(Can they be called viruses? Can they be called alive? I'll leave it to the godcallers and the philosophers to decide that.)

  Trouble was, the plugs also caused all the soldiers' babies to grow up to be very short with a propensity for having their teeth fall out and their eyes go blind at the age of thirty. G.W. Steiner was very proud of the fact that they had managed to correct for the eyes after four generations. He smiled and for the first time we really noticed that his teeth weren't like ours.

  "We make them out of certain bacteria that gets very hard when a particular virus is exposed to it. My own great-great-grandmother invented it," Steiner said.

  "We're always coming up with new and useful tools."

  I asked to see how they did this trick, which brings us full circle to what we saw on the guided tour that day. We saw the laboratories where eleven researchers were playing clever little games with DNA. I didn't understand any of it, but my monkeysuit assured me that the computer was getting it all.

  We also saw the weapons delivery system. It was very clever. It consisted of setting a culture dish full of a particular nasty weapon in a little box, closing the door to the box, and then pressing a button that opened another door to the box that led outside.

  "We let the wind take it from there," said Steiner. "We figure it takes about a year for a new weapon to reach Russia. But by then it's grown to a point that it's irresistible."

  I asked him what the bacteria lived on. He laughed. "Anything," he said. It turns out that their basic breeding stock is a bacterium that can photosynthesize and dissolve any form of iron, both at the same time. "Whatever else we change about a particular weapon, we don't change that," Steiner said. "Our weapons can travel anywhere without hosts. Quarantines don't do any good."

  Harold had an idea. I was proud of him. "If these little germs can dissolve steel, George, why the heU aren't they in here dissolving this whole installation? "

  Steiner looked like he had just been hoping we'd ask that question.

  "When we developed our basic breeder stock, we also developed a mold that inhibits the bacteria from reproducing and eating. The mold only grows on metal and the spores die if they're away from both mold and metal for more than one-seventy-seventh of a second. That means that the mold grows all the way around this installation-- and nowhere else. My fourteenth great-uncle William Westmoreland Hannamaker developed the mold."

  "Why," I asked, "do you keep mentioning your blood relationship to these inventors? Surely after eight hundred years here everybody's related?"

  I thought I was asking a simple question. But G.W. Steiner looked at me coldly and turned away, leading us to the next room.

  We found bacteria that processed other bacteria that processed still other bacteria that turned human excrement into very tasty, nutritious food. We took their word for the tasty. I know, we were still eating recycled us through the tubes in our suit. But at least we knew where ours had been.

  They had bacteria that without benefit of sunlight processed carbon dioxide and water back into oxygen and starch. So much for photosynthesis.

  And we got a list of what shelf after shelf of weapons could do to an unprepared human body. If somebody ever broke all those jars on N£ncamais or Pennsylvania or Kiev, everybody would simply disappear, completely devoured and incorporated into the life-systems of bacteria and viruses and trained amino-acid sets.

  No sooner did I think of that, than I said it. Only I didn't get any farther than the word Kiev.

  "Kiev? One of the colonies is named Kiev?"

  I shrugged. "There are only three planets colonized. Kiev, Pennsylvania, and N£ncamais."

  "Russian ancestry?"

  Oops, I thought. Oops is an all-purpose word standing for every bit of profanity, blasphemy, and pornographic and scatological exculpation I could think of.

  The guided tour ended right then.

  Back in our bedroom, we became aware that we had somehow dissolved our hospitality. After a while, Harold realized that it was my fault.

  "Captain, by damn, if you hadn't told them about Kiev we wouldn't be locked in here like this."

  I agreed, hoping to pacify him, but he didn't calm down until I used the discipliner button in my monkeysuit.

  Then we consulted the computers.

  Mine reported that in all we had been told, two areas had been completely left out: While it was obvious that in the past the little people had done extensive work on human DNA, there had been no hint of any work going on in that field today. And though we had been told of all kinds of weapons that had been flung among the Russians on the other side of the world, there had been no hint of any kind of limited effect antipersonnel weapon here.

