The wet air-filter that had almost asphyxiated me had been caused, I discovered, by a break in the moisture-trap of the unit. Careful checking assured me that the filter had failed-safe bacteriologically. No outside bugs were in my suit. I might have suffocated, but my corpse would have remained uncorrupted. Such a comfort.
I replaced the trap and filter with a fresh unit and fit a charged bottle of air onto the back of the suit. Then I gave every inch of my chastity-suit an inspection for worn spots, for bubbles forming on its moist surface—an inspection as painstaking and as sure as a window washer's check of his working harness, or an exhibition jumper's folding of his parachute. Satisfied that the suit was all set for my next adventure into the world of normal, septic human beings, I racked it and the helmet in my locker and walked out into the garden.
There I stretched out on the grass under the ultra-violets, refreshing my tan while I waited for Dr. McQueen to come up from the sump.
The garden was my favorite room in the Big Tank. It was in establishing the garden that I'd discovered that my Machiavellian mind is articulated to a pair of green thumbs. The crafty bit came over coffee in the cafeteria. I, of course, just sat there to listen and talk; not even C.U. Cafeteria coffee is aseptic enough for a Lapin to drink, even if there were some way to get a cup of the stuff inside the helmet of a sterility-suit. Anyway, I chided these two graduate students from the botany department about the research possibilities they were missing by not growing any gnotobiotic green stuff. I gave them the Boom-Food pitch. Would cabbages, grown in an environment free of bacteria, grow large as king farouks? I hit them with the Advance the Frontiers of the Biological Science line: could soil-nitrates be utilized by legumes in the absolute absence of Nitrobacteriaceae?
The two botanists leaped to my vegetable bait like a brace of starving aphids. A couple days after I'd commenced my con, three tons of quartz sand were shipped through the Big Tank's main autoclave. The lifeless stuff was poured over a grill of perforated pipes. The pipes were connected to a brew-tank of hydroponic juices, and the wet sand was planted with germ-free seeds of grass, tomatoes, carrots, and other useful herbs. We Lapins had a ball, planting the aseptic seeds in the dirtless dirt eagerly as a band of ribbon-hungry 4-H'ers. What had been our sun-room blossomed, after a decent period of germination, into our lawn and garden.
For some reason, the garden of our Eden never got an apple-tree. But we did have lettuce on our sterile sandwiches now, and fresh tomatoes, infinitely superior in texture and taste to the "radared" fruit—almost pureed by the high-energy beams that made it germ-free—that we'd grown up on.
The lesser mammals with whom we twenty-nine Lapins shared the Big Tank, the rabbits and guinea-pigs and hamsters and like small fowl, didn't go much for fresh vegetables, having developed a palate for an autoclaved diet. The monkeys, though, proved to be real competitors for carrots and raw sweet corn. They had to be locked out of the garden, rather as certain of their disobedient relatives had been.
I reached out from my supine, sun-drenched position to pull a turnip. I shook off the moist sand and wiped the hydroponic wetness off my shorts, to munch grittily while I waited for the Chief to join me.
As soon as he'd soaked in the formaldehyde mixture for half an hour, Dr. McQueen came up through the manhole. Under the shower he squirted the chemical B.O. off his modified sterility-unit, then came out into the garden to join me, dragging his air-hose. We sat side by side on the park bench I'd built beside the onion-patch. (I was fond of my onions. They were the only living things in the Big Tank with the honest stink of life to them). "Where did you plant the marijuana, Johnny?" the Chief asked me. His voice was muffled by the wetness of his suit-speaker.