"You're being very charitable," she said. "He tried to kill you."
"All right," I said. "For a minute he went berserk. But what would you do if you bagged the first Mercurian animal ever seen and a dumb kid turned it into a museum piece? If Murphy could have brought that frog back to Earth alive the National Geographic Society would have smothered him with medals."
"But won't it thaw out, Dave?"
"It's limper than a rag right now," I said. "But it is also dead as a doornail."
Sylvia's brow crinkled. "I should think a Mercurian animal would have to be plated like an armadillo. I should think it would need some sort of air-cooling system and a—"
"Hold on," I said. "You're jumping to a priori conclusions. We'll start with the animal. It is froglike, so conditions on Mercury must favor the development of slender, agile quadrupeds with powerful hindlimbs. Since Mercury is flecked with semi-molten 'marsh patches' its froglike appearance does not surprise me. We can only speculate as to its habits, but it's probably oviparous, and has a brief life-cycle.
"Now, in hot baths with carefully regulated approaches human beings have been able to stand degrees of heat above the boiling point of water. Back in the eighteenth century a Frenchman named Chamouni the Incombustible entered an oven containing a raw leg of mutton, and remained there until the meat was completely cooked. Medical history records hundreds of similar cases."
"But what has that to do with Murphy's frog?"
"Don't you see? If human beings can build up all that resistance in a few minutes what's to stop a rapidly breeding Mercurian animal from acquiring ten times as much immunity in fifty thousand generations? With already immune invertebrates to start with natural selection could give even a highly evolved, meaty-fleshed animal plenty of resistance."
I was feeling distinctly proud of myself when Sylvia countered with: "You said the sides of its body and its hindlimbs were covered with fine, reddish hairs. Villosities was the term you used. How could natural selection build up immunity in hair?"