  "Oh," Harold said. "There's nothing to stop us from walking out of here anytime we can knock the door down. And I can knock the door down anytime I want to,"

  he said, playing with the buttons on his monkeysuit. I urged him to wait until all the reports were done.

  Amauri informed us that he had gleaned enough information from their talk and his monkeyeyes that we could go home with the entire science of DNA recombination hidden away in our computer.

  And then Vladimir's suit played out a holomap of Post 004.

  The bright green, infinitesimally thin lines marked walls, doors, passages. We immediately recognized the corridors we had walked in throughout the morning, located the laboratories, found where we were imprisoned. And then we noticed a rather larger area in the middle of the holomap that seemed empty.

  "Did you see a room like that? " I asked. The others shook their heads. Vladimir asked the holomap if we had been in it. The suit answered in its whispery monkeyvoice: "No. I have only delineated the unpenetrated perimeter and noted apertures that perhaps give entry."

  "So they didn't let us in there, " Harold said. "I knew the bastards were hiding something."

  "And let's make a guess," I said. "That room either has something to do with antipersonnel weapons, or it has something to do with human DNA research."

  We sat and pondered the revelations we had just had, and realized they didn't add up to much. Finally Vladimir spoke up. Trust a half-bunny to come up with the idea where three browns couldn't. just goes to show you that a racial theory is a bunch of waggywoggle.

  "Antipersonnel hell," Vladimir said. "They don't need antipersonnel. All they have to do is open a little hole in our suits and let the germs come through."

  "Our suits close immediately," Amauri said, but then corrected himself. "I guess it doesn't take long for a virus to get through, does it?"

  Harold didn't get it. "Let one of those bunnies try to lay a knife on me, and I'll split him from ass to armpit."

  We ignored him.

  "What makes you think there are germs in here? Our suits don't measure that," I pointed out.

  Vladimir had already thought of that. "Remember what they said. About the Russians getting those little amino-acid monsters in here."

  Amauri snorted. "Russians."

  "Yeah, right," Vladimir said, "but keep the voice down, viado."

  Amauri turned red, started to say, "Quem ‚ que cˆ chama de viado!" --but I pushed the discipliner button. No time for any of that crap.

  "Watch your language, Vladimir. We got enough problems."

  "Sorry, Amauri, Captain," Vladimir said. "I'm a little wispy, you know?"

  "So's everybody."

  Vladimir took a breath and went on. "Once those bugs got in here, 004 must have been pretty thoroughly permeable. The, uh, Russians must've kept pumping more variations on the same into Post 004."

  "So why aren't they all dead?"

  "What I think is that a lot of these people have been killed-- but the survivors are ones whose bodies took readily to those plugs they came up with. The plugs are regular parts of their body chemistry now. They'd have to be, wouldn't they? They told us they were passed on in the DNA transmitted to the next generation."

  I got it. So did Amauri, who said, "So they've had seven or eight centuries to select for adaptability."

  "Why not?" Vladimir asked. "Didn't you notice? Eleven researchers on developing new weapons. And only two on developing new defenses. They can't be too worried."

  Amauri shook his head. "Oh, Mother Earth. Whatever got into you?"

  "Just caught a cold," Vladimir said, and then laughed. "A virus. Called humanity."

  We sat around looking at the holomap for a while. I found four different routes from where we were to the secret area-- if we wanted to get there. I also found three routes to the exit. I pointed them out to the others.

  "Yeah," Harold said. "Trouble is, who knows if those doors really lead into that unknown area? I mean, what the hell, three of the four doors might lead to the broom closets or service station."

  A good point.

  We just sat there, wondering whether we should head for the Pollywog or try to find out what was in the hidden area, when the Russian attack made up our minds for us. There was a tremendous bang. The floor shook, as if some immense dog had just picked up Post 004 and given it a good shaking. When it stopped the lights flickered and went out.

