The Garden - Melissa Scott [7]
"Shall we synthesize the results as we go along?" Kes asked.
Kim nodded. "But don't bother reporting anything until you find an anomaly." He looked from her to Paris. "Everything clear?"
"Reasonably," Paris said, and Kes merely nodded.
"Then let's get on with it," Kim said, and opened the door to the storage room. For an instant, it was lit only by the pale blue glow of the stasis fields, and then the overhead lights came on as well, fading the fields to near-invisibility. Kim could feel them, though, a chill presence that raised the hairs on his bare skin as he moved into the room. This had been a repair bay; it was smaller than the shuttlebays to either side, but the shelves of food-some wrapped in clingfilm, some boxed, some preserved in containers-rose to nearly three times his height.
"I'll take the left aisle to start," Paris said. "Harry, you want the middle?"
"I doubt it makes much difference," Kim said, but nodded. "Kes, that leaves you the right."
"All right." The Ocampa disappeared down the side aisle.
Kim took a deep breath, and started down his corridor. The presence o f the stasis fields was much stronger here, enough to raise goose bumps on his arms even through the uniform. He suppressed a shiver as he consulted the tricorder's plan for the area. He would begin with the tomato-things, he decided- at least three tons of them were stored in this aisle, and he had a feeling that they were somehow involved-and then sample the beans and the sour-cane, and move on to the other food as necessary.
The tomato-like fruits were stored in gas-filled cylinders at the middle of the aisle. Kim found the nearest control box and adjusted it until he had a window in the field through which he could drag one of the cylinders. Even with antigrav assistance, it was heavy, and he was sweating by the time he had it sitting in the middle of the aisle. He resealed the stasis field behind him, and turned his attention to the cylinder. The bright green fruit-somehow less viru-
lent than he remembered from the curry-bobbed gently in the preserving gas, clearly visible through the transparent walls. They certainly looked all right, he thought, and worked the controls to retrieve one fruit. The selector mechanism whined softly, numbers flickering across the checkplate, and a small lockplate slid back at the top of the cylinder. A single fruit sat in the opening, wisps of gas curling away from its bright rind. Kim took it, cautiously, wondering if something that small, that innocuous-looking- that tasty, he admitted silently-could really be the cause of their problems, and set it carefully on top of the cylinder. The access lock closed again with a soft hiss, and Kim reached for his tricorder.
He had run the standard tests before, but he cycled quickly through them again, just in case something on the planet, some peculiarity of the local condition, had interfered with their survey. As he'd expected, however, the results were the same as they had been before the fruit was perfectly edible, and even actively healthy for humans. The band that sampled ascorbic acid glowed bright green, at the upper end of the desired range. Kim made a face at that, and adjusted the controls, defining a new test. It, too, came back green, showing normal molecular structure. He ran two more tests, each one designed to target structural oddities that might not appear on the first test, but they, too, came back green. So it's not the ascorbic acid that's the problem, Kim thought, but something that's blocking its uptake-assuming, of course, that