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The colonel patted the air with a hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait until you give me the go-ahead. But I’ll want to know your plans.”

Pilar pursed his lips for a moment before he spoke. “We’ll check up on MacNeil for another forty-eight hours. We’d like to have him transferred over here, so that we can keep him in isolation. We’ll feed him more of the … uh … what’d he call ’em, Smathers?”

“Banana-pears.”

“We’ll feed him more banana-pears, and keep checking. If he is still in good shape, we’ll ask for volunteers.”

“Good enough,” said the colonel. “I’ll keep in touch.”

* * * * *

On the morning of the third day in isolation, MacNeil rose early, as usual, gulped down his normal assortment of vitamins, added a couple of aspirin tablets, and took a dose of Epsom salts for good measure. Then he yawned and leaned back to wait for breakfast. He was certainly getting enough fresh fruit, that was certain. He’d begun to worry about whether he was getting a balanced diet–he’d heard that a balanced diet was very important–but he figured that the doctors knew what they were doing. Leave it up to them.

He’d been probed and needled and tested plenty in the last couple of days, but he didn’t mind it. It gave him a feeling of confidence to know that the doctors were taking care of him. Maybe he ought to tell them about his various troubles; they all seemed like nice guys. On the other hand, it wouldn’t do to get booted out of the Service. He’d think it over for a while.

He settled back to doze a little while he waited for his breakfast to be served. Sure was nice to be taken care of.

* * * * *

Later on that same day, Dr. Pilar put out a call for volunteers. He still said nothing about MacNeil; he simply asked the colonel to say that it had been eaten successfully by a test animal.

The volunteers ate their banana-pears for lunch, approaching them warily at first, but soon polishing them off with gusto, proclaiming them to have a fine taste.

The next morning, they felt weak and listless.

Thirty-six hours later, they were dead.

“Oxygen starvation,” said Smathers angrily, when he had completed the autopsies.

Broderick MacNeil munched pleasantly on a banana-pear that evening, happily unaware that three of his buddies had died of eating that self-same fruit.

* * * * *

The chemist, Dr. Petrelli, looked at the fruit in his hand, snarled suddenly, and smashed it to the floor. Its skin burst, splattering pulp all over the gray plastic.

“It looks,” he said in a high, savage voice, “as if that hulking idiot will be the only one left alive when the ship returns!” He turned to look at Smathers, who was peering through a binocular microscope. “Smathers, what makes him different?”

“How do I know?” growled Dr. Smathers, still peering. “There’s something different about him, that’s all.”

Petrelli forcibly restrained his temper. “Very funny,” he snapped.

“Not funny at all,” Smathers snapped back. “No two human beings are identical–you know that.” He lifted his gaze from the eyepiece of the instrument and settled in on the chemist. “He’s got AB blood type, for one thing, which none of the volunteers had. Is that what makes him immune to whatever poison is in those things? I don’t know.

“Were the other three allergic to some protein substance in the fruit, while MacNeil isn’t? I don’t know.

“Do his digestive processes destroy the poison? I don’t know.