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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pariah Planet, by Murray Leinster
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Pariah Planet
+
+Author: Murray Leinster
+
+Release Date: July 18, 2009 [EBook #29448]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARIAH PLANET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Meredith Bach, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ [Transcriber's Note:
+
+  This etext was first published in Amazing Stories, July 1961. Extensive
+  research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
+  publication was renewed.]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+COMPLETE BOOK-LENGTH NOVEL
+
+
+
+
+PARIAH PLANET
+
+By MURRAY LEINSTER
+
+Illustrated by FINLAY
+
+  _When the blue plague appeared on the planet of Dara, fear struck
+  nearby worlds. The fear led to a hate that threatened the lives of
+  millions and endangered the Galactic peace._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The little Med Ship came out of overdrive and the stars were strange and
+the Milky Way seemed unfamiliar. Which, of course, was because the Milky
+Way and the local Cepheid marker-stars were seen from an unaccustomed
+angle and a not-yet-commonplace pattern of varying magnitudes. But
+Calhoun grunted in satisfaction. There was a banded sun off to port,
+which was good. A breakout at no more than sixty light-hours from
+one's destination wasn't bad, in a strange sector of the Galaxy and
+after three light-years of journeying blind.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Arise and shine, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun. "Comb your whiskers. Get
+set to astonish the natives!"
+
+A sleepy, small, shrill voice said;
+
+"_Chee!_"
+
+Murgatroyd the _tormal_ came crawling out of his small cubbyhole. He
+blinked at Calhoun.
+
+"We're due to land shortly," Calhoun observed. "You'll impress the local
+inhabitants. I'll be unpopular. According to the records, there's been
+no Med Ship inspection here for twelve standard years. And that was
+practically no inspection, to judge by the report."
+
+Murgatroyd said;
+
+"_Chee-chee!_"
+
+He began to make his toilet, first licking his right-hand whiskers and
+then his left. Then he stood up and shook himself and looked
+interestedly at Calhoun. _Tormals_ are companionable small animals. They
+are charmed when somebody speaks to them. They find great, deep
+satisfaction in imitating the actions of humans, as parrots and mynahs
+and parrokets imitate human speech. But _tormals_ have certain useful,
+genetically transmitted talents which make them much more valuable than
+mere companions or pets.
+
+Calhoun got a light-reading for the banded sun. It could hardly be an
+accurate measure of distance, but it was a guide. He said;
+
+"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd!"
+
+Calhoun threw the overdrive switch and the Med Ship flicked back into
+that questionable state of being in which velocities of some hundreds of
+times that of light are possible. The sensation of going into overdrive
+was unpleasant. A moment later, the sensation of coming out was no less
+so. Calhoun had experienced it often enough, and still didn't like it.
+
+The sun Weald burned huge and terrible in space. It was close, now. Its
+disk covered half a degree of arc.
+
+"Very neat," observed Calhoun. "Weald Three is our port, Murgatroyd. The
+plane of the ecliptic would be--Hm...."
+
+He swung the outside electron telescope, picked up a nearby bright
+object, enlarged its image to show details, and checked it against the
+local star-pilot. He calculated a moment. The distance was too short for
+even the briefest of overdrive hops, but it would take time to get there
+on solar-system drive.
+
+He thumbed down the communicator-button and spoke into a microphone.
+
+"Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty reporting arrival and asking coordinates for
+landing. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection. Our mass is
+fifty tons standard. We should arrive at a landing position in something
+under four hours. Repeat. Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty ..."
+
+He finished the regular second transmission and made coffee for himself
+while he waited for an answer. Murgatroyd wanted a cup of coffee too.
+Murgatroyd adored coffee. He held a tiny cup in a furry small paw and
+sipped gingerly at the hot liquid.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A voice came out of the communicator;
+
+"_Aesclipus Twenty, repeat your identification!_"
+
+Calhoun went to the control-board.
+
+"Aesclipus Twenty," he said patiently, "is a Med Ship, sent by the
+Interstellar Medical Service to make a planetary health inspection on
+Weald. Check with your public health authorities. This is the first Med
+Ship visit in twelve standard years, I believe, which is inexcusable.
+But your health authorities will know all about it. Check with them."
+
+The voice said truculently;
+
+"_What was your last port?_"
+
+Calhoun named it. This was not his home sector, but Sector Twelve had
+gotten into a very bad situation. Some of its planets had gone unvisited
+for as long as twenty years, and twelve between inspections was almost
+common-place. Other sectors had been called on to help it catch up.
+Calhoun was one of the loaned Med Ship men, and because of the emergency
+he'd been given a list of half a dozen planets to be inspected one after
+another, instead of reporting back to sector headquarters after each
+visit. He'd had minor troubles before with landing-grid operators in
+Sector Twelve.
+
+So he was very patient. He named the planet last inspected, the one from
+which he'd set out for Weald Three. The voice from the communicator said
+sharply;
+
+"_What port before that?_"
+
+Calhoun named the one before the last.
+
+"_Don't drive any closer,_" said the voice harshly, "_or you'll be
+destroyed!_"
+
+Calhoun said coldly;
+
+"Now you listen to me, friend! I'm from the Interstellar Medical
+Service! You get in touch with planetary health services immediately!
+Remind them of the Interstellar Medical Inspection Agreement, signed on
+Tralee two hundred and forty standard years ago. Remind them that if
+they do not cooperate in medical inspection that I can put your planet
+under quarantine and your space commerce will be cut off like that! No
+ship will be cleared for Weald from any other planet in the galaxy until
+there has been a health inspection! Things have pretty well gone to pot
+so far as the Med Service in this sector is concerned, but we're trying
+to straighten it out. You have twenty minutes to clear this and then,
+I'm coming in. If I'm not landed, a quarantine goes on! Tell your health
+authorities that!"
+
+Silence. Calhoun clicked off and poured himself another cup of coffee.
+Murgatroyd held out his cup for a refill. Calhoun gave it to him.
+
+"I hate to put on an official hat, Murgatroyd," he said annoyedly, "but
+there are some people who won't have any other way."
+
+Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" and sipped at his cup.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Calhoun checked the course of the Med Ship. It bored on through space.
+There were tiny noises from the communicator. There were whisperings and
+rustlings and the occasional strange and sometimes beautiful musical
+notes whose origin is yet obscure, but which, since they are carried by
+electromagnetic radiation of wildly varying wave-lengths, are not likely
+to be the fabled music of the spheres. He waited.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In fifteen minutes a different voice came from the speaker.
+
+"_Med Ship Aesclipus! Med Ship Aesclipus!_"
+
+Calhoun answered and the voice said anxiously;
+
+"_'Sorry about the challenge, but we have the blueskin problem always
+with us. We have to be extremely careful! Will you come in, please?_"
+
+"I'm on my way," said Calhoun.
+
+"_The planetary health authorities,_" said the voice, more anxiously
+still, "_are very anxious to be cooperative. We need Med Service help!
+We lose a lot of sleep over the blueskins! Could you tell us the name of
+the last Med Ship to land here, and its inspector, and when that
+inspection was made? We want to look up the record of the event to be
+able to assist you in every possible way._"
+
+"He's lying," Calhoun told Murgatroyd, "but he's more scared than
+hostile."
+
+He picked up the order-folio on Weald Three. He gave the information
+about the last Med Ship visit. He clicked off.
+
+"What?" he asked, "is a blueskin?"
+
+He'd read the folio on Weald, of course, but as the ship swam onward
+through emptiness he went through it again. The last medical inspection
+had been only perfunctory. Twelve years earlier--instead of three--a
+Med Ship had landed on Weald. There had been official conferences with
+health officials. There was a report on the birth-rate, the death-rate,
+the anomaly-rate, and a breakdown of all reported communicable diseases.
+But that was all. There were no special comments and no overall picture.
+
+Presently Calhoun found the word in a Sector dictionary, where words of
+only local usage were to be found.
+
+"Blueskin; Colloquial term for a person recovered from a plague which
+left large patches of blue pigment irregularly distributed over the
+body. Especially, inhabitants of Dara. The condition is said to be
+caused by a chronic, non-fatal form of Dara plague and has been said to
+be non-infectious, though this is not certain. The etiology of Dara
+plague has not fully been worked out. The blueskin condition is
+hereditary but not a genetic modification, as markings appear in
+non-Mendellian distributions...."
+
+Calhoun puzzled over it. Nobody could have read the entire Sector
+directory, even with unlimited leisure during travel between solar
+systems. Calhoun hadn't tried. But now he went laboriously through
+indices and cross-references while the ship continued travel onward. He
+found no other reference to blueskins. He looked up Dara. It was listed
+as an inhabited planet, some four hundred years colonized, with a
+landing-grid and at the time the main notice was written out, a
+flourishing interstellar commerce. But there was a memo, evidently added
+to the entry in some change of editions.
+
+"Since plague, special license from Med Service is required for
+landing."
+
+That was all. Absolutely all.
+
+The communicator said suavely;
+
+"_Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Come in on vision, please!_"
+
+Calhoun went to the control-board and threw on vision.
+
+"Well, what now?" he demanded.
+
+His screen lighted. A bland face looked out at him.
+
+"_We have--ah--verified your statements,_" said the third voice from
+Weald. "_Just one more item. Are you alone in your ship?_"
+
+"Of course," said Calhoun, frowning.
+
+"_Quite alone?_" insisted the voice.
+
+"Obviously!" said Calhoun.
+
+"_No other living creature?_" insisted the voice again.
+
+"Of--Oh!" said Calhoun annoyedly. He called over his shoulder.
+"Murgatroyd! Come here!"
+
+Murgatroyd hopped to his lap and gazed interestedly at the screen. The
+bland face changed remarkably. The voice changed even more.
+
+"_Very good!_" it said. "_Very, very good! Blueskins do not have_
+tormals! _You are Med Service! By all means come in. Your coordinates
+will be ..._"
+
+Calhoun wrote them down. He clicked off the communicator again and
+growled to Murgatroyd;
+
+"So I might have been a blueskin, eh? And you're my passport, because
+only Med Ships have members of your tribe aboard! What the hell's the
+matter, Murgatroyd? They act like they think somebody's trying to get
+down on their planet with a load of plague-germs!"
+
+He grumbled to himself for minutes. The life of a Med Ship man is not
+exactly a sinecure, at best. It means long periods in empty space in
+overdrive, which is absolute and deadly tedium. Then two or three days
+aground, checking official documents and statistics, and asking
+questions to see how many of the newest medical techniques have reached
+this planet or that, and the supplying of information about such as have
+not arrived. Then lifting out to space for long periods of tedium, to
+repeat the process somewhere else. Med Ships carry only one man because
+two could not stand the close contact without quarreling with each
+other. But Med Ships do carry _tormals_, like Murgatroyd, and a _tormal_
+and a man can get along indefinitely, like a man and a dog. It is a
+highly unequal friendship, but it seems to be satisfactory to both.
+
+Calhoun was very much annoyed with the way the Med Service had been
+operated in Sector Twelve. He was one of many men at work to correct the
+results of incompetence in directing Med Service in the twelfth sector.
+But it is always disheartening to have to labor at making up for
+somebody else's blundering, when there is so much new work that needs to
+be done.
+
+The condition shown by the landing-grid suspicions was a case in point.
+Blueskins were people who inherited a splotchy skin-pigmentation from
+other people who'd survived a plague. Weald plainly maintained a
+one-planet quarantine against them. But a quarantine is normally an
+emergency measure. The Med Service should have taken over, wiped out the
+need for a quarantine, and then lifted it. It hadn't been done.
+
+Calhoun fumed to himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The world of Weald Three grew brighter and brighter and became a disk.
+The disk had ice-caps and a reasonable proportion of land and water
+surface. The Med Ship decelerated, and voices notified observation from
+the surface, and the little craft came to a stop some five planetary
+diameters out from solidity. The landing-field force-field locked on to
+it, and its descent began.
+
+The business of landing was all very familiar, from the blue rim which
+appeared at the limb of the planet from one diameter out, to the
+singular flowing-apart of the surface features as the ship sank still
+lower. There was the circular landing-grid, rearing skyward for nearly a
+mile. It could let down interstellar liners from emptiness and lift them
+out to emptiness again, with great convenience and economy for everyone.
