Episode 359: Deduction of the Wild
"Let's talk this over," Hellman said, sitting on a box marked: vormitish�good as it sounds!
"Sure," Casker said, sprawling out on the floor. "Talk."
"If we could deduce what kind of creatures inhabited this planet, we'd know what kind of food they ate, and whether it's likely to be edible for us."
"All we do know is that they wrote a lot of lousy advertising copy."
Hellman ignored that. "What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on a planet that is all mountains?"
"Stupid ones!" Casker said.
That was no help. But Hellman found that he couldn't draw any inferences from the mountains. It didn't tell him if the late Helgans ate silicates or proteins or iodine-base foods or anything.
"Now look," Hellman said, "we'll have to work this out by pure logic�Are you listening to me?"
"Sure," Casker said.
"Okay. There's an old proverb that covers our situation perfectly: 'One man's meat is another man's poison.'"
"Yeah," Casker said. He was positive his stomach had shrunk to approximately the size of a marble.
"We can assume, first, that their meat is our meat."
Casker wrenched himself away from a vision of five juicy roast beefs dancing tantalizingly before him. "What if their meat is our poison? What then?"
"Then," Hellman said, "we will assume that their poison is our meat."
"And what happens if their meat and their poison are our poison?"
"We starve."
"All right," Casker said, standing up. "Which assumption do we start with?"
"Well, there's no sense in asking for trouble. This is an oxygen planet, if that means anything. Let's assume that we can eat some basic food of theirs. If we can't we'll start on their poisons."
"If we live that long," Casker said.
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