Women are out of place on Mercury run ships, and if I were taking fictional liberties with this record I'd leave her out. But facts are facts, and the feminine zig-zag had a lot to do with the way the frog brought us all to the brink of despair. Without her it would have been less though, but less exciting, too, and, of course, for romantic reasons I was glad she had come. She happened to be Ellison's niece, and my fiancee, and had a kid brother working on the metallurgical staff. "But it isn't a frog," I said, irritably. "It's a Mercurian animal. And I don't blame Murphy for sailing into me." "You're being very charitable," she said. "He tried to kill you." "All right," I said. "For a minute he went berserk. But what would _you_ do if you bagged the first Mercurian animal ever seen and a dumb kid turned it into a museum piece? If Murphy could have brought that frog back to Earth alive the National Geographic Society would have smothered him with medals." "But won't it thaw out, Dave?" "It's limper than a rag right now," I said. "But it is also dead as a doornail." Sylvia's brow crinkled. "I should think a Mercurian animal would have to be plated like an armadillo. I should think it would need some sort of air-cooling system and a--" "Hold on," I said. "You're jumping to a priori conclusions. We'll start with the animal. It _is_ froglike, so conditions on Mercury must favor the development of slender, agile quadrupeds with powerful hindlimbs. Since Mercury is flecked with semi-molten 'marsh patches' its froglike appearance does not surprise me. We can only speculate as to its habits, but it's probably oviparous, and has a brief life-cycle. "Now, in hot baths with carefully regulated approaches human beings have been able to stand degrees of heat above the boiling point of water. Back in the eighteenth century a Frenchman named Chamouni the Incombustible entered an oven containing a raw leg of mutton, and remained there until the meat was completely cooked. Medical history records hundreds of similar cases." "But what has that to do with Murphy's frog?" "Don't you see? If human beings can build up all that resistance in a few minutes what's to stop a _rapidly breeding_ Mercurian animal from acquiring ten times as much immunity in fifty thousand generations? With already immune invertebrates to start with natural selection could give even a highly evolved, meaty-fleshed animal plenty of resistance." I was feeling distinctly proud of myself when Sylvia countered with: "You said the sides of its body and its hindlimbs were covered with fine, reddish hairs. Villosities was the term you used. How could natural selection build up immunity in hair?" I could have brought up another player, but I wanted her to smooth my forehead instead. So I leaned back with a sigh and refrained from pointing out that chitin was slow-burning at best, and that the only hairy frog on Earth--Trichobatatrachus robustus from West Africa--lived up to its name.