+
+It landed the Med Ship in its center, and there were officials to greet
+Calhoun, and he knew in advance the routine part of his visit. There
+would be an interview with the planet's chief executive, by whatever
+title he was called. There would be a banquet. Murgatroyd would be
+petted by everybody. There would be painful efforts to impress Calhoun
+with the splendid conduct of public health matters on Weald. He would be
+told much scandal. He might find one man, somewhere, who passionately
+labored to advance the welfare of his fellow humans by finding out how
+to keep them well, or failing that how to make them well when they got
+sick. And in two days, or three, Calhoun would be escorted back to the
+landing-grid, and lifted out to space, and he'd spend long empty days in
+overdrive and land somewhere else to do the whole thing all over again.
+
+It all happened exactly as he expected, with one exception. Every human
+being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins. Blueskins and the
+idea of blueskins obsessed everyone. Calhoun listened without asking
+questions until he had the picture of what blueskins meant to the people
+who talked of them. Then he knew there would be no use asking questions
+at random. Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin. Nobody
+mentioned a specific event in which a blueskin had at any named time
+taken part. But everybody was afraid of blueskins. It was a patterned,
+an inculcated, a stage-directed fixed idea. And it found expression in
+shocked references to the vileness, the depravity, the monstrousness of
+the blueskin inhabitants of Dara, from whom Weald must at all costs be
+protected.
+
+It did not make sense. So Calhoun listened politely until he found an
+undistinguished medical man who wanted some special information about
+gene-selection as practised halfway across the galaxy. He invited that
+man to the Med Ship, where he supplied the information not hitherto
+available. He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with that joyous awe a
+man feels when he finds out something he has wanted long and badly to
+know.
+
+"Now," said Calhoun, "tell me something! Why does everybody on this
+planet hate the inhabitants of Dara? It's light-years away. Nobody
+claims to have suffered in person from them. Why make a point of hating
+them?"
+
+The Wealdian doctor grimaced.
+
+"They've blue patches on their skins. They're different from us. So they
+can be pictured as a danger and our political parties can make an
+election issue out of competing for the privilege of defending us from
+them. They had a plague on Dara, once. They're accused of still having
+it ready for export."
+
+"Hm," said Calhoun. "The story is that they want to spread contagion
+here, eh? Doesn't anybody"--his tone was sardonic--"doesn't anybody urge
+that they be massacred as an act of piety?"
+
+"Yes--s--s--s," admitted the doctor reluctantly. "It's mentioned in
+political speeches."
+
+"But how's it rationalized?" demanded Calhoun. "What's the argument to
+make pigment-patches involve moral and physical degradation, as I'm
+assured is the case?"
+
+"In the public schools," said the doctor, "the children are taught that
+blueskins are now carriers of the disease they survived three
+generations ago! That they hate everybody who isn't a blueskin. That
+they are constantly scheming to introduce their plague here so most of
+us will die and the rest become blueskins. That's beyond rationalizing.
+It can't be true, but it's not safe to doubt it."
+
+"Bad business," said Calhoun coldly. "That sort of thing usually costs
+lives, in the end. It could lead to massacre!"
+
+"Perhaps it has, in a way," said the doctor unhappily. "One doesn't like
+to think about it." He paused, and said; "Twenty years ago there was a
+famine on Dara. There were crop-failures. The situation must have been
+very bad. They built a space-ship. They've no use for such things
+normally, because no nearby planet will deal with them or let them land.
+But they built a space-ship and came here. They went in orbit around
+Weald. They asked to trade for shiploads of food. They offered any price
+in heavy metals, gold, platinum, iridium, and so on. They talked from
+orbit by vision communicators. They could be seen to be blueskins. You
+can guess what happened!"
+
+"Tell me," said Calhoun.
+
+"We armed ships in a hurry," admitted the doctor, "We chased their
+space-ship back to Dara. We hung in space off the planet. We told them
+we'd blast their world from pole to pole if they ever dared take to
+space again. We made them destroy their one ship, and we watched on
+visionscreens as it was done."
+
+"But you gave them food?"
+
+"No," said the doctor ashamedly. "They were blueskins."
+
+"How bad was the famine?"
+
+"Who knows? Any number may have starved! And we kept a squadron of armed
+ships in their skies for years. To keep them from spreading the plague,
+we said. And some of us believed it, probably!"
+
+The doctor's tone was purest irony.
+
+"Lately," he said, "there's been a move for economy in our government.
+Simultaneously, we began to have a series of over-abundant crops. The
+government had to buy the excess grain to keep the price up. Retired
+patrol-ships--built to watch over Dara--were available for
+storage-space. We filled them up with grain and sent them out into
+orbit. They're there now, hundreds of thousands or millions of tons of
+grain!"
+
+"And Dara?"
+
+The Doctor shrugged. He stood up.
+
+"Our hatred of Dara," he said, again ironically, "has produced one
+thing. Roughly halfway between here and Dara there's a two-planet solar
+system, Orede. There's a usable planet there. It was proposed to build
+an outpost of Weald there, against blueskins. Cattle were landed to run
+wild and multiply and make a reason for colonists to settle there. They
+did, but nobody wants to move nearer to blueskins! So Orede stayed
+uninhabited until a hunting-party shooting wild cattle found an
+outcropping of heavy-metal ore. So now there's a mine there. And that's
+all. A few hundred men work the mine at fabulous wages. You may be asked
+to check on their health. But not Dara's!"
+
+"I see," said Calhoun, frowning.
+
+The doctor moved toward the Med Ship's exit-port.
+
+"I answered your questions," he said grimly. "But if I talked to anyone
+else as I've done to you, I'd be lucky only to be driven into exile!"
+
+"I shan't give you away," said Calhoun. He did not smile.
+
+When the doctor had gone, Calhoun said deliberately;
+
+"Murgatroyd, you should be grateful that you're a _tormal_ and not a
+man. There's nothing about being a _tormal_ to make you ashamed!"
+
+Then he grimly changed his garments for the full-dress uniform of the
+Med Service. There was to be a banquet at which he would sit next to the
+planet's chief executive and hear innumerable speeches about the
+splendor of Weald. Calhoun had his own, strictly Med Service opinion of
+the planet's latest and most boasted-of achievement. It was a domed city
+in the polar regions, where nobody ever had to go outdoors. He was less
+than professionally enthusiastic about the moving streets, and much less
+approving of the dream-broadcasts which supplied hypnotic,
+sleep-inducing rhythms to anybody who chose to listen to them. The price
+was that while asleep one would hear high praise of commercial products,
+and one might believe them when awake.
+
+But it was not Calhoun's function to criticize when it could be avoided.
+Med Service had been badly managed in Sector Twelve. So at the banquet
+Calhoun made a brief and diplomatic address in which he temperately
+praised what could be praised, and did not mention anything else.
+
+The chief executive followed him. As head of the government he paid some
+tribute to the Med Service. But then he reminded his hearers proudly of
+the high culture, splendid health, and remarkable prosperity of the
+planet since his political party took office. This, he said, was in
+spite of the need to be perpetually on guard against the greatest and
+most immediate danger to which any world in all the galaxy was exposed.
+He referred to the blueskins, of course. He did not need to tell the
+people of Weald what vigilance, what constant watchfulness was necessary
+against that race of depraved and malevolent deviants from the norm of
+humanity. But Weald, he said with emotion, held aloft the torch of all
+that humanity held most dear, and defended not alone the lives of its
+people against blueskin contagion, but their noble heritage of ideals
+against Blueskin pollution.
+
+When he sat down, Calhoun said very politely;
+
+"It looks like some day it should be practical politics to urge the
+massacre of all blueskins. Have you thought of that?"
+
+The chief executive said comfortably;
+
+"The idea's been proposed. It's good politics to urge it, but it would
+be foolish to carry it out. People vote against blueskins. Wipe them
+out, and where'd you be?"
+
+Calhoun ground his teeth, quietly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were more speeches. Then a messenger, white-faced, arrived with a
+written note for the chief executive. He read it and passed it to
+Calhoun. It was from the Ministry of Health. The space-port reported
+that a ship had just broken out from overdrive within the Wealdian
+solar system. Its tape-transmitter had automatically signalled its
+arrival from the mining-planet Orede. But, having sent off its automatic
+signal, the ship lay dead in space. It did not drive toward Weald. It
+did not respond to signals. It drifted like a derelict upon no course at
+all. It seemed ominous, and since it came from Orede--the planet nearest
+to Dara of the blueskins--the health ministry informed the planet's
+chief executive.
+
+"It'll be blueskins," said that astute person, firmly. "They're
+next-door to Orede. That's who's done this. It wouldn't surprise me if
+they'd seeded Orede with their plague, and this ship came from there to
+give us warning!"
+
+"There's no evidence for anything of the sort," protested Calhoun. "A
+ship simply came out of overdrive and didn't signal further. That's
+all."
+
+"We'll see," said the chief executive ominously. "We'll go directly to
+the spaceport."
+
+Calhoun retrieved Murgatroyd who had been visiting with the wives of the
+higher-up officials. His small paunch distended with cakes and coffee
+and such delicacies as he'd been plied with. He was half comatose from
+over-feeding and over-petting, but he was glad to see Calhoun. At the
+spaceport they discovered the situation remained unchanged.
+
+A ship from Orede had come out of overdrive and lay dead in emptiness.
+It did not answer calls. It did not move in space. It floated eerily in
+no orbit around anything, going nowhere; doing nothing. And panic was
+the consequence.
+
+It seemed to Calhoun that the official handling of the matter accounted
+for the terror that he could feel building up. The so-far-unexplained
+bit of news was on the air all over the planet Weald. There was nobody
+awake of all the world's population who did not believe that there was a
+new danger in the sky. Nobody doubted that it came from blueskins. The
+treatment of the news was precisely calculated to keep alive the hatred
+of Weald for the inhabitants of the world Dara.
+
+Calhoun put Murgatroyd into the Med Ship and went back to the spaceport
+office. A small space-boat, designed to inspect the circling grain-ships
+from time, was already aloft. The landing-grid had thrust it swiftly out
+most of the way. Now it droned and drove on sturdily toward the
+enigmatic ship.
+
+Calhoun took no part in the agitated conferences among the officials and
+news reporters at the space-port. But he listened to the talk about him.
+As the investigating small ship drew nearer and nearer to the
+deathly-still cargo vessel, the guesses about the meaning of its
+breakout and following silence grew more and more wild. But, singularly,
+there was not one suggestion that the mystery might not be the work of
+blueskins. Blueskins were scapegoats for all the fears and all the
+uneasiness a perhaps over-civilized world developed.
+
+Presently the investigating space-boat reached the mystery ship and
+circled it, beaming queries. No answer. It reported the cargo-ship dark.
+No lights shone anywhere on or in it. There were no induction-surges
+from even pulsing, idling engines. Delicately, the messenger-craft
+maneuvered until it touched the silent vessel. It reported that
+microphones detected no motion whatever inside.
+
+"Let a volunteer go aboard," commanded the chief executive. "Have him
+report what he finds."
+
+A pause. Then the solemn announcement of an intrepid volunteer's name,
+from far, far away. Calhoun listened, frowning darkly. This pompous
+heroism wouldn't be noticed in the Med Service. It would be routine
+behavior.
+
+Suspenseful, second-by-second reports. The volunteer had rocketed
+himself across the emptiness between the two again-separated ships. He
+had opened the airlock from outside. He'd gone in. He'd closed the outer
+airlock door. He'd opened the inner. He reported.
+
+The relayed report was almost incoherent, what with horror and
+incredulity and the feeling of doom that came upon the volunteer. The
+ship was a bulk-cargo ore-carrier, designed to run between Orede and
+Weald with cargoes of heavy-metal ores and a crew of no more than five
+men. There was no cargo in her holds now, though. Instead, there were
+men. They packed the ship. They filled the corridors. They had crawled
+into every cargo and other space where a man could find room to push
+himself. There were hundreds of them. It was insanity. And it had been
+greater insanity still for the ship to have taken off with so
+preposterous a load of living creatures.
+
+But they weren't living any longer. The air apparatus had been designed
+for a crew of five. It could purify the air for possibly twenty or more.
+But there were hundreds of men in hiding as well as in plain view in the
+cargo-ship from Orede. There were many, many times more than her air
+apparatus and reserve tanks could possibly have serviced. They couldn't
+even have been fed during the journey from Orede to Weald!
