morning dosage. Vitamins, of course; got to keep plenty of vitamins in the system, or it goes all to pot on you. A, B₁, B₂, B₁₂, C, ... and on down the alphabet and past it to A-G. All-purpose mineral capsules, presumably containing every element useful to the human body and possibly a couple that weren’t. Two APC capsules. (Aspirin-Phenacetin-Caffeine. He liked the way those words sounded; very medicinal.) A milk-of-magnesia tablet, just in case. A couple of patent-mixture pills that were supposed to increase the bile flow. (MacNeil wasn’t quite sure what bile was, but he was quite sure that its increased flow would work wonders within.) A largish tablet of sodium bicarbonate to combat excess gastric acidity—obviously a horrible condition, whatever it was. He topped it all off with a football-shaped capsule containing Liquid Glandolene—“Guards the system against glandular imbalance!”—and felt himself ready to face the day. At least, until breakfast.

He slipped several bottles into his belt-pak after he had put on his field uniform, so that he could get at them at mealtimes, and trudged out toward the mess hall to the meager breakfast that awaited him.

“Specifically,” said Colonel Fennister, “what we want to know is: What are our chances of staying alive until the relief ship comes?”

He and most of the other officers were still groggy-eyed, having had too much to do to even get an hour’s sleep the night before. Only the phlegmatic Major Grodski looked normal; his eyes were always about half closed.

Captains Jones and Bellwether, in charge of A and B Companies respectively, and their lieutenants, Mawkey and Yutang, all looked grim and irritable.

The civilian components of the policy group looked not one whit better. Dr. Pilar had been worriedly rubbing at his face, so that his normally neat beard had begun to take on the appearance of a ruptured mohair sofa; Dr. Petrelli, the lean, waspish chemist, was nervously trimming his fingernails with his teeth: and the M.D., Dr. Smathers, had a hangdog expression on his pudgy face and had begun drumming his fingers in a staccato tattoo on his round belly.

Dr. Pilar tapped a stack of papers that lay before him on the long table at which they were all seated. “I have Major Grodski’s report on the remaining food. There is not enough for all of us to live, even on the most extended rations. Only the strongest will survive.”

Colonel Fennister scowled. “You mean to imply that we’ll be fighting over the food like animals before this is over? The discipline of the Space Service—”

His voice was angry, but Dr. Pilar cut him off. “It may come to fighting, colonel, but, even if perfect discipline is maintained, what I say will still be true. Some will die early, leaving more food for the remaining men. It has been a long time since anything like this has happened on Earth, but it is not unknown in the Space Service annals.”

The colonel pursed his lips and kept his silence. He knew that what the biologist said was true.

“The trouble is,” said Petrelli snappishly, “that we are starving in the midst of plenty. We are like men marooned in the middle of an ocean with no water; the water is there, but it’s undrinkable.”

“That’s what I wanted to get at,” said Colonel Fennister. “Is there any chance at all that we’ll find an edible plant or animal on this planet?”

The three scientists said nothing, as if each were waiting for one of the others to speak.

All life thus far found in the galaxy had had a carbon-hydrogen-oxygen base. Nobody’d yet found any silicon based life, although a good many