"Incompetent?" he almost snorted. "Prunella was the most belligerently competent female that it has ever been my misfortune to run across. Prunella was efficiency personified, make no mistake about that. She was--or is--a top-flight botanist and had led several expeditions here on Earth, but she couldn't realize that Xenon wasn't Earth. She tried to live by the book as she had here, but in spite of the general excellence of the _Spaceman's Handbook_, her methods didn't work so well." I primed him with another two fingers out of the bottle and sat back to listen. "Good brandy," he said. "I made some once on Xenon, but Prunella put a halt to that in a hurry, just as she did a lot of other things. The trouble with her was that she was always insufferably right. Every blasted time! And she was right again when she pointed out that if we were to come under attack, the products of the little distillery might impair our efforts to defend ourselves. My still went under the ax." * * * * * He sighed and then went on. "She neglected to say what might attack us or where this enemy might come from, since men are the only animals to achieve space flight thus far and there was nothing on Xenon that was hostile to us. "But I'm getting ahead of my story," he told his glass. "It probably all started when she arrived. We had been looking forward to the day, but none of us more than Joe, our cook. Joe was that rare find, a man who took pride in his work and worked with pride. Joe, I firmly believe, could barbecue a spaceman's boot so that it would taste like steak. He considered Prunella and her arrival a fine opportunity to show what he could do when he really wanted to. "For her first meal with us, Joe had prepared Prunella a feed from every edible native fruit, vegetable and meat that he could lay his hands on. It was the same stuff that we had been getting fat on for nearly two years, but did we eat any of his cooking that night? Not a bite," he answered himself. "I thought she was going to toss a fit right there and then. "'Gentlemen,' she said, 'you know as well as I that consumption of any native product of a strange planet is expressly forbidden by the _Spaceman's Handbook of Survival_ until these products have been thoroughly investigated and passed upon by the proper authorities. Therefore, we shall eat the synthetics that have been provided for us until these have been examined by the labs on Earth.' "She was right, of course," Lee went on. "Many poor devils have died in agony because they were foolish enough to eat some luscious-looking fruit before it had been checked. We tried to tell her that our lab monkeys and cats had eaten and liked everything on the table, as had we, but we still had to send samples to Earth. That was two years ago and they still haven't handed back a report." [Illustration] He sighed again and this time didn't wait for me to pour for him.