+
+But they hadn't starved. Air-scarcity killed them before the ship came
+out of overdrive.
+
+A remarkable thing was that there was no written message in the ship's
+log which referred to its take-off. There was no memorandum of the
+taking on of such an impossible number of passengers.
+
+"The blueskins did it," said the chief executive of Weald. He was pale.
+All about Calhoun men looked sick and shocked and terrified. "It was the
+blueskins! We'll have to teach them a lesson!" Then he turned to
+Calhoun. "The volunteer who went on that ship ... He'll have to stay
+there, won't he? He can't be brought back to Weald without bringing
+contagion ..."
+
+Calhoun raged at him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 2
+
+
+There was a certain coldness in the manner of those at the Weald
+spaceport when the Med Ship left next morning. Calhoun was not popular
+because Weald was scared. It had been conditioned to scare easily, where
+blueskins might be involved. Its children were trained to react
+explosively when the word "blueskin" was uttered in their hearing, and
+its adults tended to say "blueskin" when anything to cause uneasiness
+entered their minds. So a planet-wide habit of non-rational response had
+formed and was not seen to be irrational because almost everybody had
+it.
+
+The volunteer who'd discovered the tragedy on the ship from Orede was
+safe, though. He'd made a completely conscientious survey of the ship
+he'd volunteered to enter and examine. For his courage, he'd have been
+doomed but for Calhoun. The reaction of his fellow-citizens was that by
+entering the ship he might have become contaminated by blueskin
+infective material if the plague still existed, and if the men in the
+ship had caught it--but they certainly hadn't died of it--and if there
+had been blueskins on Orede to communicate it--for which there was no
+evidence--and if blueskins were responsible for the tragedy. Which was
+at the moment pure supposition. But Weald feared he might bring death
+back to Weald if he were allowed to return.
+
+Calhoun saved his life. He ordered that the guard-ship admit him to its
+airlock, which then was to be filled with steam and chlorine. The
+combination would sterilize and partly even eat away his space-suit,
+after which the chlorine and steam should be bled out to space, and air
+from the ship let into the lock. If he stripped off the space-suit
+without touching its outer surface, and reentered the investigating ship
+while the suit was flung outside by a man in another space-suit,
+handling it with a pole he'd fling after it, there could be no possible
+contamination brought back.
+
+Calhoun was quite right, but Weald in general considered that he'd
+persuaded the government to take an unreasonable risk.
+
+There were other reasons for disapproving of him. Calhoun had been
+unpleasantly frank. The coming of the death-ship stirred to frenzy those
+people who believed that all blueskins should be exterminated as a pious
+act. They'd appeared on every visionscreen, citing not only the ship
+from Orede but other incidents which they interpreted as crimes against
+Weald. They demanded that all Wealdian atomic reactors be modified to
+turn out fusion-bomb materials while a space-fleet was made ready for an
+anti-blueskin crusade. They confidently demanded such a rain of
+fusion-bombs on Dara that no blueskin, no animal, no shred of
+vegetation, no fish in the deepest ocean, not even a living
+virus-particle of the blueskin plague could remain alive on the blueskin
+world!
+
+One of these vehement orators even asserted that Calhoun agreed that no
+other course was possible, speaking for the Interstellar Medical
+Service. And Calhoun furiously demanded a chance to deny it by
+broadcast, and he made a bitter and indiscreet speech from which a
+planet-wide audience inferred that he thought them fools. He did.
+
+So he was definitely unpopular when his ship lifted from Weald. He'd
+curtly given his destination as Orede, from which the death-ship had
+come. The landing-grid locked on, raised the small space-craft until
+Weald was a great shining ball below it, and then somehow scornfully
+cast him off. The Med Ship was free, in clear space where there was not
+enough of a gravitational field to hinder overdrive.
+
+He aimed for his destination, his face very grim. He said savagely;
+
+"Get set, Murgatroyd! Overdrive coming!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He thumbed down the overdrive button. The universe of stars went out,
+while everything living in the ship felt the customary sensations of
+dizziness, of nausea, and of a spiralling fall to nothingness. Then
+there was silence. The Med Ship actually moved at a rate which was a
+preposterous number of times the speed of light, but it felt absolutely
+solid, absolutely firm and fixed. A ship in overdrive feels exactly as
+if it were buried deep in the core of a planet. There is no vibration.
+There is no sign of anything but solidity and--if one looks out a
+port--there is only utter blackness plus an absence of sound fit to make
+one's eardrums crack.
+
+But within seconds random tiny noises began. There was a reel and there
+were sound-speakers to keep the ship from sounding like a grave. The
+reel played and the speakers gave off minute creakings, and meaningless
+hums, and very tiny noises of every imaginable sort, all of which were
+just above the threshold of the inaudible.
+
+Calhoun fretted. Sector Twelve was in very bad shape. A conscientious
+Med Service man would never have let the anti-blueskin obsession go
+unmentioned in a report on Weald. Health is not only a physical affair.
+There is mental health, also. When mental health goes a civilization can
+be destroyed more surely and more terribly than by any imaginable war or
+plague-germ. A plague kills off those who are susceptible to it, leaving
+immunes to build up a world again. But immunes are the first to be
+killed when a mass neurosis sweeps a population.
+
+Weald was definitely a Med Service problem world. Dara was another. And
+when hundreds of men jammed themselves into a cargo-boat which could not
+furnish them with air to breathe, and took off and went into overdrive
+before the air could fail.... Orede called for no less of worry.
+
+"I think," said Calhoun dourly, "that I'll have some coffee."
+
+"Coffee" was one of the words that Murgatroyd recognized immediately. He
+would usually watch the coffee-maker with bright, interested eyes. He'd
+even tried to imitate Calhoun's motions with it, once, and had scorched
+his paws in the attempt. This time he did not move.
+
+Calhoun turned his head. Murgatroyd sat on the floor, his long tail
+coiled reflectively about a chair-leg. He watched the door of the Med
+Ship's sleeping-cabin.
+
+"Murgatroyd," said Calhoun. "I mentioned coffee!"
+
+"_Chee!_" shrilled Murgatroyd.
+
+But he continued to look at the door. The temperature was kept lower in
+the other cabin, and the look of things was different from the
+control-compartment. The difference was part of the means by which a man
+was able to be alone for weeks on end--alone save for his
+_tormal_--without becoming ship-happy. There were other carefully
+thought out items in the ship with the same purpose. But none of them
+should cause Murgatroyd to stare fixedly and fascinatedly at the
+sleeping-cabin door. Not when coffee was in the making!
+
+Calhoun considered. He became angry at the immediate suspicion that
+occurred to him. As a Med Service man, he was duty-bound to be
+impartial. To be impartial might mean not to side absolutely with Weald
+in its enmity to blueskins. The people of Weald had refused to help Dara
+in a time of famine; they'd blockaded that pariah world for years
+afterward; they had other reasons for hating the people they'd treated
+badly. It was entirely reasonable for some fanatic on Weald to consider
+that Calhoun must be killed lest he be of help to the blueskins Weald
+abhorred.
+
+In fact, it was quite possible that somebody had stowed away on the Med
+Ship to murder Calhoun, so that there would be no danger of any report
+favorable to Dara ever being presented anywhere. If so, such a stowaway
+would be in the sleeping-cabin now, waiting for Calhoun to walk
+unsuspiciously in to be shot dead.
+
+So Calhoun made coffee. He slipped a blaster into a pocket where it
+would be handy. He filled a small cup for Murgatroyd and a large one for
+himself, and then a second large one.
+
+He tapped on the sleeping-cabin door, standing aside lest a blaster-bolt
+came through it.
+
+"Coffee's ready," he said sardonically. "Come out and join us."
+
+There was a long pause. Calhoun rapped again.
+
+"You've a seat at the captain's table," he said more sardonically still.
+"It's not polite to keep me waiting!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He listened, alert for a rush which would be a fanatic's desperate
+attempt to do murder despite premature discovery. He was prepared to
+shoot quite ruthlessly.
+
+But there was no rush. Instead, there came hesitant foot-falls. The door
+of the cabin slid slowly aside. A girl appeared in the opening,
+desperately white and desperately composed.
+
+"H-how did you know I was there?" she asked shakily. She moistened her
+lips. "You didn't see me! I was in a closet, and you didn't even enter
+the room!"
+
+Calhoun said grimly;
+
+"I've sources of information." He pointed to Murgatroyd.
+
+The girl did not move. Her eyes went from Murgatroyd to Calhoun.
+
+"And now," said Calhoun, "do you want to tell me your story? You have
+one ready, I'm sure."
+
+"There--there isn't any," said the girl unsteadily. "Just--I--I need to
+get to Orede, and you're going there. There's no other way to go--now."
+
+"To the contrary," said Calhoun, "there'll undoubtedly be a fleet
+heading for Orede as soon as it can be assembled and armed. But I'm
+afraid that's not a very good story. Try another."
+
+She shivered a little.
+
+"I'm--running away ..."
+
+"Ah!" said Calhoun. "In that case I'll take you back."
+
+"No!" she said fiercely. "I'll--I'll die first! I'll wreck this ship
+first!"
+
+Her hand came from behind her. There was a tiny blaster in it. But it
+shook visibly as she tried to aim it.
+
+"I'll--shoot out the controls!"
+
+Calhoun blinked. He'd had to make a drastic change in his estimate of
+the situation the instant he saw that the stowaway was a girl. Now he
+had to make another when her threat was not to kill him but to disable
+the ship. Women are rarely assassins, and when they are they don't use
+energy weapons. Daggers and poisons are more typical.
+
+"I'd rather you didn't do that," said Calhoun drily. "Besides, you'd get
+deadly bored if we were stuck in a derelict waiting for our air and food
+to give out."
+
+Murgatroyd, for no reason whatever, felt it necessary to enter the
+conversation. He said;
+
+"_Chee-chee-chee!_"
+
+"A very sensible suggestion," observed Calhoun. "We'll sit down and have
+a cup of coffee." To the girl he said, "I'll take you to Orede, since
+that's where you say you want to go."
+
+"I--there's a boy there--"
+
+Calhoun shook his head.
+
+"No," he said reprovingly. "Nearly all the mining colony had packed
+itself into the ship that came into Weald with everybody dead. But not
+all. And there's been no check of what men were in the ship and what men
+weren't. You wouldn't go to Orede if it were likely your fellow had died
+on the way to you. Here's your coffee. Sugar or saccho, and do you take
+cream?"
+
+She trembled a little, but she took the cup.
+
+"I--don't understand--."
+
+"Murgatroyd and I," explained Calhoun--and he did not know whether he
+spoke out of anger or something else--"we are do-gooders. We go around
+trying to keep people from getting killed. It's our profession. We
+practise it even on our own behalf. We want to stay alive. So since you
+make such drastic threats, we will take you where you want to go.
+Especially since we're going there anyhow."
+
+"You--don't believe anything I've said!" It was a statement.
+
+"Not a word," admitted Calhoun. "But you'll probably tell us something
+more believable presently. When did you eat last?"
+
+"Yesterday--."
+
+"Better have something now. We'll talk more later." Calhoun showed her
+how to punch the readier for such-and-such dishes, to be extracted from
+storage and warmed or chilled, as the case might be, and served at
+dialed-for intervals.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Calhoun deliberately immersed himself in the Galactic Directory, looking
+up the planet Orede. He was headed there, but he'd had no reason to
+inform himself about it before. Now he read with every appearance of
+absorption.
+
+The girl ate daintily. Murgatroyd watched with highly amiable interest.
+But she looked acutely uncomfortable.
+
+Calhoun finished with the Directory. He got out the microfilm reels
+which contained more information. He was specifically after the Med
+Service history of all the planets in this sector. He went through the
+filmed record of every inspection ever made on Weald and on Dara. But
+Sector Twelve had not been well-run. There was no adequate account of a
+plague which had wiped out three-quarters of the population of an
+inhabited planet! It had happened shortly after one Med Ship visit, and
+was over before another Med Ship came by. But there should have been
+painstaking investigation, even after the fact. There should have been a
+collection of infective material and a reasonably complete
+identification and study of the infective agent. It hadn't been made.
+There was probably some other emergency at the time, and it slipped by.
