Ten minutes later Jenkins sat bolt upright in the darkness. Frantically he untied himself and slid into his clothes. "Idiot!" he growled to himself. "Seventh son of a seventh son—"
Five minutes later he was staring at the vats in Hrunta's laboratory. He found the one he was looking for. A pink blob of hlorg wiggled slowly around the bottom.
Jenkins drew a beaker of distilled water and added it to the fluid in the vat. It hissed and sputtered and sent up quantities of acrid steam. When the steam had cleared away, Jenkins peered in eagerly.
The pink thing in the bottom was turning a sickly violet. It had quit wiggling. As Jenkins watched, the violet color changed to mud grey, then to black. He prodded it with a stirring rod. There was no response.
With a whoop Jenkins buzzed Bowman and Stone. "We've got it!" he shouted to them when they appeared. "Look! Look at it!"
Bowman poked and probed and broke into a wide grin. The piece of hlorg was truly and sincerely dead. "It inactivates the enzyme system, and renders the base protoplasm vulnerable to anything that normally attacks it. What are we waiting for?"
They began tearing the laboratory apart, searching for the right bottles. The supply was discouragingly small, but there was some in stock. The three of them raced down the corridor for the hold where the hlorg was.
It took them three hours of angry work to exhaust the supply. They whittled chunks off the hlorg, tossed them in pans of the deadly fluid. With each slice they stopped momentarily to watch it turn violet, then black, as it died. The hlorg, dwindling in size, sensed the attack and slapped frantically at their ankles, sending out angry plumes of wet jelly, but they ducked and dodged and whittled some more. The hlorg quivered and gurgled and wept pinkish goo all over the floor, but it grew smaller and weaker with every whack.
"Hrunta must have spotted it and come down here alone," Jenkins panted between slices. "Maybe he slipped, lost his footing, I don't know—"
They continued to work until the supply was exhausted. They had reduced the hlorg to a quarter its previous size. "Check the other labs, see if they have some more," said Stone.