
"All we do know is that they wrote a lot of lousy advertising copy."
Hellman ignored that. "What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on
a planet that is all mountains?"
"Stupid ones!" Casker said.
That was no help. But Hellman found that he couldn't draw any
inferences from the mountains. It didn't tell him if the late Helgans
ate silicates or proteins or iodine-base foods or anything.
"Now look," Hellman said, "we'll have to work this out by pure
logic--Are you listening to me?"
"Sure," Casker said.
"Okay. There's an old proverb that covers our situation perfectly:
'One man's meat is another man's poison.'"
"Yeah," Casker said. He was positive his stomach had shrunk to
approximately the size of a marble.
"We can assume, first, that their meat is our meat."
Casker wrenched himself away from a vision of five juicy roast beefs
dancing tantalizingly before him. "What if their meat is our _poison_?
What then?"
"Then," Hellman said, "we will assume that their poison is our meat."
"And what happens if their meat _and_ their poison are our poison?"
"We starve."
"All right," Casker said, standing up. "Which assumption do we start
with?"
"Well, there's no sense in asking for trouble. This _is_ an oxygen
planet, if that means anything. Let's assume that we can eat some
basic food of theirs. If we can't we'll start on their poisons."
"If we live that long," Casker said.
Hellman began to translate labels. They discarded such brands as
ANDROGYNITES' DELIGHT AND VERBELL--FOR LONGER, CURLIER, MORE SENSITIVE
ANTENNAE, until they found a small gray box, about six inches by three
by three. It was called VALKORIN'S UNIVERSAL TASTE TREAT, FOR ALL
DIGESTIVE CAPACITIES.
"This looks as good as any," Hellman said. He opened the box.