sure he didn't do any sleepwalking. He was
tying it to the bunk when Stone came in with a pan in his hand and a
peculiar look on his face.

"Take a look at this," he said.

Jenkins looked at the sickly brown mass in the tray, and then up at
Stone. "Where did you find it?"

"Down in the hold. Our _hlorg_ has broken precedent. It's _rejected_
something that it ate."

"Yeah. What is it?"

"I don't know. I'm taking it to Neelsen for paraffin sections. But I
know what it looks like to me."

"Mm. I know." Jenkins felt sick. Stone headed up to the path lab,
leaving the Red Doctor settled in his bunk.

Ten minutes later Jenkins sat bolt upright in the darkness. Frantically
he untied himself and slid into his clothes. "Idiot!" he growled to
himself. "Seventh son of a seventh son--"

Five minutes later he was staring at the vats in Hrunta's laboratory. He
found the one he was looking for. A pink blob of _hlorg_ wiggled slowly
around the bottom.

Jenkins drew a beaker of distilled water and added it to the fluid in
the vat. It hissed and sputtered and sent up quantities of acrid steam.
When the steam had cleared away, Jenkins peered in eagerly.

The pink thing in the bottom was turning a sickly violet. It had quit
wiggling. As Jenkins watched, the violet color changed to mud grey, then
to black. He prodded it with a stirring rod. There was no response.

With a whoop Jenkins buzzed Bowman and Stone. "We've got it!" he shouted
to them when they appeared. "Look! Look at it!"

Bowman poked and probed and broke into a wide grin. The piece of _hlorg_
was truly and sincerely dead. "It inactivates the enzyme system, and
renders the base protoplasm vulnerable to anything that normally attacks
it. What are we waiting for?"

They began tearing the laboratory apart, searching for the right
bottles. The supply was discouragingly small, but there was some in
stock. The three of them raced down the corridor for the hold where the
_hlorg_ was.

It took them three hours of angry work to exhaust the supply. They
whittled chunks off the _hlorg_, tossed them in pans of the deadly
fluid. With each slice they stopped momentarily to watch it turn violet,
then black, as it died. The _hlorg_, dwindling in size, sensed the
attack and slapped frantically at their ankles, sending out angry plumes
of wet jelly, but they ducked and dodged and whittled some more. The
_hlorg_ quivered and gurgled and wept pinkish goo all over the floor,
but i