including odor. The clean, characteristic smells of the Barracks, together with the bland spit-and-sweat odors of a long-worn safety-suit, were all an Axenite came in contact with.

If he were able to smell the outside world, it could only be because his gnotobiotic security was compromised.

Hartford inspected his safety-suit, peering where he could and twisting and feeling the surfaces he couldn't see. Takeko laughed. She reached across his shoulder and lifted a flap of torn fabric, ripped loose when Hartford had flown from his jeep.

His panic would have been unmanly in a normal human; but Hartford all his life had been impressed with the horror of contamination. He ran blindly, though he knew that his deepened breathing was drawing the germ-laden air of Kansas deeper into his lungs. He ran through lanes of sunflowers, flailing his arms, into the darkness, away from the alien girl, away from the fear of going septic. He ran and stumbled and fell and ran again. All his life he'd been warned of the consequences of becoming infected with the bacteria against which he had no defenses. Now he was so infected.

When Hartford fell the last time it was for sheer lack of wind.

He opened his helmet and tossed it aside. Dead already, he could lose nothing by making himself comfortable for dying. He shivered. The chill of infection? No, the night was cool. He looked about him in the light of the sky of stars. The fields were below him, rustling in a million private conversations as the breeze filtered through them. It was a lovely place to die, here on the crest of a hill.

Hartford lay back and stared into the curtain of stars that rippled above him. Perhaps he wouldn't wake, he thought. With this thought he slept.

The sunlight stung his eyes. He sprang to his feet, then bent and groaned. Sore. He'd slept on naked soil, packed hard by the hillcrest winds. He stretched his hard-bedded muscles. For a dead man, he felt good. The alien bacteria and viruses within him were establishing beachheads, multiplying their platoons to companies, their companies to battalions. By the time they'd reached division-strength, he thought, he'd be well aware of the invasion.

Meanwhile, breakfast.

He opened a package of field-rations, squeeze-tube beans. He inserted the nozzle of the tube into his mouth and fed himself a dollop of the stuff. It felt strange to eat directly from the 

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