gled 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?"

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 con