Hartford knelt over the microscope in the yoga-posture called for by its being so near the floor and tried to adjust the instrument as he remembered having seen it done. He focused the coarse adjustment of the 'scope till he saw spots darting about the fluid Takeko had placed on the slide. He nailed the spots down with a gentle hand on the fine adjustment.
The juice of the pickled turnip was aswim with tiny bodies that looked like tadpoles. "What are they?" he asked, peering into the micro-world below him.
"Pia-san named them monads," said the carpenter, white-bearded Togo. "We all have them in our bodies. You have them now in yours. Our soil is alive with them. They chew the chaff of our fields into black loam; they turn to dust the flesh of our fathers. They cause turnips to become takuwan."
Hartford rocked back from the microscope to sit again on his heels. "You have no disease, no benign bacterial flora and of course no bacterial antibodies. Instead you have this whip-tailed animalcule, this monad. Is this correct?"
"So Pia-san said," Takeko agreed. "He said that the monad is a jealous beast. It is a tiger among the pygmies, he said. No little nuisance-makers can exist on Kansas; the monad would eat them in a rage."
"The ultimate antibiotic," Hartford said. "A micro-organism that functions as a saprophyte, a soil-former and a scavenger. Besides all this, it's a universal phagocyte, policing up the human environment inside and out, to keep it clean of any other microscopic organisms. The monad fills every niche in the micro-ecology of the planet."
"This is what Pia-san and his okusama, poor dead girl, discovered," Takeko said. "Renkei entered the Stone House to tell you that we do not stink, that we are not dangerous. Three people have died to tell this—and Nef still does not know."
"I think he may know it after all," Hartford said. "He knows about the monad, and fears it. This little bug means that every member of the human race can join his damned Brotherhood. A crew of monads in his gut would make every man on Stinker Earth a dignotobiote, germ-free except for his housekeeping protozoa."
"Until Pia-san told us," Yamata said, "we knew nothing except that we lived longer than our ancestors had. We knew that we did not suffer from the strange tirednesses the books told of, ills caused by the little animals. We did not know that the smallest natives of this planet had made of us their fortresses."
"If I could only get past Nasty Nef to tell this to the Axenites," Hartford said.
"Ron yori shoko," Kiwa-san said. Takeko translated for her father. "He says, Proof is stronger than argument."
"Indeed," Hartford agreed. "But how do I prove to the troopers that the monad sweeps Kansas cleaner than their Barracks floors?"
"As Pia-san tried to," Takeko said. "He removed his glasshead and his silken suit. He breathed our air and ate our food. He wanted to prove that he could live, but he was killed before he could. Now you have made that proof. Your brothers of the Stone House must undress of their silken suits and come among us, Lee-san."

"That they will not," Hartford said. "They are certain they will die if they inhale a breath of Kansas air, chew a bite of Kansas food, drink your clear stream water. I was certain I would die when my safety-suit was torn: remember our meeting, Takeko-san? It will not be easy to persuade my brothers and sisters in the Barracks to forget their fears. We are so sure, we Axenites, that contamination will kill us that we'd rather dance with lightning and eat stones than walk this world unprotected and eat its fruits."
When Takeko had respoken these words to her father, the old man said again: "Ron yori shoko." Proof is greater than argument.
"Proof?" Hartford asked. "I am not proof enough to have a Regiment of Axenites shed their safety-suits and declare the Kansans their brothers. It would take years of lab work before the first of them would walk suitless onto bug-dirt. We'd have to knock down the walls of the Barracks and burn two thousand-odd safety-suits, before we'd have the Axenite troopers here trapped into being guinea-pigs."
"Each trooper carries the Stone House with him when he walks our roads," the calligrapher remarked. "We have but to break through the silken suit he wears to make a trooper know the garment isn't needed here."
"He'd die of fright," Hartford said. "I very nearly did. Besides, each column of troopers, a squad or the Regiment, goes out with a Decontamination Team. If a man becomes septic through some sort of accident, he's hustled by a cleanup squad into a Decontamination Vehicle for his shower, shave and shots. I know the process well," he said, running his palm over his naked head.
"Ano ne," Kiwa said. "Will this Decontamination-kuruma house two thousand men? Two hundred? Twenty?"
"It will hold two or three troopers at once," Hartford answered. "We have several of them, though."
"So ... ka?" white-bearded Togo exclaimed. He leaned over to whisper into the ear of Takeko's father, who nodded and smiled.
Old Kiwa spoke, and Takeko interpreted. "We must surprise a group of troopers," he said. "We must cause all their silken suits to be torn, or all their glass heads shattered, at one time. It is so simple as that."
"Simple in all but the doing," said Yamata the calligrapher. He picked up a brush and sketched on the mat before him a line of trooper-silhouettes, a platoon, marching single-file. "How do we break into all those Stone Houses at once?" he asked.
Hartford's face was pale. "We could use grenades, perhaps," he said. "Or bombs. After all, these troopers we speak of are no more than my family, my village, my people. I may of course be expected to cooperate in their dest............