His name was Alvin Frick, but no one ever used it. He was twenty-nine, and would never have rated a space berth as anything but a hydroponics attendant, which is one step above manual labor. He was short, plump and scrubbed to the pink, and he was the only hypochondriac I ever knew in this modern age of almost no sickness. He groused about the germs swarming in his reduction tanks, and he was scared green, in spite of his permanent immunization shots, that he'd contract some nameless alien disease at every planetfall. He dosed himself continuously with concoctions whipped up from an old medical book he had found somewhere, and he spent most of his off-duty time spraying himself and his quarters with disinfectant. His mania had only one good facet—if he had been the careless sort, hydroponics being what it is, he'd have smelled like a barnyard instead of a dispensary.
We had never made any attempt to get rid of him, since we might have drawn an even worse tank-farmer, but we began to wish now that we had. We had hardly begun to figure ways and means of escaping when a bunch of grinning natives swung into our court and deposited the Quack, sleeping soundly, in our midst.
He came to just before sundown, and when we told him what had happened, he promptly passed out again—this time from fright.
"A fine lot of help you are, you super-sterile slob," I said when he woke up for the second time. I'd probably have said worse, but it was just then that the real squeeze began.
Gaffa came back with the two scowling Haslops in tow and handed us the problem his tribe had spent twenty-two years in working up.
"We have learned enough already from Haslop," Gaffa said, "to know something of the pressures and complexities that follow the expansion of your Terran Realm through the galaxy, and to assure us that in time we must either become a part of that Realm or isolate ourselves completely.
"We are a peaceful species and feel that we should probably benefit as much from your physical sciences as your people would from our biological skills, but there is a question of compatibility that must be settled first, before we may risk making ourselves known to Terra. So we have devised a test to determine what our course shall be."
We raised our brows at one another over that, not guessing at the time just what the Balakians really had on the ball.
"For thousands of generations, we have devoted our energies to knowing ourselves and our environment," Gaffa said, "because we know that no species can be truly balanced unless it understands itself. The symbiosis between all life-forms on our planet is the result of that knowledge. We should like to assure ourselves that you are capable of understanding your own kind as well before we offer our services to your Terran Realm—and therein lies the test we have arranged for you."