bacterium inside their bodies—would wipe out the Regiment. Axenites are chemically pure people. They have no immuniological experience. Their gamma-globulin is low, their intestinal walls are thin. They may be killed by a light salting of staphyllococci, a soupcon of strep, or just a pinch of B. subtilis, a buglet as innocuous to "normal" humans as the dust-motes it inhabits.

The Syphon was the only entrance to the Barracks. It opened as the "Wet Gut," a ramp leading downward into liquid disinfectant which finally filled a tunnel, which ran the length of the Barracks. Each trooper, as he walked down into the disinfectant, grabbed the hand-holds at either side to pull himself along. Half-swimming through a turbulent portion that tugged at his suit with cavitations designed to loose the gummiest particle of bug-dirt, he came to a quieter section where he wormed along in silence, watching the man ahead of him, his stay in the antiseptic gauged to make the outside of his safety-suit as germ-free as the inside.

The Wet Gut ended in an upslope. The troopers walked out, dripping, into a hallway returning in the direction from which they'd just swum. This upper arm of the Syphon was a hallway so brilliantly lighted that the trooper had to drop his polarizing shields over his eyes. The air here in the Hot Gut was spiced with ozone from the ultra-violet sources. As each man strode down the Hot Gut at a set pace, his suit was bathed in u-v light from lamps in the ceiling, floor and walls. Just as he was washed sufficiently in the Wet Gut to kill the sturdiest-shelled spore of anthrax, the most insistently cysted protozooan, in the Hot Gut he was laved in actinic radiation powerful enough to afford a one hundred per cent safety factor against his bringing viable bug-dirt into the Barracks. At the very end of the Syphon, so that his safety-suit wouldn't stink of disinfectant or crack from ozone-rot, the trooper was blasted from all sides by a needle-shower of sterile water. Then he was home.

The platoon to the left of the Terrible Third had ballooned and was column-of-squadding toward the entrance to the Syphon. "At ease, men," Hartford said. "Increase suit-pressure one pound. Open and check reserve air-tanks. Close off filters." The men blimped a bit. Their suits sausaged out around their arms and legs. Should some trooper have a pinhole in his safety-suit, the positive pressure within would keep the deadly antiseptic solution from seeping in. "Okay, men. First squad off to the sheep-dip. Check the man ahead of you for bubbles. This is Save-Your-Buddy Week," Hartford said.

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