the surrounding forest. But he was looking for a plant, not
an animal.

And he finally saw what he was looking for.

The technicians paid him no attention. They rarely did. They had their
job, and he had his. Of course, he didn't want to be caught breaking
regulations, but he knew how to avoid that catastrophe. He walked
casually toward the tree, as though he were only slightly interested in
it.

He didn't know what the name of the tree was. He'd asked a technician
once, and the tech had said that the tree didn't have any name yet.
Personally, MacNeil thought it was silly for a thing not to have a name.
Hell, _everything_ had a name.

But, if they didn't want to tell him what it was, that was all right
with him, too. He called it a banana-pear tree.

Because that's what the fruit reminded him of.

The fruit that hung from the tree were six or eight inches long, fat in
the middle, and tapering at both ends. The skin was a pale chartreuse in
color, with heliotrope spots.

[Illustration]

MacNeil remembered the first time he'd seen one, the time he'd asked the
tech what its name was. The tech had been picking some of them and
putting them into plastic bags, and the faint spark of MacNeil's dim
curiosity had been brought to feebly flickering life.

"Hey, Doc," he'd said, "whatcha gonna do with them things?"

"Take 'em to the lab," said the technician, engrossed in his work.

MacNeil had digested that carefully. "Yeah?" he'd said at last. "What
for?"

The technician had sighed and popped another fruit into a bag. He had
attempted to explain things to Broderick MacNeil before and given it up
as a bad job. "We just feed 'em to the monkeys, Mac, that's all."

"Oh," said Broderick MacNeil.

Well, that made sense, anyhow. Monkeys got to eat _something_, don't
they? Sure. And he had gazed at the fruit in interest.

Fresh fruit was something MacNeil missed. He'd heard that fresh fruit
was necessary for health, and on Earth he'd always made sure that he had
plenty of it. He didn't want to get sick. But they didn't ship fresh
fruit on an interstellar expedition, and MacNeil had felt vaguely
apprehensive about the lack.

Now, however, his problems were solved. He knew that it was strictly
against regulations to eat native fruit until the brass said so, but
that didn't worry him too much. He'd heard somewhere that a man can eat
anything a monkey can, so he wasn't worried about it. So he'd tried one.
It tasted fine,