+But Calhoun--whose career was not to be spent in this sector--resolved
+on a blistering report about this negligence and its consequences.
+
+He kept himself casually busy, ignoring the girl. A Med Ship man has
+resources of study and meditation with which to occupy himself during
+overdrive travel from one planet to another. Calhoun made use of those
+resources. He acted as if he were completely unconscious of the
+stowaway. But Murgatroyd watched her with charmed attention.
+
+Hours after her discovery, she said uneasily;
+
+"Please?"
+
+Calhoun looked up.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I--don't know exactly how things stand."
+
+"You are a stowaway," said Calhoun. "Legally, I have the right to put
+you out the airlock. It doesn't seem necessary. There's a cabin. When
+you're sleepy, use it. Murgatroyd and I can make out quite well here.
+When you're hungry, you now know how to get something to eat. When we
+land on Orede, you'll probably go about whatever business you have
+there. That's all."
+
+She stared at him.
+
+"But--you don't believe what I've told you!"
+
+"No," agreed Calhoun. But he didn't add to the statement.
+
+"But--I will tell you," she offered. "The police were after me. I had to
+get away from Weald! I had to! I'd stolen--"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"No," he said. "If you were a thief, you'd say anything in the world
+except that you were a thief. You're not ready to tell the truth yet.
+You don't have to, so why tell me anything? I suggest that you get some
+sleep."
+
+She rose slowly. Twice her lips parted as if to speak again, but then
+she went into the other cabin and closed herself in.
+
+Murgatroyd blinked at the place where she'd disappeared and then climbed
+up into Calhoun's lap, with complete assurance of welcome. He settled
+himself and was silent for moments. Then he said;
+
+"_Chee!_"
+
+"I believe you're right," said Calhoun. "She doesn't belong on Weald, or
+with the conditioning she'd have had, there'd be only one place she'd
+dread worse than Orede, and that would be Dara. But I doubt she'd be
+afraid to land even on Dara."
+
+Murgatroyd liked to be talked to. He liked to pretend that he carried on
+a conversation, like humans.
+
+"_Chee-chee!_" he said with conviction.
+
+"Definitely," agreed Calhoun. "She's not doing this for her personal
+advantage. Whatever she thinks she's doing, it's more important to her
+than her own life. Murgatroyd--"
+
+"_Chee?_" said Murgatroyd in an inquiring tone.
+
+"There are wild cattle on Orede," said Calhoun. "Herds and herds of
+them. I have a suspicion that somebody's been shooting them. Lots of
+them. Do you agree? Don't you think that a lot of cattle have been
+slaughtered on Orede lately?"
+
+Murgatroyd yawned. He settled himself still more comfortably in
+Calhoun's lap.
+
+"_Chee,_" he said drowsily.
+
+He went to sleep, while Calhoun continued the examination of highly
+condensed information. Presently he looked up the normal rate of
+increase, with other data, among herds of _bivis domesticus_ in a wild
+state, on planets where they have no natural enemies. It wasn't
+unheard-of for a world to be stocked with useful types of Terran fauna
+and flora before it was attempted to be colonized. Terran life-forms
+could play the devil with alien ecological systems, very much to
+humanity's benefit. Familiar microorganisms and a standard vegetation
+added to the practicality of human settlements on otherwise alien
+worlds. But sometimes the results were strange.
+
+They weren't often so strange, however, as to cause some hundreds of men
+to pack themselves frantically aboard a cargo-ship which couldn't
+possibly sustain them, so that every man must die while the ship was in
+overdrive.
+
+Still, by the time Calhoun turned in on a spare pneumatic mattress, he
+had calculated that as few as a dozen head of cattle, turned loose on a
+suitable planet, would have increased to herds of thousands or tens or
+even hundreds of thousands in much less time than had probably elapsed.
+
+The Med Ship drove on in seemingly absolute solidity, with no sound from
+without, with no sight to be seen outside, with no evidence at all that
+it was not buried deep in the heart of a planet instead of flashing
+through emptiness at a speed so great as to have no meaning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next ship-day the girl looked oddly at Calhoun when she appeared in the
+control-room. "Shall I--have breakfast?" she asked uncertainly.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+Silently, she operated the food-readier. She ate. Calhoun gave the
+impression that he would respond politely when spoken to, but that he
+was busy with activities that kept him remote from stowaways.
+
+About noon, ship-time, she asked;
+
+"When will we get to Orede?"
+
+Calhoun told her absently, as if he were thinking of something else.
+
+"What--what do you think happened there? I mean, to make that tragedy in
+the ship?"
+
+"I don't know," said Calhoun. "But I disagree with the authorities on
+Weald. I don't think it was a planned atrocity of the blueskins."
+
+"Wh-what are blueskins?"
+
+Calhoun turned around and looked at her directly.
+
+"When lying," he said mildly, "you tell as much by what you pretend
+isn't, as by what you pretend is. You know what blueskins are!"
+
+"B--but what do you think they are?" she asked.
+
+"There used to be a human disease called smallpox," said Calhoun. "When
+people recovered from it, they were usually marked. Their skin had
+little scar-pits here and there. At one time, back on Earth, it was
+expected that everybody would catch smallpox sooner or later, and a
+large percentage would die of it. And it was so much a matter of course
+that if they printed a description of a criminal, they never mentioned
+it if he were pock-marked--scarred. It was no distinction. But if he
+didn't have the markings, they'd mention that!" He paused. "Those
+pock-marks weren't hereditary, but otherwise a blueskin is like a man
+who had them. He can't be anything else!"
+
+"Then you think they're--human?"
+
+"There's never yet been a case of reverse evolution," said Calhoun.
+"Maybe pithecanthropus had a monkey uncle, but no pithecanthropus ever
+went monkey."
+
+She turned abruptly away. But she glanced at him often during that day.
+He continued to busy himself with those activities which make a Med
+Ship man's life consistent with retained sanity.
+
+Next day she asked without preliminary;
+
+"Don't you believe the blueskins planned for the ship with the dead men
+to arrive at Weald and spread plague there?"
+
+"No," said Calhoun.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"It couldn't possibly work," Calhoun told her. "With only dead men on
+board, the ship wouldn't arrive at a place where the landing-grid could
+bring it down. So that would be no good. And plague-stricken living men
+wouldn't try to conceal that they had the plague. They might ask for
+help, but they'd know they'd instantly be killed on Weald if they were
+found to be plague-victims. So that would be no good, either! No, the
+ship wasn't intended to land plague on Weald."
+
+"Are you--friendly to blueskins?" she asked uncertainly.
+
+"Within reason," said Calhoun, "I am a well-wisher to all the human
+race. You're slipping, though. When using the word 'blueskin' you should
+say it uncomfortably, as if it were a word no refined person liked to
+pronounce. You don't. We'll land on Orede tomorrow, by the way. If you
+ever intend to tell me the truth, there's not much time."
+
+She bit her lips. Twice, during the remainder of the day, she faced him
+and opened her mouth as if to speak, and then turned away again. Calhoun
+shrugged. He had fairly definite ideas about her, by now. He carefully
+kept them tentative, but no girl born and raised on Weald would
+willingly go to Orede, with all of Weald believing that a shipload of
+miners preferred death to remaining there. It tied in, like everything
+else that was unpleasant, to blueskins. Nobody from Weald would dream of
+landing on Orede! Not now!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A little before the Med Ship was due to break out from overdrive, the
+girl said very carefully;
+
+"You've been--very kind. I'd like to thank you. I--didn't really believe
+I would--live to get to Orede."
+
+Calhoun raised his eyebrows.
+
+"I--wish I could tell you everything you want to know," she added
+regretfully. "I think you're--really decent. But some things...."
+
+Calhoun said caustically;
+
+"You've told me a great deal. You weren't born on Weald. You weren't
+raised there. The people of Dara--notice that I don't say blueskins,
+though they are--the people of Dara have made at least one space-ship
+since Weald threatened them with extermination. There is probably a new
+food-shortage on Dara now, leading to pure desperation. Most likely it's
+bad enough to make them risk landing on Orede to kill cattle and freeze
+beef to help. They've worked out."
+
+She gasped and sprang to her feet. She snatched out the tiny blaster in
+her pocket. She pointed it waveringly at him.
+
+"I--have to kill you!" she cried desperately. "I--I have to!"
+
+Calhoun reached out. She tugged despairingly at the blaster's trigger.
+Nothing happened. Before she could realize that she hadn't turned off
+the safety, Calhoun twisted the weapon from her fingers. He stepped
+back.
+
+"Good girl!" he said approvingly. "I'll give this back to you when we
+land. And thanks. Thanks very much!"
+
+She stared at him. "Thanks? When I tried to kill you?"
+
+"Of course!" said Calhoun. "I'd made guesses. I couldn't know that they
+were right. When you tried to kill me, you confirmed every one. Now,
+when we land on Orede I'm going to get you to try to put me in touch
+with your friends. It's going to be tricky, because they must be pretty
+well scared about that ship. But it's a highly desirable thing to get
+done!"
+
+He went to the ship's control-board and sat down before it.
+
+"Twenty minutes to break-hour," he observed.
+
+Murgatroyd peered out of his little cubbyhole. His eyes were anxious.
+_Tormals_ are amiable little creatures. During the days in overdrive,
+Calhoun had paid less than the usual amount of attention to Murgatroyd,
+while the girl was fascinating. They'd made friends, awkwardly on the
+girl's part, very pleasantly on Murgatroyd's. But only moments ago there
+had been bitter emotion in the air. Murgatroyd had fled to his cubbyhole
+to escape it. He was distressed. Now that there was silence again, he
+peered out unhappily.
+
+"_Chee?_" he queried plaintively. "_Chee-chee-chee?_"
+
+Calhoun said matter-of-factly;
+
+"It's all right, Murgatroyd. If we aren't blasted as we try to land, we
+should be able to make friends with everybody and get something
+accomplished."
+
+The statement was hopelessly inaccurate.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 3
+
+
+There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoun drove
+the Med Ship to a favorable position for a call. He patiently repeated,
+over and over again, that Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty notified its arrival
+and requested coordinates for landing. There should have been a crisp
+description of the direction from the planet's center at which, a
+certain time so many hours or minutes later, the force-fields of the
+grid would find it convenient to lock onto and lower the Med Ship. But
+the communicator remained silent.
+
+"There is a landing-grid," said Calhoun, frowning, "and if they're using
+it to load fresh meat for Dara, from the herds I'm told about, it should
+be manned. But they don't seem to intend to answer. Maybe they think
+that if they pretend I'm not here I'll go away."
+
+He reflected, and his frown deepened.
+
+"If I didn't know what I do know, I might. So if I land on
+emergency-rockets the blueskins down below may decide that I come from
+Weald. And in that case it would be reasonable to blast me before I
+could land and unload some fighting men. On the other hand, no ship from
+Weald would conceivably land without impassioned assurance that it was
+safe. It would drop bombs." He turned to the girl. "How many Darians
+down below?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"You don't know," said Calhoun, "or won't tell, yet. But they ought to
+be told about the arrival of that ship at Weald, and what Weald thinks
+about it! My guess is that you came to tell them. It isn't likely that
+Dara gets news direct from Weald. Where were you put ashore from Dara,
+when you set out to be a spy?"
+
+Her lips parted to speak. But she compressed them tightly. She shook her
+head again.
+
+"It must have been plenty far away," said Calhoun restlessly. "Your
+people would have built a ship, and made fine forged papers for it, and
+they'd travel so far from this part of space that when they landed
+nobody would think of Dara. They'd use makeup to cover the blue spots,
+but maybe it was so far away that blueskins had never been heard of!"
+
+Her face looked pinched, but she did not reply.
+
+"Then they'd land half a dozen of you, with a supply of makeup for the
+blue patches. And you'd separate, and take ships that went various
+roundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by one, to see what could be
+done there to...." He stopped. "When did you find out positively that
+there wasn't any plague any more?"
+
+She began to grow pale.
+
+"I'm not a mind-reader," said Calhoun. "But it adds up. You're from
+Dara. You've been on Weald. It's practically certain that there are
+other, agents, if you like that word better, on Weald. And there hasn't
+been a plague on Weald so you people aren't carriers of it. But you
+knew it in advance, I think. How'd you learn? Did a ship in some sort of
+trouble land there, on Dara?"
