“And by that time, we’ll have all the Extee-Three we want. Well, a lot of Fuzzies, including mine, are going to have to do without, then.”
He blanked the screen and lit a cigarette and looked at the globe of Zarathustra, which Henry Stenson had running on time again and which he could interpret like a clock. Be another hour till Sandra got back from the new Adoption Center; she’d have to pick up Diamond at Government House. And Leslie wouldn’t be in for cocktails this evening; he was over on Epsilon Continent, talking to people about things he didn’t want to discuss by screen. Ben Rainsford had finally gotten around to calling for an election for delegates to a constitutional convention, and they wanted to line up candidates of their own. It looked as though Mr. Victor Grego would have cocktails with the manager-in-chief of the Charterless Zarathustra Company, this evening. Might as well have them here.
Titanium, he thought disgustedly. It would be something like that. What was it they called the stuff? Oh, yes; the nymphomaniac metal; when it gets hot it combines with anything. An idea suddenly danced just out of reach. He stopped, halfway from the desk to the cabinet, his eyes closed. Then he caught it, and dashed for the communication screen, punching Malcolm Dunbar’s call combination.
It was a few minutes before Dunbar answered; he had his hat and coat on.
“I was just going out, Mr. Grego.”
“So I see. That man Vespi, the one who worked for Odin Dietetics; is he still around?”
“Why, no. He left twenty minutes ago, and I don’t know how to reach him right away.”
“No matter; get him in the morning. Listen, the pressure cookers, the ones you use to cook the farina for bulk-matter. What are they made of?”
“Why, light nonox-steel; our manufacture. Why?”
“Ask Vespi what they used for that purpose on Odin. Don’t suggest the answer, but see if it wasn’t titanium.”
Dunbar’s eyes widened. He’d heard about the chemical nymphomania of titanium, too.
“Sure; that’s what they’d use, there. And at Argentine Syntho-Foods, too. Listen, suppose I give the police an emergency-call request; they could find Joe in half an hour.”
“Don’t bother; tomorrow morning’s good enough. I want to try something first.”
He blanked the screen, and called Myra Fallada. She never left the office before he did.
“Myra; call out and get me five pounds of pure wheat farina, and be sure it’s made from Zarathustran wheat. Have it sent up to my apartment, fifteen minutes ago.”
“Fifteen minutes from now do?” she asked. “What’s it for; the Little Monster? All right, Mr. Grego.”
He forgot about the drink he was going to have with Mr. Victor Grego. You had a drink when the work was done, and there was still work to do.
THERE WAS CLATTERING in the kitchenette when Sandra Glenn brought Diamond into the Fuzzy-room. She opened the door between and looked through, and Diamond crowded past her knees for a look, too. Mr. Grego was cooking something, in a battered old stew pan she had never seen around the place before. He looked over his shoulder and said, “Hi, Sandra. Heyo, Diamond; use Fuzzyphone, Pappy Vic no get ear-thing.”
“What make do, Pappy Vic?” Diamond asked.
“That’s what I want to know, too.”
“Sandra, keep your fingers crossed; when this stuff’s done and has cooled off, we’re going to see how Diamond likes it. I think we have found out what’s the matter with that Extee-Three.”
“Estee-fee? You make Estee-fee? Real? Not like other?” Diamond wanted to know.
“You eat,” Pappy Vic said. “Tell if good. Pappy Vic not know.”
“Well, what is it?” she asked.
“Hoenveld found what was different about it.” The explanation was rather complicated; she had been exposed to, rather than studied, chemistry. She got the general idea; the Extee-Three the Fuzzies liked had been cooked in titanium.
“That’s what this stew pan is; part of a camp cooking kit I brought here from Terra.” He gave the white mess in the pan a final stir and lifted it from the stove, burning his finger and swearing; just like a man in a kitchen. “Now, as soon as this slop’s cool…”
Diamond smelled it, and wanted to try it right away. He had to wait, though, until it was cool. Then they carried the pan, it had a treacherous-looking folding handle, out to the Fuzzy-room, and Mr. Grego spooned some onto Diamond’s plate, and Diamond took his little spoon and tasted, cautiously. Then he began shoveling it into his mouth ravenously.
“The Master Mind crashes through again,” she said. “He really likes it.” Diamond had finished what was on his plate. “You like?” she asked, in Fuzzy. “Want more?”
“Give him the rest of it, Sandra. I’m going to call Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld, and suggest an experiment for him to try. And after that, Miss Glenn, will you honor me by having a cocktail with me?”
JACK HOLLOWAY LAUGHED. “So that’s it. When did you find out?”
“Mallin just screened me; he just got it from Grego,” Gerd van Riebeek, in the screen, said. “They’re going to start tearing out all the stainless-steel cookers right away, and replace them with titanium. Jack, have you any titanium cooking utensils?”
“No. Everything we have here is steel. We have sheet titanium; the house and the sheds and the old hangar are all sheet-titanium. We might be able to make something…” He stopped short. “Gerd, we don’t have to cook the food in titanium. We can cook titanium in the food. Cut up some chunks and put them in the kettles. It would work the same way.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Gerd said. “I never thought of that. I’ll bet nobody else did, either.”
DR JAN CHRISTIAAN Hoenveld was disgusted and chagrined and embarrassed, and mostly disgusted.
It had been gratifying to discover a hitherto unknown biochemical, especially one existing unsuspected in a well known, long manufactured, and widely distributed commercial product. He could understand how it had happened; a by-effect in one of the manufacturing processes, and since the stuff had been proven safe and nutritious for humans and other life-forms having similar biochemistry and metabolism, nobody had bothered until some little animals — no, people, that had been scientifically established — had detected its absence by taste. Things like that happened all the time. He had been proud of the accomplishment; he’d been going to call the newly discovered substance hoenveldine. He could have worked out a way of synthesizing it, too, but by proper scientific methods it would have taken over a year, and he knew it, and he’d said so to everybody.
And now, within a day, it had been synthesized, if that were the word for it, by a rank amateur, a layman, a complete non-scientist. And not in a laboratory but in a kitchen, with no equipment but a battered old stew pan!
And the worst of it was that this layman, this empiric, was his employer. The claims of the manager-in-chief of the Zarathustra Company simply couldn’t be brushed off. Not by a Company scientist.
Well, Grego had found out what he wanted; he could stop worrying about that. He had important work to do; an orderly, long-term study of the differences between Zarathustran and Terran biochemistry. The differences were minute, but they existed, and they had to be understood, and they had to be investigated in an orderly, scientific manner.
And now, they wanted him to go haring off, hit-or-miss, after this problem about Fuzzy infant mortality and defective births, and they didn’t even know any such problem existed. They had one, just one, case — that six-month fetus the Andrews girl had brought in — and they had a lot of unsubstantiated theorizing by Gerd van Riebeek, pure conclusion jumping. And now they wanted him to find out if eating land-prawns caused these defective births which they believed, on the basis of one case and a lot of supposition, to exist. Maybe after years of observation of hundreds of cases they might have some justification, but…