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."

e 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."

e 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,