"Prunella?" I said. "I don't think—"
"Well, that's what the boys at the station began calling her a couple of days after she landed. Behind her back, of course."
"I still don't know who—"
"You know, the niece of that windbag in World Congress that you featherheads in the front office sent out to replace Pop Jensen when he fell out of that tree and had to be sent back to Earth for hospitalization."
"Oh, that one. Look, Lee, I didn't have anything to do with her selection. She was appointed by the Old Man himself. Understand there was some kind of pressure on him from the top."
"I forgive you, Sam, but I rather doubt if some of the other people of the group will for a while."
"How come she didn't stay?" I asked. "Political pressure or not, I can't imagine the supervisors sending out an incompetent replacement."
"Incompetent?" he almost snorted. "Prunella was the most belligerently competent female that it has ever been my misfortune to run across. Prunella was efficiency personified, make no mistake about that. She was—or is—a top-flight botanist and had led several expeditions here on Earth, but she couldn't realize that Xenon wasn't Earth. She tried to live by the book as she had here, but in spite of the general excellence of the Spaceman's Handbook, her methods didn't work so well."
I primed him with another two fingers out of the bottle and sat back to listen.
"Good brandy," he said. "I made some once on Xenon, but Prunella put a halt to that in a hurry, just as she did a lot of other things. The trouble with her was that she was always insufferably right. Every blasted time! And she was right again when she pointed out that if we were to come under attack, the products of the little distillery might impair our efforts to defend ourselves. My still went under the ax."