Illustrated by WEISS
There are exceptions to almost every rule and Xenon was one of them.The rule in this particular case was the old cataloguers' adage that cataloguing duty was never pleasant, often dangerous and always hard.Xenon is the fourth planet of one of the stars investigated some sevenor eight years ago by the battleship _Terra_ on her swing around theedge of the Black Hole.
Unequipped for exploration, the Terra hadn't bothered to land on the planet, but instead had taken only the usual gravitational and atmosphere readings and then had continued on her long mapping patrol. She had slowed just long enough to send back her report on tight beam to Venus Relay Station and propose the name of Xenon, "the unknown." After all, a planet with point nine Earth gravity and almost twenty per cent oxygen in its atmosphere was well worth a name rather than a number.
About a year later, the preliminary exploration ship arrived and spent several weeks mapping and testing this, that and the other thing. Then she went home and wrote her report — and what a report it was! The thing read like a Chamber of Commerce bulletin that had been sponsored by a subdivider. All it needed was a couple of ads offering some choice business locations for sale and it would have been complete.
The planet was perfect, the climate was perfect, the soil fertile. There were no natives or hostile life to bother a man. The forests were wide, the plains were broad and the numerous rivers were not only full of fish but also emptied into blue seas that were just as full of fish as the rivers. That report was enough to make a man quit his job and go to Xenon to start a chicken ranch or grow oranges.
The bureau of Colonization acted with its usual speed. Three years later, a cataloguing group landed from the supply ship Hunter. The duties of the groups are simple enough; they determine which of the food crops known to Man can best adapt themselves to the conditions found on the particular planet under examination. They list the native flora and fauna, minerals and resources. They chart the weather and its cycles and, in general, try to determine if Man can exist there and, if so, if the planet is worth the expense, trouble and danger of colonization.
Most planets are not worth it, but Xenon was.
And now the group had returned with its final report and its recommendations. The report? Xenon was perfect, just perfect. The recommendations? Immediate colonization, but be careful who is sent so that place isn't spoiled by a bunch of land-grabbing exploiters who might not appreciate the place.
They had been back nearly a week before Lee Spencer had time to come to my place for the weekend. Due to a combination of my wife's cooking and a sedentary desk job with the Bureau, I was beginning to have a bit of difficulty in bending over far enough to zip on my shoes in the mornings, but Lee was still as lean and fit as he was the day he blasted off for Xenon nearly four years before.
He had been given the full returned-hero treatment, complete with press conferences, testimonial dinner, audience with the Coordinator — everything. He hadn't had a waking moment to himself since he landed, so I suppose that might have been one reason that he relaxed so completely in front of the library fire after dinner and talked more than he perhaps should have. Or the generous slug of the old brandy my 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."
We 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."
He 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, 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."
Lee 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 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."
I 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?"