The Primus Curse
"Must be a slip somewhere. They weren't designed for Primus. I'll bet my life it was the pill."

"Never mind betting your life any more now. You get some rest."

He snapped to his feet. "Give him something," he told the doctor. "And take care of him. We'll analyze those pills ourselves. There's going to be hell to pay if he's right, and just this minute I'm betting that he is."

"Betting your life, Captain?"

Grimes spun to find Lieutenant Ramsey rubbing his jaw and eyeing him bitterly.

"Yes, Lieutenant, betting my life." He ran to a wall cabinet and jerked out a Mars kit and suit. He tore open the kit and threw out the Uneasy pills, then he hurriedly donned the suit. Maybe that was the answer after all, he mused grimly. Something in the atmosphere reacted with the pill. They had never been declared official for Primus. No time to worry about that now however.

He dropped to the surface of the planet and ran to the UN building. He flung himself inside and ran wildly up and down the stair, shouting like a vacation-crazed schoolboy. From the first building he went on to the others, and then into the city, stopping to be sick when he felt the urge and actually enjoying the pain.

Hours later an exhausted Captain Grimes returned to his spaceship to be greeted by an apologetic and happier crew.

"The boy's going to be all right," Dr. Johnson told him. "He thinks he owes his life to the fact that he only took half a pill, but I don't know. I'd say it was just plain old guts."

"How about the pills?"

"No doubt about them, but I haven't pinned it down yet. We put a pump on Manson and found some sodium chlorate in his stomach. That's NaClO_{3}, you know, and you could get it from ordinary table salt, NaCl, and ozone, O_{3}, if you could combine them. The Uneasy pill has the NaCl all right, and there's plenty of ozone in the atmosphere here--you've smelled it, of course. Smells like chlorine."Grimes nodded impatiently. "But you couldn't get enough sodium chlorate to kill a man from one medium size pill, could you?"

"No, you couldn't. It is poisonous, however. It's used as an insecticide and as a weed-killer. But it's highly unstable and I don't know how it could have been formed from such a stable substance as sodium chloride. But we've never really had a chance to analyze 
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