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."

  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?"

nother 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