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."

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."

ee 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