“You eat,” Pappy Vic said. “Tell if good. Pappy Vic not know.”
“Well, what is it?” she asked.
“Hoenveld found what was different about it.” The explanation was rather complicated; she had been exposed to, rather than studied, chemistry. She got the general idea; the Extee-Three the Fuzzies liked had been cooked in titanium.
“That’s what this stew pan is; part of a camp cooking kit I brought here from Terra.” He gave the white mess in the pan a final stir and lifted it from the stove, burning his finger and swearing; just like a man in a kitchen. “Now, as soon as this slop’s cool…”
Diamond smelled it, and wanted to try it right away. He had to wait, though, until it was cool. Then they carried the pan, it had a treacherous-looking folding handle, out to the Fuzzy-room, and Mr. Grego spooned some onto Diamond’s plate, and Diamond took his little spoon and tasted, cautiously. Then he began shoveling it into his mouth ravenously.
“The Master Mind crashes through again,” she said. “He really likes it.” Diamond had finished what was on his plate. “You like?” she asked, in Fuzzy. “Want more?”
“Give him the rest of it, Sandra. I’m going to call Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld, and suggest an experiment for him to try. And after that, Miss Glenn, will you honor me by having a cocktail with me?”
JACK HOLLOWAY LAUGHED. “So that’s it. When did you find out?”
“Mallin just screened me; he just got it from Grego,” Gerd van Riebeek, in the screen, said. “They’re going to start tearing out all the stainless-steel cookers right away, and replace them with titanium. Jack, have you any titanium cooking utensils?”
“No. Everything we have here is steel. We have sheet titanium; the house and the sheds and the old hangar are all sheet-titanium. We might be able to make something…” He stopped short. “Gerd, we don’t have to cook the food in titanium. We can cook titanium in the food. Cut up some chunks and put them in the kettles. It would work the same way.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Gerd said. “I never thought of that. I’ll bet nobody else did, either.”
DR JAN CHRISTIAAN Hoenveld was disgusted and chagrined and embarrassed, and mostly disgusted.
It had been gratifying to discover a hitherto unknown biochemical, especially one existing unsuspected in a well known, long manufactured, and widely distributed commercial product. He could understand how it had happened; a by-effect in one of the manufacturing processes, and since the stuff had been proven safe and nutritious for humans and other life-forms having similar biochemistry and metabolism, nobody had bothered until some little animals — no, people, that had been scientifically established — had detected its absence by taste. Things like that happened all the time. He had been proud of the accomplishment; he’d been going to call the newly discovered substance hoenveldine. He could have worked out a way of synthesizing it, too, but by proper scientific methods it would have taken over a year, and he knew it, and he’d said so to everybody.
And now, within a day, it had been synthesized, if that were the word for it, by a rank amateur, a layman, a complete non-scientist. And not in a laboratory but in a kitchen, with no equipment but a battered old stew pan!
And the worst of it was that this layman, this empiric, was his employer. The claims of the manager-in-chief of the Zarathustra Company simply couldn’t be brushed off. Not by a Company scientist.
Well, Grego had found out what he wanted; he could stop worrying about that. He had important work to do; an orderly, long-term study of the differences between Zarathustran and Terran biochemistry. The differences were minute, but they existed, and they had to be understood, and they had to be investigated in an orderly, scientific manner.
And now, they wanted him to go haring off, hit-or-miss, after this problem about Fuzzy infant mortality and defective births, and they didn’t even know any such problem existed. They had one, just one, case — that six-month fetus the Andrews girl had brought in — and they had a lot of unsubstantiated theorizing by Gerd van Riebeek, pure conclusion jumping. And now they wanted him to find out if eating land-prawns caused these defective births which they believed, on the basis of one case and a lot of supposition, to exist. Maybe after years of observation of hundreds of cases they might have some justification, but…
He rose from the chair at the desk in the corner of the laboratory and walked slowly among the workbenches. Ten men and women, eight of them working on new projects that had been started since young van Riebeek had started after this mare’s-nest of his, all of them diverted from serious planned research. He stopped at one bench, where a woman was working.
“Miss Tresca, can’t you keep your bench in better order than this?” he scolded. “Keep things in their places. What are you working on?”
“Oh, a hunch I had, about this hokfusine.”
Hunch! That was the trouble, all through Science Center; too many hunches and not enough sound theory.
“About what?”
“Oh, the titanium thing. It’s a name Mr. Grego suggested, from a couple of Fuzzy words, hoku fusso, wonderful food. It’s what the Fuzzies call Extee-Three.”
Hokfusine, indeed. Now they were getting the Fuzzy language into scientific nomenclature.
“Well, just forget about your hunch,” he told her. “There are a lot of samples of organic matter, blood, body secretions, hormones, tissue, from pregnant female Fuzzies that they want analyzed. I don’t suppose it makes any more sense than your hunch, but they want analyses immediately. They want everything immediately, it seems. And straighten up that clutter on your bench. How often do I have to tell you that order is the first virtue in scientific work?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THEY WERE IN Jack’s living room, and it looked almost exactly as it had the first night Gerd van Riebeek had seen it, when he and Ruth and Juan Jimenez had come out to see the Fuzzies, without the least idea that the validity of the Company’s charter would be involved. All the new office equipment that had cluttered it had gone, in the two weeks he and Ruth had been in Mallorysport, and there was just the sturdy, comfortable furniture Jack had made himself, and the damnthing and the bush-goblin and veldbeest skins on the floor, and the gunrack with the tangle of bedding under it.
There were just five of them, as there had been that other evening, three months, or was it three ages, ago. Juan Jimenez and Ben Rainsford were absent, in Mallorysport, but they had been replaced by Pancho Ybarra, lounging in one of the deep chairs, and Lynne Andrews, on the couch beside Ruth. Jack sat in the armchair at his table-desk, trying to keep Baby Fuzzy, on his lap, from climbing up to sit on his head. On the floor, the adult Fuzzies — just Jack’s own family; this was their place, and the others didn’t intrude here — were in the middle of the room, playing with the things that had been brought back from Mallorysport. The kind of playthings Fuzzies liked; ingenuity-challenging toys for putting together shapes and colors.
He was glad they weren’t playing with their molecule-model kit. He’d seen enough molecule models in the last two weeks to last him a lifetime.
“And there isn’t anything we can do about it, at all?” Lynne was asking.
“No. There isn’t anything anybody can do. The people in Mallorysport have given up trying. They’re still investigating, but that’s only to be able to write a scientifically accurate epitaph for the Fuzzy race.”
“Can’t they do something to reverse it?”
“It’s irreversible,” Ruth told her. “It isn’t a matter of diet or environment or anything external. It’s this hormone, NFM p , that they produce in their own bodies, that inhibits normal development of the embryo. And we can’t even correct it in individual cases by surgery; excising the glands that secrete it would result in sterility.”