Hours later an exhausted Captain Grimes returned to his spaceship to be greeted by an apologetic and happier crew. "The boy's going to be all right," Dr. Johnson told him. "He thinks he owes his life to the fact that he only took half a pill, but I don't know. I'd say it was just plain old guts." "How about the pills?" "No doubt about them, but I haven't pinned it down yet. We put a pump on Manson and found some sodium chlorate in his stomach. That's NaClO_{3}, you know, and you could get it from ordinary table salt, NaCl, and ozone, O_{3}, if you could combine them. The Uneasy pill has the NaCl all right, and there's plenty of ozone in the atmosphere here--you've smelled it, of course. Smells like chlorine." Grimes nodded impatiently. "But you couldn't get enough sodium chlorate to kill a man from one medium size pill, could you?" "No, you couldn't. It is poisonous, however. It's used as an insecticide and as a weed-killer. But it's highly unstable and I don't know how it could have been formed from such a stable substance as sodium chloride. But we've never really had a chance to analyze this atmosphere. I'll work on it on the way back. Whatever the catalyst is, it must have allowed some other ozonides to form, and many of them are highly explosive. A man could literally have been blown to pieces from the inside. It must have been something that could produce hallucinations too, judging from Lerner's actions." Grimes laughed bitterly, but with relief. "Man, do we owe the Primans an apology! I better draft something quick; then we'll shove off." Lieutenant Ramsey was the only one who managed to speak. "I insist on making out a voluntary on my actions, sir. I don't know what came over me." The captain pushed him aside. "There'll be no voluntarys passed across my desk. I'm capable of reporting on conditions in my ship." He went on to his private quarters. Well, it was over, he thought wearily. The psychology boys had been right again. He had felt like a mechanical man all the time. He never would have believed he could send men out like that--and the ship! He could have lost everything. He glanced at the tape player still in position at his bedside. Suddenly, on impulse, he dived at it and threw it open at the top. He shorted out the governor circuits and then re-wound the tape to the playing position. He had heard of commanders doing it before, and vaguely he was aware that there was an order forbidding it, but he replayed the tape anyway--this time to his conscious mind. There was some soft, dreamy music for a couple of minutes, then a feminine voice whispered, "Sleep well, Captain Grimes. Sleep well." That was all, except for some more music. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Primus Curse, by Bill Wesley