  "Golden opportunity," I said into the monkeymouth. The others agreed. So we flashed on the lights from our suits and pointed them at the door. Harold suddenly felt very important. He went to the door and ran his magic flipper finger all the way around the door. Then he stepped back and flicked a lever on his suit.

  "Better turn your backs," he said. "This can flash pretty bright."

  Even looking at the back wall the explosion blinded me for a few seconds. The world looked a little green when I turned around. The door was in shreds on the floor, and the doorjamb didn't look too healthy.

  "Nice job, Harold," I said.

  "Gra€as a deus," he answered, and I had to laugh. Odd how little religious phrases refused to die, even with an irreverent filho de punta like Harold.

  Then I remembered that I was in charge of ordergiving. So I gave.

  The second door we tried led into the rooms we wanted to see. But just as we got in, the lights came on.

  "Damn. They've got the station back in order," Amauri said. But Vladimir just pointed down the corridor.

  The pea soup had gotten in. It was oozing sluggishly toward us.

  "Whatever the Russians did, it must have opened up a big hole in the station."

  Vladimir pointed his laser finger at the mess. Even on full power, it only made a little spot steam. The rest just kept coming.

  "Anyone for swimming?" I asked. No one was. So I hustled them all into the not-so-hidden room.

  There were some little people in there, cowering in the darkness. Harold wrapped them in cocoons and stuck them in a corner. So we had time to look around.

  There wasn't that much to see, really. Standard lab equipment, and then thirty-two boxes, about a meter square. They were under sunlamps. We looked inside.

  The animals were semisolid looking. I didn't touch one right then, but the sluggish way it sent out pseudopodia, I concluded that the one I was watching, at least, had a rather crusty skin-- with jelly inside. They were all a light brown--

  even lighter than Vladimir's skin. But there were little green spots here and there.

  I wondered if they photosynthesized.

  "Look what they're floating in," Amauri said, and I realized that it was pea soup.

  "They've developed a giant amoeba that lives on all other microorganisms, I guess," Vladimir said. "Maybe they've trained it to carry bombs. Against the Russians."

  At that moment Harold began firing his arsenal, and I noticed that the little people were gathered at the door to the lab looking agitated. A few at the front were looking dead.

  Harold probably would have killed all of them, except that we were still standing next to a box with a giant amoeba in it. When he screamed, we looked and saw the creature fastened against his leg. Even as we watched, Harold fell, the bottom half of his leg dropping away as the amoeba continued eating up his thigh.

  We watched just long enough for the little people to grab hold of us in sufficient numbers that resistance would have been ridiculous. Besides, we couldn't take our eyes off Harold.

  At about the groin, the amoeba stopped eating. It didn't matter. Harold was dead anyway-- we didn't know what disease got him, but as soon as his suit had cracked he started vomiting into his suit. There were pustules all over his face. In short, Vladimir's guess about the virus content of Post 004 had been pretty accurate.

  And now the amoeba formed itself into a pentagon. Five very smooth sides, the creature sitting in a clump on the gaping wound that had once been a pelvis.

  Suddenly, with a brief convulsion, all the sides bisected, forming sharp angles, so that now there were ten sides to the creature. A hairline crack appeared down the middle. And then, like jelly sliced in the middle and finally deciding to split, the two halves slumped away on either side. They quickly formed into two new pentagons, and then they relaxed into pseudopodia again, and continued devouring Harold.

  "Well," Amauri said. "They do have an antipersonnel weapon."

  When he spoke, the spell of stillness was broken, and the little people had us spread on tables with sharp-pointed objects pointed at us. If any one of those punctured a suit even for a moment, we would be dead. We held very still.

  Richard Nixon Dixon, the top halibut, interrogated us himself. It all started with a lot of questions about the Russians, when we had visited them, why we had decided to serve them instead of the Americans, etc. We kept insisting that they were full of crap.

  But when they threatened to open a window into Vladimir's suit, I decided enough was enough.

  "Tell 'em! " I shouted into the monkeymouth, and Vladimir said, "All right," and the little people leaned back to listen.

