things to test."

"Tell our guest, Take-chan, what Pia found," Old Kiwa told his daughter.

"Hai, Otosan." The girl turned to Hartford. "In our bodies there are no mischief-makers of the sort Earth-people know. There are not even those juices Pia-san called 'footprints of the bugs.'"

"He must have meant you have no bacterial antibodies," Hartford said. "That explains the whole package," he went on, with growing excitement. "Why I'm alive without my safety-suit. What Piacentelli went outside to find. And, when he found it, why he unsuited himself, knowing this world as pure as Titan. You're Axenites, you Kansans! You're as germ-free as the troopers."

"The whole truth is less simple," said the lean old man who'd been introduced to Hartford as Yamata, the calligrapher.

"Does the rubble of your forest-floors never turn to mould, then?" Hartford asked. "Do the bodies of your buried fathers lie uncorrupted in their graves?"

"Of course not," Takeko said. "If that happened, we would be buried ourselves in unmouldered leaves. The bodies of our ancestors would be stacked about us, unchanging, like logs for the charcoal-burners. Our soil would die, and all men would die with it, if dead things did not crumble to make new soil."

"Show our friend the hero of our epic," the calligrapher told her.

"Hai." Takeko stood and went to another room, going through the ritual of kneeling to slide the door screen, standing, kneeling, standing, with a grace that made the kimono she wore the loveliest of garments. She brought to the small table at the center of the room a heavy object wrapped in a yellow silk tenugui. Near this on the table she placed a small lamp, fueled with sunflower-seed oil. She lighted the lamp and uncovered the instrument she'd brought in.

It was the microscope Piacentelli had taken from the Barracks on his fatal expedition.

Takeko dipped a chopstick into a dish and placed it beneath the objective of the microscope. "We shall look at a spot of evil-smelling takuwan-juice," she said. "There is light enough. Make it fit your eyes, Lee-san; and you will know the secret of Jodo, this world you call Kansas."

IX

Hartford knelt over the microscope in the yoga-posture called for by its being so 

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