+
+"Y-yes," said the girl. "We wouldn't let it go again. But the people
+didn't catch--they didn't die--they lived--."
+
+She stopped short.
+
+"It's not fair to trap me!" she cried passionately, "It's not fair!"
+
+"I'll stop," said Calhoun.
+
+He turned to the control-board. The Med Ship was only planetary
+diameters from Orede, now, and the electron telescope showed shining
+stars in leisurely motion across its screen. Then a huge, gibbous
+shining shape appeared, and there were irregular patches of that muddy
+color which is sea-bottom, and varicolored areas which were plains and
+forests. Also there were mountains. Calhoun steadied the image and
+squinted at it.
+
+"The mine," he observed, "was found by members of a hunting-party,
+killing wild cattle for sport."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Even a small planet has many millions of square miles of surface, and a
+single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by
+random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport
+would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they
+found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle
+would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be
+on a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would be near the edge of
+mountains, not far from a prairie such as wild cattle would frequent,
+and it would be in a temperate climate. Forested areas could be ruled
+out. And there would be a landing-grid. Handling only one ship at a
+time, it might be a very small grid. It need be only hundreds of yards
+across and less than half a mile high. But its shadow would be
+distinctive.
+
+Calhoun searched among low mountains near unforested prairie in a
+temperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it many-fold, and it was
+the mine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings. There was something
+which cast a long, lacy shadow. The landing-grid.
+
+"But they don't answer our call," observed Calhoun, "so we go down
+unwelcomed."
+
+He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency-rockets boomed. The ship
+plunged planetward.
+
+A long time later it was deep in the planet's atmosphere. The noise of
+its rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforce
+the sound.
+
+"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd," commanded Calhoun. "We may have to
+dodge some ack."
+
+But nothing came up from below. The Med Ship again inverted itself, and
+its rockets pointed toward the planet and poured out pencil-thin,
+blue-white, high-velocity flames. It checked slightly, but continued to
+descend. It was not directly above the grid. It swept downward until
+almost level with the peaks of the mountains in which the mine lay. It
+tilted again, and swept onward over the mountain-tops, and then tilted
+once more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid was
+plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest there be
+opposition.
+
+But there was no sign. Then the rockets bellowed, and the ship slowed
+its forward motion, hovered momentarily, and settled to solidity outside
+the framework of the grid. The grid was small, as Calhoun reasoned. But
+it reached interminably toward the sky.
+
+The rocket cut off. Slender as the flame had been, they'd melted and
+bored thin drill-holes deep into the soil. Molten rock boiled and
+bubbled down below. But there seemed no other sound. There was no other
+motion. There was absolute stillness all around. But when Calhoun
+switched on the outside microphones a faint, sweet melange of
+high-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures hidden under the
+vegetation of the mountainsides.
+
+Calhoun put a blaster in his pocket and stood up.
+
+"We'll see what it looks like outside," he said with a certain grimness.
+"I don't quite believe what the visionscreens show."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Minutes later he stepped down to the ground from the Med Ship's
+exit-port. The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet from what once had
+been a wooden building. In it, ore from the mines was concentrated and
+the useless tailings carried away by a conveyor-belt to make a monstrous
+pile of broken stone. But there was no longer a building. Next to it
+there had been a structure containing an ore-crusher. The massive
+machinery could still be seen, but the structure was fragments. Next to
+that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters of the mine. They also
+were shattered practically to match-sticks.
+
+The look of the ground about the building-sites was simply and purely
+impossible. It was a mass of hoofprints. Cattle by thousands and tens of
+thousands had trampled everything. Cattle had burst in the wooden sides
+of the buildings. Cattle had piled themselves up against the beams
+upholding roofs until the buildings collapsed. Then cattle had gone
+plunging over the wrecked buildings until there was nothing left but
+indescribable chaos. Many, many cattle had died in the crush. There were
+heaps of dead beasts about the metal girders which were the foundation
+of the landing-grid. The air was tainted by the smell of carrion.
+
+The settlement had been destroyed, positively, by stampeded cattle in
+tens or hundreds of thousands charging blindly through and over and upon
+it. Senselessly, they'd trampled each other to horrible shapelessnesses.
+The mine-shaft was not choked, because enormously strong timbers had
+fallen across and blocked it. But everything else was pure destruction.
+
+Calhoun said evenly;
+
+"Clever! Very clever! You can't blame men when beasts stampede! We
+should accept the evidence that some monstrous herd, making its way
+through a mountain pass, somehow went crazy and bolted for the plains
+and this settlement got in the way and it was too bad for the
+settlement. Everything's explained, except the ship that went to Weald.
+A cattle stampede, yes. Anybody can believe that! But there was a
+man-stampede! Men stampeded into the ship as blindly as the cattle
+trampled down this little town. The ship stampeded off into space as
+insanely as the cattle. But a stampede of men _and_ cattle, in the same
+place,--that's a little too much at one time!"
+
+"How," asked Calhoun directly, "do you intend to get in touch with your
+friends here?"
+
+"I--I don't know," she said distressedly. "But if--the ship stays here,
+they're bound to come and see why. Won't they? Or will they?"
+
+"If they're sane, they won't," said Calhoun. "The one undesirable thing,
+here, would be human footprints on top of cattle-tracks. If your friends
+are a meat-getting party from Dara, as I believe, they should cover up
+their tracks, get off-planet as fast as possible, and pray that no signs
+of their former presence are ever discovered. That would be their best
+first move, certainly!"
+
+"What should I do?" she asked helplessly.
+
+"I'm far from sure. At a guess, and for the moment, probably nothing.
+I'll work something out ... I've got the devil of a job before me,
+though. I can't spend too much time here."
+
+"You can--leave me here...."
+
+He grunted and turned away. It was naturally unthinkable that he should
+leave another human being on a supposedly uninhabited planet, with the
+knowledge that it might actually be uninhabited, and the further
+knowledge that any visitors would have the strongest of possible reasons
+to hide themselves away.
+
+He believed that there were Darians here, and the girl in the Med
+ship--so he also believed--was a Darian. But any who might be hiding had
+so much to lose if they were discovered that they might be hundreds or
+even thousands of miles from anywhere a space-ship would normally
+land--if they hadn't fled after the incident of the space-ship's
+departure with its load of doomed passengers.
+
+Considered detachedly, the odds were that there was again a
+food-shortage on Dara. That blueskins, in desperation, had raided or
+were raiding or would raid the cattle-herds of Orede for food to carry
+back to their home planet. That somehow the miners on Orede had found
+that they had blueskin neighbors, and died of the consequences of their
+terror. It was a risky guess to make on such evidence as Calhoun
+considered he had, but no other guess was possible.
+
+If his guess was right, he was under some obligation to do exactly what
+he believed the girl considered her mission, to warn all blueskins that
+Weald would presently try to find them on Orede, when all hell must
+break loose upon Dara for punishment. But if there were men here, he
+couldn't leave a written warning for them in default of friendly
+contact. They might not find it, and a search-party of Wealdians might.
+All he could possibly do was try to make contact and give warning by
+such means as would leave no evidence behind that he'd done so. Weald
+would consider a warning sure proof of blueskin guilt.
+
+It was not satisfactory to be limited to broadcasts which might not be
+picked up, and were unlikely to be acknowledged. But he settled down
+with the communicator to make the attempt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He called first on a GC wave-length and form. It was unlikely that
+blueskins would use general-communication bands to keep in touch with
+each other, but it had to be tried. He broadcast, as broadly tuned as
+possible, and went up and down the GC spectrum, repeating his warning
+painstakingly and listening without hope for a reply. He did find one
+spot on the dial where there was re-radiation of his message, as if from
+a tuned receiver. But he could not get a fix on it, and nobody might be
+listening. He exhausted the normal communication pattern. Then he
+broadcast on old-fashioned amplitude modulation which a modern
+communicator would not pick up at all, and which therefore might be used
+by men in hiding.
+
+He worked for a long time. Then he shrugged and gave it up. He'd
+repeated to absolute tedium the facts that any Darians--blueskins--on
+Orede ought to know. There'd been no answer. And it was all too likely
+that if he'd been received, that those who heard him took his message
+for a trick to discover if there were any hearers.
+
+He clicked off at last and stood up, shaking his head. Suddenly the Med
+Ship seemed empty. Then he saw Murgatroyd staring at the exit-port. The
+inner door of that small airlock was closed. The tell-tale said the
+outer was not locked. Someone had gone out, quietly. The girl. Of
+course. Calhoun said angrily;
+
+"How long ago, Murgatroyd?"
+
+"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd indignantly.
+
+It wasn't an answer, but it showed that Murgatroyd was vexed that he'd
+been left behind. He and the girl were close friends, now. If she'd left
+Murgatroyd in the ship when he wanted to go with her, she wasn't coming
+back.
+
+Calhoun swore. Then he made certain. She was not in the ship. He flipped
+the outside-speaker switch and said curtly into the microphone;
+
+"Coffee! Murgatroyd and I are having coffee. Will you come back,
+please?"
+
+He repeated the call, and repeated it again. Multiplied as his voice was
+by the speakers, she should hear him within a mile. She did not appear.
+He went to a small and inconspicuous closet and armed himself. A Med
+Ship man was not ever expected to fight, but there were blast-rifles
+available for extreme emergency.
+
+When he'd slung a power-pack over his shoulder and reached the airlock,
+there was still no sign of his late stowaway. He stood in the airlock
+door for long minutes, staring angrily about. Almost certainly she
+wouldn't be looking in the mountains for men of Dara come here for
+cattle. He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification to
+search as wide an area down-valley as possible, and then at highest
+power to search the most likely routes.
+
+He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a far-away hillcrest. It was her
+head. It went down below the hilltop.
+
+He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when the _tormal_ was on the
+ground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobody but
+a Med Ship man was at all likely to discover or use.
+
+"She's an idiot!" he told Murgatroyd sourly. "Come along! We've got to
+be idiots too!"
+
+He set out in pursuit.
+
+The girl had a long start. Twice Calhoun came to places where she could
+have chosen either of two ways onward. Each time he had to determine
+which she'd followed. That cost time. Then the mountains ended,
+abruptly, and a vast undulating plain stretched away to the horizon.
+There were at least two large masses and many smaller clumps of what
+could only be animals gathered together. Cattle.
+
+But here the girl was plainly in view. Calhoun increased his stride. He
+began to gain on her. She did not look behind.
+
+Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a complaining tone.
+
+"I should have left you behind," agreed Calhoun dourly, "but there was
+and is a chance I won't get back. You'll have to keep on hiking."
+
+He plodded on. His memory of the terrain around the mining settlement
+told him that there was no definite destination in the girl's mind. But
+she was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost. She'd
+guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on the planet,
+they'd keep the landing-grid under observation. If they saw her leave
+that area and could see that she was alone, they should intercept her to
+find out the meaning of the Med Ship's landing. Then she could identify
+herself as one of them and give them the terribly necessary warning of
+Weald's suspicions.
+
+"But," said Calhoun sourly, "if she's right, they'll have seen me
+marching after her now, which spoils her scheme. And I'd like to help
+it, but the way she's going is too dangerous!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went down into one of the hollows of the uneven plain. He saw a clump
+of a dozen or so cattle a little distance away. The bull looked up and
+snorted. The cows regarded him truculently. Their air was not one of
+bovine tranquility.
+
+He was up the farther hillside and out of sight before the bull worked
+himself up to a charge. Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of the
+items in the data about cattle he'd looked into just the other day. He
+felt himself grow pale.
+
+"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply. "We've got to catch up! Fast! Stay with
+me if you can, but ..." He was jog-trotting as he spoke--"even if you
+get lost I have to hurry!"
+
+He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces. He ran fifty and walked
+fifty. He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground. She came to a full
+stop. He ran. He saw her turn to retrace her steps. He flung to the
+safety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the ground for
+her to hear.
+
+Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him. He plunged on. She
+vanished down into a hollow. Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'd
+just left. Cattle appeared. Four--a dozen--fifteen--twenty. They moved
+ominously in her wake. He saw her again, running frantically over
+another upward swell of the prairie. He let off another blast to guide
+her. He ran on at top speed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind.
+From time to time Murgatroyd called "_Chee-chee-chee!_" in frightened
+pleading not to be abandoned.
