"You cannot understand," Hartford said. He spoke more to himself than to the girl. "The medicine here is certainly primitive. You have no concept of the biological nature of disease. Tell me, Takeko-san, do you Kansans know anything of the very, very small...." "Microscopic?" Takeko asked. "Piacentelli did a splendid job of teaching you the Standard language," Hartford said. He looked up and down Takeko's trim, just post-adolescent figure in frank appraisal, jealously wondering whether Gabe could have achieved his remarkable pedagogical results by means of the pillow-book method of linguistic instruction so popular with soldiers of occupation in every time and climate. That thought, he rebuked himself, was unworthy of Pia's memory. In any case, his friend had conducted his researches wearing that guarantee of chastity, a safety-suit. "We'll have to wait an hour or so until the _giraffu_ come," Takeko said. She unstrapped the wallet from her back and unpacked it on the grass at the edge of the little stream. The Kansan girl took out a coil of line, spun from the stalk of the sunflower, and a bronze hook. "We will feed the gentleman from the Stone House," she said. Hartford watched with amusement as she baited the hook with a bit of the bread from her knapsack, twirled the line about her head and dropped it into the center of the stream. "This place has many fish," she said. "We will not wait long before we eat." It took Takeko only ten minutes to have three seven-inch fish, so plump and meaty-looking that not even a xenologist would have wasted time studying them, lying on the grass. Hartford demanded equal time with the fishline, and discovered to his gratification that the dough he pinched off the chapattis and molded to the hook took the fancy of Kansas fish as well as Takeko's offerings. With a sense of at last participating in the affairs of the universe, he de-capitated and decaudated the six fish they ended with, and gutted them with a rich delight in the juicy messiness of the task. Hartford and Takeko scissored the fillets in split twigs and roasted them, like aquatic weenies, over a fire built from the pithy stalks of dead sunflowers. The firepit, a saucer of scooped-out dirt, had buried beneath it half a dozen of the swollen roots of sunflowers, each wrapped in the cordiform, sharkskin-surfaced leaf of the parent plant, to roast beneath the coals. * * * * * They seasoned their fish with _daikon_, a kind of horseradish; and their plates were the fresh-baked, flat, un-leavened chappattis Takeko had brought in her pack. The tubers, eaten from a fresh leaf-plate, needed only butter. Takeko had this, too, churned of camelopard-milk cream. Buds or flower-heads of the sunflower were eaten with sunflower oil, like artichokes. "Your people have a good friend in the sunflower;" Hartford remarked, wiping his lips.