Bowman charts it as geometric progression."

Stone scratched his jaw as a lone pink pseudopod pushed out on the floor
toward him. Then he leaped forward and stamped on it, severing the
strand from the body.

The severed member quivered and lay still for a moment. Then it flowed
back to rejoin the body with a wet gurgle.

Stone looked at his half-dissolved shoe.

"Egotropism," Jenkins said. "Bowman played around with that, too. A
severed piece will rejoin if it can. If it can't it just takes up
independent residence and we have two _hlorgs_."

"What happens to it outside the ship?" Stone wanted to know.

"It falls dormant for several hours, and then splits up into a thousand
independent chunks. One of the boys spent half of yesterday out there
gathering them up. I tell you, this thing is equipped to _survive_."

"So are we," said Green Doctor Stone grimly. "If we can't outwit this
free-flowing gob of obscenity, we deserve anything we get. Let's have a
conference."

They met in the pilot room. The Black Doctor was there; so were Bowman
and Hrunta. Chambers, the physiologist, was glumly clasping and
unclasping his hands in a corner. The geneticist, Piccione, drew symbols
on a scratch pad and stared blankly at the wall.

Jenkins was saying: "Of course, these are only preliminary reports, but
they serve to outline the problem. This is not just an annoyance any
longer, it's a crisis. We'd all better understand that."

The Black Doctor cut him off with a wave of his hand, and glowered at
the papers as he read them through minutely. As he sat hunched at the
desk with the black cowl of his office hanging down from his shoulders
he looked like a squat black judge, Jenkins thought, a shadow from the
Inquisition, a Passer of Spells. But there was no medievalism in Black
Doctor Neelsen. In fact, it was for that reason, and only that reason,
that the Black Service had come to be the leaders and the whips, the
executors and directors of all the manifold operations of Hospital
Earth.

* * * * *

The physicians of the General Practice Patrol were fledglings, newly
trained in their specialties, inexperienced in the rigorous discipline
of medicine that was required of the directors of permanent Planetary
Dispensaries in the heavily populated systems of the Galaxy. On outlying
worlds where little was known of the ways of medicine, the temptation
was great to substitute faith for knowledge, cant