. Which makes Tabby quite a
bug.

Kyser, the youngest reporter, volunteered to let a Tabby bite him. It
did without too much coaxing. Now he has a little, itchy bump on his
wrist, and he's happily banging away at his typewriter on a story
titled, "I Was Bitten by the Bug from Space!" That was hours ago, and we
haven't learned anything sinister about the green fly except that it
does have a remarkable breeding ability.

One thing the reporter accomplished: we can go outside the screened
quarters now without wondering about catching space-typhus.

* * * * *

June 2--The quarantine was probably a pretty good idea. Cleve has turned
up some dope on Tabby's life cycle that makes us glad all over that we
are surrounded by a thousand miles of salt water. Tabby's adult life is
only a couple of days, but she is viviparous, prolific (some thousand
young at a sitting), and her green little microscopic babies combine the
best survival features of spores and plankton, minus one: they don't
live in salt water. But they do very well almost anyplace else. We have
watched them grow on hot rocks, leaves, in the sand and best of all,
filtered down a little into the moist earth.

They grow incredibly fast with a little sun, so the chlorophyll is
biologically justified in the life-cycle. This puzzled us at first,
because the adult Tabby turns into a blood-sucking little brute.
Deprived of any organic matter, our bottled specimens die in a short
time, in or out of the sunlight, indicating the green stuff doesn't
provide them with much if any nourishment after they are full-grown.

Now we are waiting for a supply of assorted insecticides to find the
best controls over the pests. The few things we had on hand worked quite
well, but I guess they aren't forgetting our sad experience with DDT a
few years back.

The Tabbies now outnumber all the other insects here, and most outside
work has been halted. The little green devils make life miserable
outside the tent-houses. We have built another screened shelter to
accommodate the latest arrivals. We are getting quite a fleet of
amphibian aircraft floating around our lagoon. No one will be allowed to
return until we come up with all the answers to the question of
controlling our insect invasion.

Cleveland is trying to convince Sellers and the commander that we should
get out and send in atomic fire to blow the whole island into the sea.
They forwarded his sugg