reds of incoming calls backed up. By
sheer obstinacy and bad manners he made it. He got a connection to a
hospital where he was known, and he talked to its bacteriologist. The
bacteriologist was competent, but not yet famous. With Holden giving
honest guesses at the color of the sunlight, and its probable
ultra-violet content, and with careful estimates of the exactness with
which burning vegetation here smelled like Earth-plants, they arrived at
imprecise but common sense conclusions. Of the hundreds of thousands of
possible organic compounds, only so many actually took part in the
life-processes of creatures on Earth. Yet there were hundreds of
thousands of species prepared to make use of anything usable. If the
sunlight and temperature of the two worlds were similar, it was somewhat
more than likely that the same chemical compounds would be used by
living things on both. So that there could be micro-organisms on the
new planet which could be harmful. But on the other hand, either they
would be familiar in the toxins they produced--and human bodies could
resist them--or else they would be new compounds to which humans would
react allergically. Basically, then, if anybody on the ship developed
hives, they had reason to be frightened. But so long as nobody sneezed
or broke out in welts, their lives were probably safe.

This comforting conclusion took a long time to work out. Meanwhile Babs
and Cochrane had swung down to the ground and went hiking. Cochrane was
armed as before, though he had no experience as a marksman. In
television shows he had directed the firing of weapons shooting blank
charges--cut to a minimum so they wouldn't blast the mikes. He knew what
motions to go through, but nothing else.

They did not explore in the same direction as their first excursion. The
ship was to take off presently, as soon as this planet had turned enough
for the space-ship's nose to point nearly in the direction of their next
target. They had two hours for exploration.

They came upon something which lay still across their path, like a great
serpent. Cochrane looked at it startledly. Then he saw that the round,
glistening seeming snake was fastened to the ground by rootlets. It was
a plant which grew like a creeper, absorbing nourishment from a vast
root-area. Somewhere, no doubt, it would rear upward and spread out
leaves to absorb the sun's light. It used, in a way, the principle of
those lateral wells which in dry climates