o come under attack, the products of the little distillery might
impair our efforts to defend ourselves. My still went under the ax."

* * * * *

He sighed and then went on. "She neglected to say what might attack us
or where this enemy might come from, since men are the only animals to
achieve space flight thus far and there was nothing on Xenon that was
hostile to us.

"But I'm getting ahead of my story," he told his glass. "It probably
all started when she arrived. We had been looking forward to the day,
but none of us more than Joe, our cook. Joe was that rare find, a man
who took pride in his work and worked with pride. Joe, I firmly
believe, could barbecue a spaceman's boot so that it would taste like
steak. He considered Prunella and her arrival a fine opportunity to
show what he could do when he really wanted to.

"For her first meal with us, Joe had prepared Prunella a feed from
every edible native fruit, vegetable and meat that he could lay his
hands on. It was the same stuff that we had been getting fat on for
nearly two years, but did we eat any of his cooking that night? Not a
bite," he answered himself. "I thought she was going to toss a fit
right there and then.

"'Gentlemen,' she said, 'you know as well as I that consumption of any
native product of a strange planet is expressly forbidden by the
_Spaceman's Handbook of Survival_ until these products have been
thoroughly investigated and passed upon by the proper authorities.
Therefore, we shall eat the synthetics that have been provided for us
until these have been examined by the labs on Earth.'

"She was right, of course," Lee went on. "Many poor devils have died
in agony because they were foolish enough to eat some luscious-looking
fruit before it had been checked. We tried to tell her that our lab
monkeys and cats had eaten and liked everything on the table, as had
we, but we still had to send samples to Earth. That was two years
ago and they still haven't handed back a report."

[Illustration]

He sighed again and this time didn't wait for me to pour for him.

"So we ate synthetics, but you know how they are--every morsel filled
to the brim with everything a man needs to live on indefinitely,
except one thing--taste. It almost broke Joe's spirit, he fixed the
stuff for us in every way known to mortal Man. No matter how thin he
sliced it, it was still synthetic and still had that flavor of a
well-aged glue-po