“Five days later (Earth-time, naturally—this garnet doesn’t cover comparative chronology) he was back, with a slip from the foreman: his efficiency was low and he was too cheerful about failures. What was the matter? The medic gestured again with the gauge, found no fever—on the contrary, the man’s body temperature was several degrees on the safe side—and referred him to the disciplinary squad.

“Three more days passed. A friend brought the victim in this time. It was impossible to rouse him sufficiently for useful performance. The man was in an amiable stupor, and it was known that he had drunk no bootleg in two days. He no longer ate at all. And as long as he was here, the friend mentioned, he’d felt cold for a moment himself, a couple of days ago. As though a cold wash of air had descended on him, making him shiver, though no one else had felt it. It had passed in a minute and he felt fine now, better than ever, as a matter of fact, but...The medic automatically played the gauge over him, found no fever, dismissed him, made another entry in the record (for he was a good medic), and took the slack laborer in charge.

“The man’s body temperature was 297° K and dropping. This was an unusual departure from the human norm of about 310° K, and the medic was intrigued. The man had no symptoms that could not be accounted for by the chill itself; what caused the chill was a mystery. In due course the patient died and the fact was properly noted. A report was sent routinely to Earth where it was lost in clerical tape and forgotten.

“Meanwhile three more men, including the friend, were down with it. They were not sick—that is, they had no fever—but the medic, catching a glimmer of a problem requiring a technique for which he was not competent—that is, serious thought—held two for observation and shipped the third directly to Earth for study. That one was intercepted by the efficient quarantine station and retained for proper dispensation. He was dead by the time the medic Officer of the Day had been notified, but Standard Operating Procedure had been upheld to the letter of the death certificate. Autopsy revealed the cause; malfunction of vital tissues owing to insufficient temperature. The body’s natural regulatory mechanism had lapsed. No cause for that had been determined.