+
+More cattle appeared against the horizon. Fifty or a hundred. They came
+after the first clump. The first-seen group of a bull and his harem were
+moving faster, now. The girl fled from them, but it is the instinct of
+beef-cattle on the open range--Calhoun had learned it only two days
+before--to charge any human they find on foot. A mounted man to their
+dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but a human on
+foot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Those in the lead were definitely charging now, with heads bent low. The
+bull charged furiously with shut eyes, as bulls do, but the
+many-times-more-deadly cows charged with their eyes wide open and
+wickedly alert, and with a lumbering speed much greater than the girl
+could manage.
+
+She came up over the last rise, chalky-white and gasping, her hair
+flying, in the last extremity of terror. The nearest of the pursuing
+cattle were within ten yards when Calhoun fired from twenty yards
+beyond. One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck. It went down and
+others crashed into it and swept over it, and more came on. The girl saw
+Calhoun, now, and ran toward him, panting, and he knelt very
+deliberately and began to check the charge by shooting the leading
+animals.
+
+He did not succeed. There were more cattle following the first, and more
+and more behind them. It appeared that all the cattle on the plain
+joined in the blind and senseless charge. The thudding of hooves became
+a mutter and then a rumble and then a growl. Plunging, clumsy figures
+rushed past on either side. But horns and heads heaved up over the mound
+of animals Calhoun had shot. He shot them too. More and more cattle came
+pounding past the rampart of his victims, but always, it seemed, some
+elected to climb the heap of their dead and dying fellows, and Calhoun
+shot and shot.
+
+But he split the herd. The foremost animals had been charging a sighted
+human enemy. Others had followed because it is the instinct of cattle to
+join their running fellows in whatever crazed urgency they feel. There
+was a dense, pounding, horrible mass of running bulls and cows and
+calves; bellowing, wailing, grunting, puffing, raising thick and
+impenetrable clouds of dust which had everything but galloping beasts
+going past on either side.
+
+It lasted for minutes. Then the thunder of hooves diminished. It ended
+abruptly, and Calhoun and the girl were left alone with the gruesome
+pile of animals which had divided the charging herd into two parts. They
+could see the rears of innumerable running animals, stupidly continuing
+the charge--hardly different, now, from a stampede--whose original
+objective none now remembered.
+
+Calhoun thoughtfully touched the barrel of his blast-rifle and winced at
+its scorching heat.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I just realized," he said coldly, "that I don't know your name. What is
+it?"
+
+"M-maril," said the girl. She swallowed. "Th-thank you--."
+
+"Maril," said Calhoun, "you are an idiot! It was half-witted at best to
+go off by yourself! You could have been lost! You could have cost me
+days of hunting for you, days badly needed for more important matters!"
+He stopped and took breath. "You may have spoiled what little chance
+I've got to do something about the plans Weald's already making!"
+
+He said more bitterly still;
+
+"And I had to leave Murgatroyd behind to get to you in time! He was
+right in the path of that charge!"
+
+He turned away from her and said dourly;
+
+"All right! Come on back to the ship. We'll go to Dara. We'd have to,
+anyhow. But Murgatroyd--"
+
+Then he heard a very small sneeze. Out of a rolling wall of
+still-roiling dust, Murgatroyd appeared forlornly. He was dust-covered,
+and draggled, and his tail drooped, and he sneezed again. He moved as if
+he could barely put one paw before another, but at the sight of Calhoun
+he sneezed yet again and said, "_Chee!_" in a disconsolate voice. Then
+he sat down and waited for Calhoun to pick him up.
+
+When Calhoun did so, Murgatroyd clung to him pathetically and said,
+"_Chee-chee!_" and again "_Chee-chee!_" with the intonation of one
+telling of incredible horrors and disasters endured.
+
+Calhoun headed back for the valley, the settlement and the Med Ship.
+Murgatroyd clung to his neck. The girl Maril followed visibly shaken.
+
+Calhoun did not speak to her again. He led the way. A mile back toward
+the mountains, they began to see stragglers from the now-vanished herd.
+A little further, those stragglers began to notice them. And it would
+have been a matter of no moment if they'd been domesticated
+dairy-cattle, but these were range-cattle gone wild. Twice, Calhoun had
+to use his blast-rifle to discourage incipient charges by irritated
+bulls or even more irritated cows. Those with calves darkly suspected
+Calhoun of designs upon their offspring.
+
+It was a relief to enter the valley again. But it was two miles more to
+the landing-grid with the Med Ship beside it and the reek of carrion in
+the air.
+
+They were perhaps two hundred feet from the ship when a blast-rifle
+crashed and its bolt whined past Calhoun so close that he felt the
+monstrous heat. There had been no challenge. There was no warning. There
+was simply a shot which came horribly close to ending Calhoun's career
+in a completely arbitrary fashion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 4
+
+
+Five minutes later Calhoun had located one would-be killer behind a mass
+of splintered planking that once had been a wall. He set the wood afire
+by a blaster-bolt and then viciously sent other bolts all around the man
+it had sheltered when he fled from the flames. He could have killed him
+ten times over, but it was more desirable to open communication. So he
+missed, intentionally.
+
+Maril had cried out that she came from Dara and had word for them, but
+they did not answer. There were three men with heavy-duty blast-rifles.
+One was the one Calhoun had burned out of his hiding-place. That man's
+rifle exploded when the flames hit it. Two remained. One--so Calhoun
+presently discovered--was working his way behind underbrush to a shelf
+from which he could shoot down at Calhoun. Calhoun had dropped into a
+hollow and pulled Maril to cover at the first shot. The second man
+happily planned to get to a point where he could shoot him like a fish
+in a barrel. The third man had fired half a dozen times and then
+disappeared. Calhoun estimated that he intended to get around to the
+rear, in hope there was no protection from that direction for Calhoun.
+It would take some time for him to manage it.
+
+So Calhoun industriously concentrated his fire on the man trying to get
+above him. He was behind a boulder, not too dissimilar to Calhoun's
+breastwork. Calhoun set fire to the brush at the point at which the
+other man aimed. That, then, made his effort useless. Then Calhoun sent
+a dozen bolts at the other man's rocky shield. It heated up. Steam rose
+in a whitish mass and blew directly away from Calhoun. He saw that
+antagonist flee. He saw him so clearly that he was positive that there
+was a patch of blue pigment on the right-hand side of the back of his
+neck.
+
+He grunted and swung to find the third. That man moved through thick
+undergrowth, and Calhoun set it on fire in a neat pattern of spreading
+flames. Evidently, these men had had no training in battle-tactics with
+blast-rifles. The third man also had to get away. He did. But something
+from him arched through the smoke. It fell to the ground directly upwind
+from Calhoun. White smoke puffed up violently.
+
+It was instinct that made Calhoun react as he did. He jerked the girl
+Maril to her feet and rushed her toward the Med Ship. Smoke from the
+flung bomb upwind barely swirled around him and missed Maril altogether.
+Calhoun, though, got a whiff of something strange, not scorched or
+burning vegetation at all. He ceased to breathe and plunged onward. In
+clear air he emptied his lungs and refilled them. They were then halfway
+to the ship, with Murgatroyd prancing on ahead.
+
+But then Calhoun's heart began to pound furiously. His muscles twitched
+and tense. He felt extraordinary symptoms like an extreme of agitation.
+Calhoun was familiar enough with tear-gas, used by police on some
+planets. But this was different and worse. Even as he helped and urged
+Maril onward, he automatically considered his sensations, and had it.
+Panic gas! Police did not use it because panic is worse than rioting.
+Calhoun felt all the physical symptoms of fear and of gibbering terror.
+A man whose mind yields to terror experiences certain physical
+sensations, wildly beating heart, tensed and twitching muscles, and a
+frantic impulse to convulsive action. A man in whom those physical
+sensations are induced by other means will--ordinarily--find his mind
+yielding to terror.
+
+Calhoun couldn't combat his feelings, but his clinical attitude enabled
+him to act despite them. The three from Weald reached the base of the
+Med Ship. One of their enemies had lost his rifle and need not be
+counted. Another had fled from flames and might be ignored for some
+moments, anyhow. But a blast-bolt struck the ship's metal hull only feet
+from Calhoun, and he whipped around to the other side and let loose a
+staccato of fire which emptied the rifle of all its charges.
+
+Then he opened the airlock door, hating the fact that he shook and
+trembled. He urged the girl and Murgatroyd in. He slammed the outer
+airlock door just as another blaster-bolt hit.
+
+"They--they don't realize," said Maril desperately. "If they only
+knew--."
+
+"Talk to them, if you like," said Calhoun. His teeth chattered and he
+raged, because the symptom was of terror he denied.
+
+He pushed a button on the control-board. He pointed to a microphone. He
+got at an oxygen-bottle and inhaled deeply. Oxygen, obviously, should be
+an antidote for panic, since the symptoms of terror act to increase the
+oxygenation of the blood-stream and muscles, and to make superhuman
+exertion possible if necessary. Breathing ninety-five per cent oxygen
+produced the effect the terror-inspiring gas strove for, so his heart
+slowed nearly to normal and his body relaxed. He held out his hand and
+it did not tremble.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He turned to Maril. She hadn't spoken into the mike yet.
+
+"They--may not be from Dara!" she said shakily. "I just thought! They
+could be somebody else--maybe criminals who planned to raid the mine for
+a shipload of its ore ..."
+
+"Nonsense!" said Calhoun. "I saw one of them clearly enough to be sure.
+But they're skeptical characters. I'm afraid there may be more on the
+way here wherever they keep themselves. Anyhow, now we know some of them
+are in hearing! I'll take advantage of that and we'll go on."
+
+He took the microphone. Instants later his voice boomed in the stillness
+outside the ship, cutting through the thin shrill of invisible small
+creatures.
+
+"This is the Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty," said Calhoun's voice, amplified
+to a shout. "I left Weald four days ago, one day after the cargo-ship
+from here arrived with everybody on board dead. On Weald they don't know
+how it happened, but they suspect blueskins. Sooner or later they'll
+search here. Get away! Cover up your tracks! Hide all signs that you've
+ever been here! Get the hell away, fast! One more warning! There's talk
+of fusion-bombing Dara. They're scared! If they find your
+traces, they'll be more scared still! So cover up your tracks
+and--get--away--from--here!"
+
+The many-times-multiplied voice rolled and echoed among the hills. But
+it was very clear. Where it could be heard it could be understood, and
+it could be heard for miles.
+
+But there was no response to it. Calhoun waited a reasonable time. Then
+he shrugged and seated himself at the control-board.
+
+"It isn't easy," he observed, "to persuade desperate men that they've
+out-smarted themselves! Hold hard, Murgatroyd!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The rockets bellowed. Then there was a tremendous noise to end all
+noises, and the ship began to climb. It sped up and up and up. By the
+time it was out of atmosphere it had velocity enough to coast to clear
+space and Calhoun cut the rockets altogether. He busied himself with
+those astrogational chores which began with orienting oneself to
+galactic directions after leaving a planet which rotates at its own
+individual speed. Then one computes the overdrive course to another
+planet, from the respective coordinates of the world one is leaving and
+the one one aims for. Then,--in this case at any rate--there was the
+very finicky task of picking out a fourth-magnitude star of whose
+planets one was his destination. He aimed for it with ultra-fine
+precision.
+
+"Overdrive coming," he said presently. "Hold on!"
+
+Space reeled. There was nausea and giddiness and a horrible sensation of
+falling in a wildly unlikely spiral. Then stillness, and solidity, and
+the blackness of the Pit outside the Med Ship. The little craft was in
+overdrive again.
+
+After a long while, the girl Maril said uneasily.
+
+"I don't know what you plan now--."
+
+"I'm going to Dara," said Calhoun. "On Orede I tried to get the
+blueskins there to get going, fast. Maybe I succeeded. I don't know. But
+this thing's been mishandled! Even if there's a famine, people shouldn't
+do things out of desperation!"
+
+"I know now that I was--very foolish--."
+
+"Forget it," commanded Calhoun. "I wasn't talking about you. Here I run
+into a situation that the Med Service should have caught and cleaned up
+generations ago! But it's not only a Med Service obligation, it's a
+current mess! Before I could begin to get at the basic problem, those
+idiots on Orede--. It'd happened before I reached Weald! An emotional
+explosion triggered by a ship full of dead men that nobody intended to
+kill."
