near the floor and tried to adjust the instrument as he remembered having seen it done. He focused the coarse adjustment of the 'scope till he saw spots darting about the fluid Takeko had placed on the slide. He nailed the spots down with a gentle hand on the fine adjustment.

The juice of the pickled turnip was aswim with tiny bodies that looked like tadpoles. "What are they?" he asked, peering into the micro-world below him.

"Pia-san named them monads," said the carpenter, white-bearded Togo. "We all have them in our bodies. You have them now in yours. Our soil is alive with them. They chew the chaff of our fields into black loam; they turn to dust the flesh of our fathers. They cause turnips to become takuwan."

Hartford rocked back from the microscope to sit again on his heels. "You have no disease, no benign bacterial flora and of course no bacterial antibodies. Instead you have this whip-tailed animalcule, this monad. Is this correct?"

"So Pia-san said," Takeko agreed. "He said that the monad is a jealous beast. It is a tiger among the pygmies, he said. No little nuisance-makers can exist on Kansas; the monad would eat them in a rage."

"The ultimate antibiotic," Hartford said. "A micro-organism that functions as a saprophyte, a soil-former and a scavenger. Besides all this, it's a universal phagocyte, policing up the human environment inside and out, to keep it clean of any other microscopic organisms. The monad fills every niche in the micro-ecology of the planet."

"This is what Pia-san and his okusama, poor dead girl, discovered," Takeko said. "Renkei entered the Stone House to tell you that we do not stink, that we are not dangerous. Three people have died to tell this—and Nef still does not know."

"I think he may know it after all," Hartford said. "He knows about the monad, and fears it. This little bug means that every member of the human race can join his damned Brotherhood. A crew of monads in his gut would make every man on Stinker Earth a dignotobiote, germ-free except for his housekeeping protozoa."

"Until Pia-san told us," Yamata said, "we knew nothing except that we lived longer than our ancestors had. We knew that we did not suffer from the strange tirednesses the books told of, ills caused by the little animals. We did not know that the smallest natives of this planet had made of us their fortresses."

"If 

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