"Rubbish!" said Crobe. "I will have you know, whatever your name is, that the moment fable enters the world of solid science, we are lost!" Crobe was almost frothing. "You are overlooking one important fact!" he told Heller. "Humanoid forms are the commonest sentient forms in the universe! They comprise 93.7 percent of all populations discovered to date. The humanoid form is inevitable from the basic survival demands of any reasonable carbon-oxygen planet: if sentient life is to appear and succeed, the adeptness of hands, the articulation of feet, the symmetrical right-left body construction and flexible skin are needed." Why you old fraud! I thought. You know all that and yet you make freaks and pretend they are other populations!

"The facts are built into the structure of cells!" harangued Crobe. "But every sentient population of a planet evolved there. And that'sthe scientific fact. Forget your religions and fables! Oh, of course," he said, modifying his view, "the blood cells are different, humanoid race to humanoid race, and these are the one channel by which you can identify crossbreeding between planets." Heller said mildly, "I was just interested in the similarity between the facial bone structures of the races on Earth, some of them, and the races on Manco."

"I'll show you!" snapped Crobe as though Heller had been arguing with him. The cellologist rushed out. I had an idea where he was going: the deep freeze body vats. And sure enough I shortly heard from there the chunk of an axe.

Crobe rushed back in. He was carrying a frozen human hand chopped off at the wrist. He dug into the dirty litter on a cart and came up with an instant-thawer and in a moment the severed hand started to bleed. Leave it to Crobe to hack off a hand when all he wanted was a little blood. I began to feel ill, very ill. "Earthman!"said Crobe, dripping some blood into a culture.

Heller looked a bit startled. "Soltan, do you kidnap Earth people?" Yes, indeed, Royal Officer Heller. "No," I said. "We picked up some bodies years ago from vehicle accidents and they're here in deep freeze for study." Crobe shot me an odd glance, as well he might. He threw the hand on the floor where it landed with a plop and gave his attention to lining up the culture vial in a microscope.

Then the doctor took a filthy, sharp probe and, before I could stop him, seized Heller's hand and punctured his thumb. I almost threw up. I couldn't account for my reaction.

But Crobe didn't do any more to Heller. He took the blood sample and put it in another vial and set it up in a second microscope. "Now take a look at that!" he challenged Heller. "And once and for all you see there is no crossbreeding between Manco and Blito-P3! Anything human on Earth generated on Earth. That's scientific fact!" Heller looked at both. "They're similar," he said.

"Ha!" said Crobe. "Unqualified observer!" He gave Heller a shove off to one side and looked himself. He straightened up. "Officer Gris, was that one of your Earth agents? Go in that vault and look. No." He changed his mind and picked up the hand and threw it into a bone densimeter. "Well, it wasan Earthman." Crobe gathered up his notes and bawled at an assistant to collect up the dolly and table. He pointed to a stool and said to Heller, "Go ahead and sit there and dream up your fables." And Heller smiled faintly and picked up the book of color plates again.

The doctor went to the door and beckoned to me urgently and I followed him into an even more filthy office. I was afraid to sit down for fear I'd find a piece of a corpse under me. But I was feeling poorly and I got on a stool.

Crobe sat down and indicated his notes. He leaned forward like a conspirator. What else? "Officer Gris, we've got problems with this agent. We're in trouble." He hadn't sounded like that before. My stomach felt worse.

"Officer Gris, we'll have to work over that agent." He looked at his notes. "The weight is all right. He weighs about 239 pounds here and he'll weigh about 199 pounds on Earth. That will pass unnoticed. It is his age." He thumped some tables. "Now according to this, possibly due to nutrition or some malfunction inherent in their organ evolution, Earthmen do not live out a proper life span. Any self-respecting mammal on any self-respecting planet that has any self-respecting cellular structure normally lives six times as long as its growth period." Well, I knew that. What of it?

"On Blito-P3," said Crobe, consulting his tables, "they are reported to mature and achieve full growth by the age of twenty. That may be too fast for them. But, whatever, they should live to about one hundred and twenty years of age. They don't. They usually kick off at seventy or before."

"Crobe . . . ," I began to say that he wouldn't be there that long and then I definitely realized he would! But so what?

"To compound this problem," continued Crobe, "the growth period of a humanoid on Manco is thirty-two years. And they dolive their factor of six. Now, unless something else gets to him first, this special agent of yours will live to be about one hundred and ninety-two." I couldn't see what all this had to do with it.

"That special agent in there is about twenty-eight years of age. He is right this moment six feet two inches tall. Growth in the last years is small but by the time he is thirty-two, he will be six feet five inches!" I was feeling sick and apprehensive. I knew something was coming.

"The average height," said Crobe, consulting his table, "for a race on Earth that has his skin color – white? more like bronze – is only five feet eight and a half inches." He threw down his papers and looked at me. "He is too tall! He is going to stand out like a lighthouse!" I started to pooh-pooh it. Crobe said, "Wait. He will also look too young to them." He peered at his tables. "Yes. He will look to them like a boy of about nineteen, even eighteen." Crobe held up some age photos he had. "See?" Then he smiled. "But all is not lost. We can save it." He leaned over toward me, very close. He got that crazy look on his face he gets on the subject of freaks. He said, "We can subsection his legs and arms. We can take out some pieces of bone from each. We can also shrink his skull . . . Officer Gris! What is the matter?" I was doubled up. I was holding my stomach with both hands. I have never before felt such pain in my life! I started to vomit. I vomited all over my legs, all over the floor. I threw up everything I had eaten for a week. And then went into agonizing, dry retches.

It must have made a horrible commotion. Noisy! The next thing I knew, Heller was standing there, holding my head.

One of Crobe's assistants got a tube and tried to get some fluid down my throat. I threw it up violently! Another fanned a vapor bottle in front of my face but it just made it worse.

Heller was barking some orders to someone. The two platoon guards came in. Heller took a redstar engineer's rag from his pocket and wiped off the worst of it from my face. Then he got a stretcher from an assistant and put me on it very gently. The two guards got on either end and we left that place.