+
+Maril shook her head.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Those Darian characters," said Calhoun annoyedly, "shouldn't have gone
+to Orede in the first place. If they went there, they should at least
+have stayed on a continent where there were no people from Weald digging
+a mine and hunting cattle for sport on their off days! They could be
+spotted! I believe they were! And again, if it had been a long way from
+the mine installation, they could probably have wiped out the people who
+sighted them before they could get back with the news! But it looks like
+miners saw men hunting, and got close enough to see they were blueskins,
+and then got back to the mine with the news!"
+
+She waited for him to explain.
+
+"I know I'm guessing, but it fits!" he said distastefully. "So something
+had to be done. Either the mining settlement had to be wiped out or the
+story that blueskins were on Orede had to be discredited. The blueskins
+tried for both. They used panic-gas on a herd of cattle and it made them
+crazy and they charged the settlement like the four-footed lunatics they
+are! And the blueskins used panic-gas on the settlement itself as the
+cattle went through. It should have settled the whole business nicely.
+After it was over every man in the settlement would believe he'd been
+out of his head for a while, and he'd have the crazy state of the
+settlement to think about, and he wouldn't be sure of what he'd seen or
+heard beforehand. They might try to verify the blueskin story later, but
+they wouldn't believe anything certainly! It should have worked!"
+
+Again she waited. So Calhoun said very wrily indeed;
+
+"Unfortunately, when the miners panicked, they stampeded into the ship.
+Also unfortunately, panic-gas got into the ship with them. So they
+stayed panicked while the astrogator--in panic!--took off and headed for
+Weald and threw on the overdrive--which would be set for Weald
+anyhow--because that would be the fastest way to run away from whatever
+he imagined he feared. But he and all the men on the ship were still
+crazy with panic from the gas they were re-breathing until they died!"
+
+Silence. After a long interval, Maril asked;
+
+"You don't think the--Darians intended to kill?"
+
+"I think they were stupid!" said Calhoun angrily. "Somebody's always
+urging the police to use panic-gas in case of public tumult. But it's
+too dangerous. Nobody knows what one man will do in a panic. Take a
+hundred or two or three and panic them all, and there's no limit to
+their craziness! The whole thing was handled wrong!"
+
+"But you don't blame them?"
+
+"For being stupid, yes," said Calhoun fretfully. "But if I'd been in
+their place, perhaps ..."
+
+"Where were you born?" asked Maril suddenly.
+
+Calhoun jerked his head around. He said;
+
+"No! Not where you're guessing--or hoping. Not on Dara. Just because I
+act as if Darians were human doesn't mean I have to be one! I'm a Med
+Service man, and I'm acting as I think I should." His tone became
+exasperated. "Dammit, I'm supposed to deal with health situations,
+actual and possible causes of human deaths! And if Weald thinks it finds
+proof that blueskins are in space again and caused the death of
+Wealdians it won't be healthy! They're halfway set anyhow to drop
+fusion-bombs on Dara to wipe it out!"
+
+Maril said fiercely;
+
+"They might as well drop bombs. It'll be quicker than starvation, at
+least!"
+
+Calhoun looked at her more exasperatedly than before.
+
+"It is a crop failure again?" he demanded. When she nodded he said
+bitterly; "Famine conditions already?" When she nodded again he said
+drearily; "And of course famine is the great-grandfather of health
+problems! And that's right in my lap with all the rest!"
+
+He stood up. Then he sat down again.
+
+"I'm tired!" he said flatly. "I'd like to get some sleep."
+
+Maril understood. She picked up a book and went into the other cabin.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Alone in the control compartment, he tried to relax, but it was not
+possible. He flung himself into a comfortable chair and considered the
+situation of the people of the planet Dara. Those people were marked by
+patches of blue pigment as an inherited consequence of a plague of three
+generations past. Dara was a planet of pariahs, excluded from the human
+race by those who had been conditioned to fear them.
+
+And now there was famine on Dara for the second time, and they were of
+no mind to starve quietly. There was food on the planet Orede, monstrous
+herds of cattle without owners. It was natural enough for Darians to
+build a ship or ships and try to bring food back to its starving people.
+But that desperately necessary enterprise had now roused Weald to a
+frenzy of apprehension. Weald was if possible more hysterically afraid
+of blueskins than ever before, and even more implacably the enemy of the
+starving planet's population. Weald itself throve and prospered.
+Ironically, it had such an excess of foodstuffs that it stored them in
+unneeded space-ships in orbits about itself. Hundreds of thousands of
+tons of grain circled Weald in sealed-tight hulks, while the people of
+Dara starved and only dared try to steal--it could be called
+stealing--some of the innumerable wild cattle of Orede.
+
+The blueskins on Orede could not trust Calhoun, so they pretended not to
+hear--or maybe they didn't hear. They'd been abandoned and betrayed by
+all of humanity beyond their world. They'd been threatened and oppressed
+by guardships in orbit about them, ready to shoot down any space-craft
+they might send aloft.
+
+So Calhoun pondered ...
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A long time later Calhoun heard small sounds which were not normal on a
+Med Ship in overdrive. They were not part of the random noises carefully
+generated to keep the silence of the ship endurable. Calhoun raised his
+head. He listened sharply. No sound could come from outside.
+
+He knocked on the door of the sleeping-cabin. The noises stopped
+instantly.
+
+"Come out," he commanded through the door.
+
+"I'm--I'm all right," said Maril's voice. But it was not quite steady.
+She paused. "I was just having a bad dream."
+
+"I wish," said Calhoun, "that you'd tell me the truth occasionally! Come
+out, please!"
+
+There were stirrings. After a little the door opened and Maril appeared.
+She looked as if she'd been crying. She said quickly;
+
+"I probably look queer, but it's because I was asleep."
+
+"To the contrary," said Calhoun, fuming, "you've been lying awake
+crying. I don't know why. I've been out here wishing I could sleep,
+because I'm frustrated. But since you aren't asleep maybe you can help
+me with my job. I've figured some things out. For some others I need
+facts. How about it?"
+
+She swallowed.
+
+"I'll try."
+
+"Coffee?" he asked.
+
+Murgatroyd popped his head out of his miniature sleeping-cabin.
+
+"_Chee?_" he asked interestedly.
+
+"Go back to sleep!" snapped Calhoun.
+
+He began to pace back and forth.
+
+"I need to know something about the pigment patches," he said jerkily.
+"Maybe it sounds crazy to think of such things now. First things first,
+you know. But that is a first thing! So long as Darians don't look like
+the people of other worlds, they'll be considered different. If they
+look repulsive, they'll be thought of as evil.... Tell me about those
+patches. They're different-sized and different-shaped and they appear in
+different places. You've none on your face or hands, anyhow."
+
+"I haven't any at all," said the girl reservedly.
+
+"I thought--"
+
+"Not everybody," she said defensively. "Nearly, yes. But not all. Some
+people don't have them. Some people are born with bluish splotches on
+their skin, but they fade out while they're children. When they grow up
+they're just like--the people of Weald or any other world. And their
+children never have them."
+
+Calhoun stared.
+
+"You couldn't possibly be proved to be a Darian, then?"
+
+She shook her head. Calhoun remembered, and started the coffee-maker.
+
+"When you left Dara," he said, "You were carried a long, long way, to
+some planet where they'd practically never heard of Dara, and where the
+name meant nothing. You could have settled there, or anywhere else and
+forgotten about Dara. But you didn't. Why not, since you're not a
+blueskin?"
+
+"But I am!" she said fiercely. "My parents, my brothers and sisters, and
+Korvan--."
+
+Then she bit her lip. Calhoun took note but did not comment on the name
+that she had mentioned.
+
+"Then your parents had the splotches fade, so you never had them," he
+said absorbedly. "Something like that happened on Tralee, once! There's
+a virus--a whole group of virus particles! Normally we humans are immune
+to them. One has to be in terrifically bad physical condition for them
+to take hold and produce whatever effects they do. But once they're
+established they're passed on from mother to child.... And when they die
+out it's during childhood, too!"
+
+He poured coffee for the two of them. As usual, Murgatroyd swung down to
+the floor and said impatiently;
+
+"_Chee! Chee! Chee!_"
+
+Calhoun absently filled Murgatroyd's tiny cup and handed it to him.
+
+"But this is marvellous!" he said exuberantly. "The blue patches
+appeared after the plague, didn't they? After people recovered--when
+they recovered?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Maril stared at him. His mind was filled with strictly professional
+considerations. He was not talking to her as a person. She was purely a
+source of information.
+
+"So I'm told," said Maril reservedly. "Are there any more humiliating
+questions you want to ask?"
+
+He gaped at her. Then he said ruefully;
+
+"I'm stupid, Maril, but you're touchy. There's nothing personal."
+
+"There is to me!" she said fiercely. "I was born among blueskins, and
+they're of my blood, and they're hated and I'd have been killed on Weald
+if I'd been known as--what I am! And there's Korvan, who arranged for me
+to be sent away as a spy and advised me to do just what you
+said,--abandon my home world and everybody I care about! Including him!
+It's personal to me!"
+
+Calhoun wrinkled his forehead helplessly.
+
+"I'm sorry," he repeated, "Drink your coffee!"
+
+"I don't want it," she said bitterly. "I'd like to die!"
+
+"If you stay around where I am," Calhoun told her, "you may get your
+wish. All right. There'll be no more questions, I promise."
+
+She turned and moved toward the door to the sleeping-cabin. Calhoun
+looked after her.
+
+"Maril," he called out to her.
+
+"What?"
+
+"Why were you crying?"
+
+"You wouldn't understand," she said evenly.
+
+Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He was a
+professional man. In his profession he was not incompetent. But there is
+no profession in which a really competent man tries to understand women.
+Calhoun annoyedly had to let fate or chance or disaster take care of
+Maril's personal problems. He had larger matters to cope with.
+
+But he had something to work on, now. He hunted busily in the reference
+tapes. He came up with an explicit collection of information on exactly
+the subject he needed. He left the control-room to go down into the
+storage areas of the Med Ship's hull. He found an ultra-frigid storage
+box, whose contents were kept at the temperature of liquid air. He
+donned thick gloves, used a special set of tongs, and extracted a tiny
+block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of glass was embedded. It
+frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage-box was closed
+again the block was covered with a thick and opaque coating of frozen
+moisture.
+
+He went back to the control-room and pulled down the panel which made
+available a small-scale but surprisingly adequate biological laboratory.
+He set the plastic block in a container which would raise it very, very
+gradually to a specific temperature and hold it there. It was,
+obviously, a living culture from which any imaginable quantity of the
+same culture could be bred. Calhoun set the apparatus with great
+exactitude.
+
+"This," he told Murgatroyd, "may be a good day's work. Now I think I can
+rest."
+
+Then, for a long while, there was no sound or movement in the Med Ship.
+The girl Maril may have slept, or maybe not. Calhoun lay relaxed in a
+chair which at the touch of a button became the most comfortable of
+sleeping-places. Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his tail curled
+over his nose. There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable
+murmurings now and again. They kept the feeling of life alive in the
+ship. But for such infinitesimal stirrings of sound--carefully recorded
+for this exact purpose--the feel of the ship would have been that of a
+tomb.
+
+But it was quite otherwise when another ship-day began with the taped
+sounds of morning activities as faint as echoes but nevertheless
+establishing an atmosphere of their own.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Calhoun examined the plastic block and its contents. He read the
+instruments which had cared for it while he slept. He put the block--no
+longer frosted--in the culture-microscope and saw its enclosed,
+infinitesimal particles of life in the process of multiplying on the
+food that had been frozen with them when they were reduced to the spore
+condition. He beamed. He replaced the block in the incubation oven and
+faced the day cheerfully.
+
+Maril greeted him with great reserve. They breakfasted.
+
+"I've been thinking," said Maril evenly. "I think I can get you a
+hearing for--whatever ideas you may have to help Dara."
+
+"Kind of you," murmured Calhoun. "May I ask whose influence you'll
+exert?"
+
+"There's a man," said Maril reservedly, "who--thinks a great deal of me.
+I don't know his present official position, but he was certain to become
+prominent. I'll tell him how you've acted up to now, and your attitude,
+and of course that you're Med Service. He'll be glad to help you, I'm
+sure."
