thought. "If that hypochondriac idiot has brains enough to sit tight, we
may have a chance. If they get him, too, we're lost."

The Quack was a damned poor reed to lean on.

His name was Alvin Frick, but no one ever used it. He was twenty-nine,
and would never have rated a space berth as anything but a hydroponics
attendant, which is one step above manual labor. He was short, plump and
scrubbed to the pink, and he was the only hypochondriac I ever knew in
this modern age of almost no sickness. He groused about the germs
swarming in his reduction tanks, and he was scared green, in spite of
his permanent immunization shots, that he'd contract some nameless alien
disease at every planetfall. He dosed himself continuously with
concoctions whipped up from an old medical book he had found somewhere,
and he spent most of his off-duty time spraying himself and his quarters
with disinfectant. His mania had only one good facet--if he had been the
careless sort, hydroponics being what it is, he'd have smelled like a
barnyard instead of a dispensary.

We had never made any attempt to get rid of him, since we might have
drawn an even worse tank-farmer, but we began to wish now that we had.
We had hardly begun to figure ways and means of escaping when a bunch of
grinning natives swung into our court and deposited the Quack, sleeping
soundly, in our midst.

He came to just before sundown, and when we told him what had happened,
he promptly passed out again--this time from fright.

"A fine lot of help _you_ are, you super-sterile slob," I said when he
woke up for the second time. I'd probably have said worse, but it was
just then that the real squeeze began.

Gaffa came back with the two scowling Haslops in tow and handed us the
problem his tribe had spent twenty-two years in working up.

"We have learned enough already from Haslop," Gaffa said, "to know
something of the pressures and complexities that follow the expansion of
your Terran Realm through the galaxy, and to assure us that in time we
must either become a part of that Realm or isolate ourselves completely.

"We are a peaceful species and feel that we should probably benefit as
much from your physical sciences as your people would from our
biological skills, but there is a question of compatibility that must be
settled first, before we may risk making ourselves known to Terra. So we
have devised a test to determine what our course shall be."

* *