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The fruit that hung from the tree were six or eight inches long, fat in the middle, and tapering at both ends. The skin was a pale chartreuse in color, with heliotrope spots.

MacNeil remembered the first time he’d seen one, the time he’d asked the tech what its name was. The tech had been picking some of them and putting them into plastic bags, and the faint spark of MacNeil’s dim curiosity had been brought to feebly flickering life.

“Hey, Doc,” he’d said, “whatcha gonna do with them things?”

“Take ’em to the lab,” said the technician, engrossed in his work.

MacNeil had digested that carefully. “Yeah?” he’d said at last. “What for?”

The technician had sighed and popped another fruit into a bag. He had attempted to explain things to Broderick MacNeil before and given it up as a bad job. “We just feed ’em to the monkeys, Mac, that’s all.”

“Oh,” said Broderick MacNeil.

Well, that made sense, anyhow. Monkeys got to eat something, don’t they? Sure. And he had gazed at the fruit in interest.

Fresh fruit was something MacNeil missed. He’d heard that fresh fruit was necessary for health, and on Earth he’d always made sure that he had plenty of it. He didn’t want to get sick. But they didn’t ship fresh fruit on an interstellar expedition, and MacNeil had felt vaguely apprehensive about the lack.

Now, however, his problems were solved. He knew that it was strictly against regulations to eat native fruit until the brass said so, but that didn’t worry him too much. He’d heard somewhere that a man can eat anything a monkey can, so he wasn’t worried about it. So he’d tried one. It tasted fine, something like a pear and something like a banana, and different from either. It was just fine.

Since then, he’d managed to eat a couple every day, so’s to get his fresh fruit. It kept him healthy. Today, though, he needed more than just health; he was hungry, and the banana-pears looked singularly tempting.

When he reached the tree, he turned casually around to see if any of the others were watching. They weren’t, but he kept his eye on them while he picked several of the fruit. Then he turned carefully around, and, with his back to the others, masking his movements with his own body, he began to munch contentedly on the crisp flesh of the banana-pears.

* * * * *

“Now, take this one, for instance,” said Dr. Pilar. He was holding up a native fruit. It bulged in the middle, and had a chartreuse rind with heliotrope spots on it. “It’s a very good example of exactly what we’re up against. Ever since we discovered this particular fruit, we’ve been interested in it because the analyses show that it should be an excellent source of basic food elements. Presumably, it even tastes good; our monkeys seemed to like it.”

“What’s the matter with it, then?” asked Major Grodski, eying the fruit with sleepy curiosity.

Dr. Pilar gave the thing a wry look and put it back in the specimen bag. “Except for the fact that it has killed every one of our test specimens, we don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

Colonel Fennister looked around the laboratory at the cages full of chittering animals–monkeys, white mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, and the others. Then he looked back at the scientist. “Don’t you know what killed them?”

Pilar didn’t answer; instead, he glanced at Dr. Smathers, the physician.

Smathers steepled his fingers over his abdomen and rubbed his fingertips together. “We’re not sure. Thus far, it looks as though death was caused by oxygen starvation in the tissues.”

“Some kind of anemia?” hazarded the colonel.

Smathers frowned. “The end results are similar, but there is no drop in the hemoglobin–in fact, it seems to rise a little. We’re still investigating that. We haven’t got all the answers yet, by any means, but since we don’t quite know what to look for, we’re rather hampered.”