"One of the men, this mate said, happened to step on a piece of one of those stumps, after he'd gotten out of his glassite suit. I got kind of sick listening to the mate tell about what happened then. Ever see an Earth wasp sting another insect and then lay its eggs in that insect's body, Olger? Well, it was like that. The man was paralyzed the minute the spores settled on him and he started screaming. A couple of minutes and the spores had paralyzed his vocal chords and after that he stopped screaming. He--well, he just kept screaming with his eyes, the mate said. They put a blaster to the poor devil's head before they left. "That's what those spores are like, Olger, and I don't want any part of them, thanks. I don't mind taking a chance on dying from a ray gun but those rhizoids are only worth a hundred thousand credits apiece and I'd want a hundred million before I'd take a chance on dying like that." "And what if we could show you a chance to make your hundred million?" Bill Olger asked softly. Mallard's fingers tightened around his glass. "I'm listening." "You see," Olger began slowly, "the trouble up to now has been that no one could get those stones out of the fungus stumps unless he was protected by a cumbersome glassite suit and the swamp belt is too dense to bring those suits into. That meant they could only pick up a few they found growing around the rim of the belt. There are rumors that the natives have found a way to handle the spores but they regard the fungus as sacred and won't help. "But, a couple of years back the Galactic Colonization Board finally managed to get one of the plants back to Earth. It isn't generally known but they really did it. They used a low powered force field and finally worked it into a glassite cage. They kept it quiet because they lost three of their men getting the thing caged. "When they got the fungus stump back to Earth they began to experiment with it. They started coating white rats with different chemicals and coverings, or injecting different drugs in them, and then sending them into the cage with the thing. They used up an awful lot of white rats, Mallard." George Mallard shuddered. "I can believe that." "The main thing, though, the thing that matters to us, is that they put D'ulio, here, in charge of the experiments. And D'ulio had ideas of his own. He was just out of the Martian University and he just couldn't see any point in working for Terrans for the rest of his life for a small salary. "The second week D'ulio worked on the fungus stump he discovered that the spores could be killed as fast as they were released by a plain, ordinary Overton ray. You remember the old Overton ray gun that was used in the war against the Martian desert tribes? The gun was originally meant to be rigged up on a ship but D'ulio made a smaller model that could be carried by two men and it worked on the spores as well as a big gun.