Hartford nodded, his face pale. The "A" of the Axenite's alphabet was Apprehension. As a germ-free--axenic, gnotobiotic--human being, he is superior in most ways to ordinary men. He's usually larger and stronger. He never has dental caries, pimples, appendicitis, the common cold or certain cancers. No matter how much or how long he sweats, the Axenite doesn't stink; nor do his other excretions. On a contaminated world, however, the Axenite is a tender flower indeed. A baby's breath can be death to him, if that baby be a "normal" human; for no microbe is benign to the man without antibodies. To him a drop of rain may reek with pestilence, the scent of evening may be a lethal gas. "I can't understand their stripping Pia, sir," he said. "Why would they do such a terrible thing?" "Because they're Stinkers!" Nef said. "Can you imagine what it must be like to be one of them? Every inch of your skin a-crawl with living filth, your guts packed with foulness, your whole frame a compromise with rottenness? Do you wonder that they'd delight to make us as unwholesome as they are themselves?" Colonel Nef lighted the cigar he'd been mulling. "Lee, do you think one Stinkerville destroyed is too high a price for them to pay for having murdered two Axenite troopers? For Piacentelli's wife is as much their victim as her husband." Hartford shook his head. "I'm not sure, sir. What bothers me more than anything else is that it's my fault Pia went out last night. He asked me to arrange for him to replace the scheduled picket officer, and I did." "Lee, why was Piacentelli so anxious to pull this extra duty?" Nef asked. Hartford tried unobtrusively to squirm his chair out of the jet-stream from Nef's cigar. "He told me he wanted to work on the language, sir," he said. "Pia really had such a project. He'd never had contact with anyone with a speech other than Standard before, and the problem of transducing one language into another fascinated him. The Kansans call their speech _Nihon-go_. Pia taught me to understand some of it." "A waste of your time, Lee," Nef said. "You'll never have occasion to speak it. Be that as it may, unless Piacentelli was attempting to coax a course in Bedroom Kansan from a Stinker maiden, I can hardly understand why his lexigraphical labors should require him to unsuit himself. No, Piacentelli was deliberately murdered." "I'm puzzled, sir," Hartford admitted. "When we tossed those smoke-candles, I heard Pia shouting for us to stop it. Would he have done so if the Indigenous Hominids had him captive? Why did none of the natives lift a hand against us, though we were burning their homes? Why did Paula Piacentelli seem to know why Pia was going outside tonight? Why did he take a microscope with him? Why did Paula kill herself?" * * * * *