  "There are no Russians," Vladimir said.

  The little people got ready to carve holes.

  "No, wait, it's true! After we got your homing signal, before we landed, we made seven orbital passes over the entire planet. There is absolutely no human life anywhere but here!"

  "Conimie lies," Richard Nixon Dixon said.

  "God's own truth!" I shouted. "Don't touch him, man! He's telling the truth! The only thing out there over this whole damn planet is that pea soup! It covers every inch of land and every inch of water, except a few holes at the poles."

  Dixon began to feel a little confused, and the little people murmured. I guess I sounded sincere.

  "If there aren't any people," Dixon said, "where do the Russian attacks come from?"

  Vladimir answered that one. For a bunny, he was quick on the uptake.

  "Spontaneous recombination! You and the Russians got new strains of every microbe developing like crazy. All the people, all the animals, all the plants were killed. And only the microbes lived. But you've been introducing new strains constantly, tough competitors for all those beasts out there. The ones that couldn't adapt died. And now that's all that's left-- the ones who adapt.

  Constantly."

  Andrew Jackson Wallichinsky, the head researcher, nodded. "It sounds plausible."

  "If there's anything we've learned about commies in the last thousand years,"

  Richard Nixon Dixon said, "it's that you can't trust 'em any farther than you can spit."

  "Well," Andy lack said, "it's easy enough to test them."

  Dixon nodded. "Go ahead."

  So three of the little people went to the boxes and each came, back with an amoeba. In a minute it was clear that they planned to set them on us. Amauri screamed. Vladimir turned white. I would have screamed but I was busy trying to swallow my tongue.

  "Relax," Andy Jack said. "They won't hurt you."

  "Acredito!" I shouted. "Like it didn't hurt Harold!"

  "Harold was killing people. These won't harm you. Unless you were lying."

  Great, I thought. Like the ancient test for witches. Throw them in the water, if they drown they're innocent, if they float they're guilty so kill 'em.

  But maybe Andy Jack was telling the truth and they wouldn't hurt us. And if we refused to let them put those buggers on us they'd "know" we had been lying and punch holes in our monkeysuits.

  So I told the little people to put one on me only. They didn't need to test us all.

  And then I put my tongue between my teeth, ready to bite down hard and inhale the blood when the damn thing started eating me. Somehow I thought I'd feel better about going honeyduck if I helped myself along.

  They set the thing on my shoulder. It didn't penetrate my monkeysuit. Instead it just oozed up toward my head.

  It slid over my faceplate and the world went dark.

  "Kane Kanea," said a faint vibration in the faceplate.

  "Meu deus," I muttered.

  The amoeba could, talk. But I didn't have to speak to answer it. A question would come through the vibration of the faceplate. And then I would lie there and-

  - it knew my answer. Easy as pie. I was so scared I urinated twice during the interview. But my imperturbable monkeysuit cleaned it all up and got it ready for breakfast, just like normal.

  And at last the interview was over. The amoeba slithered off my faceplate and returned to the waiting arms of one of the little people, who carried it back to Andy Jack and Ricky Nick. The two men put their hands on the thing and then looked at us in surprise.

  "You're telling the truth. There are no Russians."

  Vladimir shrugged. "Why would we lie?"

  Andy Jack started toward me, carrying the writhing monster that had interviewed me.

  "I'll kill myself before I let that thing touch me again."

  Andy Jack stopped in surprise. "You're still afraid of that?"

  "It's intelligent," I said. "It read my mind."

  Vladimir looked startled, and Amauri muttered something. But Andy Jack only smiled. "Nothing mysterious about that. It can read and interpret the electromagnetic fields of your brain, coupled with the amitron flux in your thyroid gland."

  "What is it?" Vladimir asked.

  Andy Jack looked very proud. "This one is my son."

  We waited for the punch line. It didn't come. And suddenly we realized that we had found what we had been looking for-- the result of the little people's research into recombinant human DNA.