were dead.

"Oxygen starvation," said Smathers angrily, when he had completed the
autopsies.

Broderick MacNeil munched pleasantly on a banana-pear that evening,
happily unaware that three of his buddies had died of eating that
self-same fruit.

* * * * *

The chemist, Dr. Petrelli, looked at the fruit in his hand, snarled
suddenly, and smashed it to the floor. Its skin burst, splattering pulp
all over the gray plastic.

"It looks," he said in a high, savage voice, "as if that hulking idiot
will be the only one left alive when the ship returns!" He turned to
look at Smathers, who was peering through a binocular microscope.
"Smathers, what makes him different?"

"How do I know?" growled Dr. Smathers, still peering. "There's something
different about him, that's all."

Petrelli forcibly restrained his temper. "Very funny," he snapped.

"Not funny at all," Smathers snapped back. "No two human beings are
identical--you know that." He lifted his gaze from the eyepiece of the
instrument and settled in on the chemist. "He's got AB blood type, for
one thing, which none of the volunteers had. Is that what makes him
immune to whatever poison is in those things? I don't know.

"Were the other three allergic to some protein substance in the fruit,
while MacNeil isn't? I don't know.

"Do his digestive processes destroy the poison? I don't know.

"It's got something to do with his blood, I think, but I can't even be
sure of that. The leucocytes are a little high, the red cell count is a
little low, the hemoglobin shows a little high on the colorimeter, but
none of 'em seems enough to do any harm.

"It might be an enzyme that destroys the ability of the cells to utilize
oxygen. It might be _anything_!"

His eyes narrowed then, as he looked at the chemist. "After all, why
haven't you isolated the stuff from the fruit?"

"There's no clue as to what to look for," said Petrelli, somewhat less
bitingly. "The poison might be present in microscopic amounts. Do you
know how much botulin toxin it takes to kill a man? A fraction of a
milligram!"

Smathers looked as though he were about to quote the minimum dosage, so
Petrelli charged on: "If you think anyone could isolate an unknown
organic compound out of a--"

"Gentlemen! _Please!_" said Dr. Pilar sharply. "I realize that this is a
strain, but bickering won't help. What about your latest tests on
MacNeil, Dr. Smathers?"

"As far as I can t