The girl laughed. "If you think all Kansas a place of sweet perfumes, smell this, Lee-san," she said. She took a covered dish and opened it. "This is takuwan," she said. A smell strong as that of limburger cheese made itself known in the room. "It is pickled turnip, made in the old manner of our island forefathers on Earth."
"Whew!" Hartford said. "There is the true Stinker of Kansas."
"Pia-san learned much from the bad-smelling takuwan," Takeko said. "His wife knew about the small stink-makers, these bacteria; she was a user of microscopes. She looked for them in the air of Kansas, and in our soil. Pia-san went even further. He took drops of our blood and other things to test."
"Tell our guest, Take-chan, what Pia found," Old Kiwa told his daughter.
"Hai, Otosan." The girl turned to Hartford. "In our bodies there are no mischief-makers of the sort Earth-people know. There are not even those juices Pia-san called 'footprints of the bugs.'"
"He must have meant you have no bacterial antibodies," Hartford said. "That explains the whole package," he went on, with growing excitement. "Why I'm alive without my safety-suit. What Piacentelli went outside to find. And, when he found it, why he unsuited himself, knowing this world as pure as Titan. You're Axenites, you Kansans! You're as germ-free as the troopers."
"The whole truth is less simple," said the lean old man who'd been introduced to Hartford as Yamata, the calligrapher.
"Does the rubble of your forest-floors never turn to mould, then?" Hartford asked. "Do the bodies of your buried fathers lie uncorrupted in their graves?"
"Of course not," Takeko said. "If that happened, we would be buried ourselves in unmouldered leaves. The bodies of our ancestors would be stacked about us, unchanging, like logs for the charcoal-burners. Our soil would die, and all men would die with it, if dead things did not crumble to make new soil."