Poison snooper

Poison snoopers were mechanical devices designed to detect poison in food, known as chaumas, or in drink, known as chaumurky. A snooper functioned as a radiation analyzer within the olfactory spectrum, keyed to detect poisonous substances, and it was an essential precaution in a society where assassination by poison was a constant danger of high politics.

Types and manufacture#

There were typically two kinds of snooper, fixed and portable. Fixed poison snoopers were usually mounted to the ceiling of rooms where people took their meals. They remained active at all times and would emit an alarm if poison was detected. Portable snoopers were small hand held boxes fitted with a hose extension that carried a sensor at its end. The user passed the sensor over the food or drink, and like the fixed model it would sound an alarm at any sign of poison.

Poison snoopers were usually of Richesian or Ixian manufacture, and the Ixian devices were generally preferred because they were more sensitive. Even so, snoopers were not infallible, and some forms of poison were not detected. They were expensive devices, employed by wealthy families during the days of the Faufreluches, which was precisely the class most often in need of them, and such devices were common whenever the Great Houses of the Old Imperium were feuding. They remained in use as late as the time of the Honored Matres, by which point they had become smaller and less cumbersome.

Use by House Atreides#

When House Atreides moved from Caladan to Arrakis, Duke Leto Atreides I informed Lady Jessica that his Mentat and master of assassins, Thufir Hawat, had already installed a poison snooper over the dining table and placed a portable one in her room. A portable snooper was kept in the conference room at breakfast, and at a formal dinner a fixed one was hidden by a chandelier while guests discreetly carried their own. The limits of the technology proved decisive in the fall of the House. The poison tooth supplied to Duke Leto passed undetected through Baron Vladimir Harkonnen's own snooper, and the blade coated to slow the muscles that Feyd-Rautha later wielded would likewise not have alerted a snooper. The Fremen, who lived by other defenses in the sietch, made no use of poison snoopers at all.