He got a connection to a
hospital where he was known, and he talked to its bacteriologist. The
bacteriologist was competent, but not yet famous. With Holden giving
honest guesses at the color of the sunlight, and its probable
ultra-violet content, and with careful estimates of the exactness with
which burning vegetation here smelled like Earth-plants, they arrived at
imprecise but common sense conclusions. Of the hundreds of thousands of
possible organic compounds, only so many actually took part in the
life-processes of creatures on Earth. Yet there were hundreds of
thousands of species prepared to make use of anything usable. If the
sunlight and temperature of the two worlds were similar, it was somewhat
more than likely that the same chemical compounds would be used by
living things on both. So that there could be micro-organisms on the
new planet which could be harmful. But on the other hand, either they
would be familiar in the toxins they produced--and human bodies could
resist them--or else they would be new compounds to which humans would
react allergically. Basically, then, if anybody on the ship developed
hives, they had reason to be frightened.
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