they were missing by not growing any gnotobiotic green stuff. I gave them the Boom-Food pitch. Would cabbages, grown in an environment free of bacteria, grow large as king farouks? I hit them with the Advance the Frontiers of the Biological Science line: could soil-nitrates be utilized by legumes in the absolute absence of Nitrobacteriaceae?

The two botanists leaped to my vegetable bait like a brace of starving aphids. A couple days after I'd commenced my con, three tons of quartz sand were shipped through the Big Tank's main autoclave. The lifeless stuff was poured over a grill of perforated pipes. The pipes were connected to a brew-tank of hydroponic juices, and the wet sand was planted with germ-free seeds of grass, tomatoes, carrots, and other useful herbs. We Lapins had a ball, planting the aseptic seeds in the dirtless dirt eagerly as a band of ribbon-hungry 4-H'ers. What had been our sun-room blossomed, after a decent period of germination, into our lawn and garden.

For some reason, the garden of our Eden never got an apple-tree. But we did have lettuce on our sterile sandwiches now, and fresh tomatoes, infinitely superior in texture and taste to the "radared" fruit—almost pureed by the high-energy beams that made it germ-free—that we'd grown up on.

The lesser mammals with whom we twenty-nine Lapins shared the Big Tank, the rabbits and guinea-pigs and hamsters and like small fowl, didn't go much for fresh vegetables, having developed a palate for an autoclaved diet. The monkeys, though, proved to be real competitors for carrots and raw sweet corn. They had to be locked out of the garden, rather as certain of their disobedient relatives had been.

I reached out from my supine, sun-drenched position to pull a turnip. I shook off the moist sand and wiped the hydroponic wetness off my shorts, to munch grittily while I waited for the Chief to join me.

As soon as he'd soaked in the formaldehyde mixture for half an hour, Dr. McQueen came up through the manhole. Under the shower he squirted the chemical B.O. off his modified sterility-unit, then came out into the garden to join me, dragging his air-hose. We sat side by side on the park bench I'd built beside the onion-patch. (I was fond of my onions. They were the only living things in the Big Tank with the honest stink of life to them). "Where did you plant the marijuana, Johnny?" the Chief asked me. His voice was muffled by the wetness of his suit-speaker.

"Now, there's a pregnant idea," I said. "We won't plant muggles, Chief. We'll plant 

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