+
+"Splendid!" said Calhoun, nodding. "That will be Korvan."
+
+She started.
+
+"How did you know?"
+
+"Intuition," said Calhoun drily. "All right. I'll count on him."
+
+But he did not. He worked in the tiny biological lab all that ship-day
+and all the next. The girl remained quiet.
+
+On the ship-day after, the time for breakfast approached. And while the
+ship was practically a world all by itself, it was easy to look forward
+with confidence to the future. But when contact and--in a
+fashion--conflict with other and larger worlds loomed nearer, prospects
+seemed less bright. Calhoun had definite plans, now, but there were so
+many ways in which they could be frustrated! Weald's political leaders
+could not oppose hysterical demands for action against blueskins, after
+a deathship arrived with no signs whatever of blueskins as responsible
+for its cargo of corpses. It was certain that a starving Dara would tend
+to desperate and fatal measures against hereditary enemies.
+
+Calhoun sat down at the control-board and watched the clock.
+
+"I've got things lined up," he told Maril wrily, "if only they work out.
+_If_ I can make somebody on Dara listen and follow my advice and _if_
+Weald doesn't get ideas and isn't doing what I suspect it is, maybe
+something can be done."
+
+"I'm sure you'll do your best," said Maril politely.
+
+Calhoun managed to grin. He watched the ship-clock. There was no
+sensation attached to overdrive travel except at the beginning and the
+end. It was now time for the end. He might find that absolutely anything
+had happened while he made plans which would immediately be seen to be
+hopeless. Weald could have sent ships to Dara, or Dara might be in such
+a state of desperation that ...
+
+As it turned out, Dara was desperate. The Med Ship came out nearly a
+light-month from the sun about which the planet Dara revolved. Calhoun
+went into a short hop toward it. Then Dara was on the other side of the
+blazing yellow star. It took time to reach it. He called down,
+identifying himself and the ship and asking for coordinates so his ship
+could be brought to ground. There was confusion, as if the request were
+so unusual that the answers were not ready. The grid, too, was on the
+planet's night side. Presently the ship was locked onto by the grid's
+force-fields. It went downward without incident.
+
+Calhoun saw that Maril sat tensely, twisting her fingers within each
+other, until the ship actually touched ground.
+
+Then he opened the exit-port, and faced armed men in the darkness, with
+blast-rifles trained on him. There was a portable cannon trained on the
+Med Ship itself.
+
+"Come out!" rasped a voice. "If you try anything you get blasted! Your
+ship and its contents are seized by the planetary government!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 5
+
+
+It seemed that the smell of hunger was in the air. The armed men were
+cadaverous. Lights came on, and stark, harsh shadows lay black upon the
+ground. Calhoun's captors were uniformed, but the uniforms hung loosely
+upon them. Where the lights struck upon their faces, their cheeks were
+hollow. They were emaciated. And there were the splotches of pigment of
+which Calhoun had heard. The leader of the truculent group was blue,
+except for two fingers which in the glaring illumination seemed whiter
+than white.
+
+"Out!" said that man savagely. "We're taking over your stock of food.
+You'll get your share of it, like everybody else, but--out!"
+
+Maril spoke over Calhoun's shoulder. She uttered a cryptic sentence or
+two. It should have amounted to identification, but there was skepticism
+in the the armed party.
+
+"Oh, you're one of us, eh?" said the guard-leader sardonically. "You'll
+have a chance to prove that! Come out of there!"
+
+Calhoun spoke abruptly;
+
+"This is a Med Ship," he said. "There are medicines and bacterial
+cultures, inside it. They shouldn't be meddled with. Here on Dara you've
+had enough of plagues!"
+
+The man with the blue hand said as sardonically as before;
+
+"I said the government was taking over your ship! It won't be looted.
+But you're not taking a full cargo of food away! In fact, it's not
+likely you're leaving!"
+
+"I want to speak to someone in authority," snapped Calhoun. "We've just
+come from Weald." He felt bristling hatred all about him as he named
+Weald. "There's tumult there. They're talking about dropping fusion
+bombs here. It's important that I talk to somebody with the authority to
+take a few sensible precautions!"
+
+He descended to the ground. There was a panicky "_Chee! Chee!_" from
+behind him, and Murgatroyd came dashing to swarm up his body and cling
+apprehensively to his neck.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"A _tormal,_" said Calhoun. "He's not a pet. Your medical men will know
+something about him. This is a Med Ship and I'm a Med Ship man, and he's
+an important member of the crew. He's a Med Ship _tormal_ and he stays
+with me!"
+
+The man with the blue hand said harshly;
+
+"There's somebody waiting to ask you questions. Here!"
+
+A ground-car came rolling out from the side of the landing-grid
+enclosure. The ground-car ran on wheels, and wheels were not much used
+on modern worlds. Dara was behind the times in more ways than one.
+
+"This car will take you to Defense and you can tell them anything you
+want. But don't try to sneak back in this ship! It'll be guarded!"
+
+The ground-car was enclosed, with room for a driver and the three from
+the Med Ship. But armed men festooned themselves about its exterior and
+it went bumping and rolling to the massive ground-layer girders of the
+grid. It rolled out under them and there was paved highway. It picked up
+speed.
+
+There were buildings on either side of the road, but few showed lights.
+This was night-time, and the men at the landing-grid had set a pattern
+of hunger, so that the silence and the dark buildings did not seem a
+sign of tranquility and sleep, but of exhaustion and despair. The
+highway lamps were few, by comparison with other inhabited worlds, and
+the ground-car needed lights of its own to guide its driver over a paved
+surface that needed repair. By those moving lights other depressing
+things could be seen. Untidiness. Buildings not kept up to perfection.
+Evidences of apathy. The road hadn't been cleaned lately. There was
+litter here and there.
+
+Even the fact that there were no stars added to the feeling of
+wretchedness and gloom and--ultimately--of hunger.
+
+Maril spoke nervously to the driver.
+
+"The famine isn't any better?"
+
+He moved his head in negation, but did not speak.
+
+"I left--two years ago," said Maril. "It was just beginning then.
+Rationing hadn't started then--."
+
+The driver said evenly;
+
+"There's rationing now!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The car went on and on. A vast open space appeared ahead. Lights about
+its perimeter seemed few and pale.
+
+"E-everything seems--worse. Even the lights."
+
+"Using all the power," said the driver, "to warm up ground to grow crops
+where it ought to be winter. Not doing too well, either."
+
+Calhoun knew, somehow, that Maril moistened her lips.
+
+"I--was sent," she explained to the driver, "to go ashore on Trent and
+then make my way to Weald. I--mailed reports of what I found out back to
+Trent. Somebody got them back to here whenever--it was possible."
+
+The driver said;
+
+"Everybody knows the man on Trent disappeared. Maybe he got caught,
+maybe somebody saw him without makeup. Or maybe he just quit being one
+of us. What's the difference? No use!"
+
+Calhoun found himself wincing a little. The driver was not angry. He was
+hopeless. But men should not despair. They shouldn't accept hostility
+from those about them as a device of fate for their destruction. They
+shouldn't ...
+
+Maril said quickly to him;
+
+"You understand? Dara's a heavy-metals planet. There aren't many light
+elements in our soil. Potassium is scarce. So our ground isn't very
+fertile. Before the Plague we traded heavy metals and manufactures for
+imports of food and potash. But since the Plague we've had no off-planet
+commerce. We've been--quarantined."
+
+"I gathered as much," said Calhoun. "It was up to Med Service to see
+that that didn't happen. It's up to Med Service now to see that it
+stops."
+
+"Too late now for anything," said the driver, "whatever Med Service may
+be! They're talking about cutting down our population so there'll be
+food enough for some to live. There are two questions about it: who's to
+be kept alive and why."
+
+The ground-car aimed now for a cluster of faintly brighter lights on the
+far side of the great open space. They enlarged as they grew nearer.
+Maril said hesitantly;
+
+"There was someone--Korvan--" Calhoun didn't catch the rest of the name,
+Maril said hesitantly; "He was working on food-plants. I--thought he
+might accomplish something ..."
+
+The driver said caustically;
+
+"Sure! Everybody's heard about him! He came up with a wonderful thing!
+He and his outfit worked out a way to process weeds so they can be
+eaten. And they can. You can fill your belly and not feel hungry, but
+it's like eating hay. You starve just the same. He's still working. Head
+of a government division."
+
+The ground-car passed through a gate. It stopped before a lighted door.
+The armed men hanging to its outside dropped off. They watched Calhoun
+closely as he stepped out with Murgatroyd riding on his shoulder.
+
+Minutes later they faced a hastily-summoned group of officials of the
+Darian government. For a ship to land on Dara was so remarkable an event
+that it called practically for a cabinet meeting. And Calhoun noted that
+they were no better fed than the guards at the space-port.
+
+They regarded Calhoun and Maril with oddly burning eyes. It was, of
+course, because the two of them showed no signs of hunger. They
+obviously had not been on short rations.
+
+"My name is Calhoun," said Calhoun briskly. "I've the usual Med Service
+credentials. Now ..."
+
+He did not wait to be questioned. He told them of the appalling state of
+things in the Twelfth Sector of the Med Service, so that men had been
+borrowed from other sectors to remedy the intolerable, and he was one of
+them. He told of his arrival at Weald and what had happened there, from
+the excessively cautious insistence that he prove he was not a Darian,
+to the arrival of the death-ship from Orede. He was giving them the news
+affecting them, as they had not heard it before.
+
+He went on to tell of his stop at Orede and his purpose, and his
+encounter with the men he found there. When he finished there was
+silence. He broke it.
+
+"Now," he said, "Maril's an agent of yours. She can add to what I've
+told you. I'm Med Service. I have a job to do here to repair what wasn't
+done before. I should make a planetary health inspection and make
+recommendations for the improvement of the state of things. I'll be glad
+if you'll arrange for me to talk to your health officials. Things look
+bad, and something should be done."
+
+Someone laughed without mirth.
+
+"What will you recommend for long-continued undernourishment?" he asked
+derisively. "That's our health problem!"
+
+"I recommend food," said Calhoun.
+
+"Where'll you fill the prescription?"
+
+"I've the answer to that, too," said Calhoun curtly. "I'll want to talk
+to any space-pilots you've got. Get your astrogators together and I
+think they'll approve my idea."
+
+The silence was totally skeptical.
+
+"Orede ..."
+
+"Not Orede," said Calhoun. "Weald will be hunting that planet over for
+Darians. If they find any, they'll drop bombs here."
+
+"Our only space-pilots," said a tall man, presently, "are on Orede now.
+If you've told the truth, they'll probably head back because of your
+warning. They should bring meat."
+
+His mouth worked peculiarly, and Calhoun knew that it was at the thought
+of food.
+
+"Which," said another man sharply, "goes to the hospitals! I haven't
+tasted meat in two years!"
+
+"Nobody has," growled another man still. "But here's this man Calhoun.
+I'm not convinced he can work magic, but we can find out if he lies. Put
+a guard on his ship. Otherwise let our health men give him his head.
+They'll find out if he's from this Medical Service he tells of! And this
+Maril--"
+
+"I--can be identified," said Maril. "I was sent to gather information
+and sent it in secret writing to one of us on Trent. I have a family
+here. They'll know me! And I--there was someone who was working on
+foods, and I believe he--made it possible to use--all sorts of
+vegetation for food. He will identify me."
+
+Someone laughed harshly.
+
+"Oh, yes!" said a man with a blue forehead. "He's a valuable man! Within
+the year he's come up with a way to make his weeds taste like any food
+one chooses. If we decide to cut our population, we'll simply give the
+people to be eliminated all they want to eat of his products. They'll
+not be hungry. They'll be quite happy. But they'll die for lack of
+nourishment. He's volunteered to prove it painless by going through it
+himself!"
+
+Maril swallowed.
+
+"I'd like to see him," she repeated. "And my family."
+
+Some of the blue-splotched men turned away. A broad-shouldered man said
+bluntly;
+
+"Don't look for them to be glad to see you. And you'd better not show
+yourself in public. You've been well fed. You'll be hated for that."
+
+Maril began to cry. Murgatroyd said bewilderedly;
+
+"_Chee! Chee!_"
+
+Calhoun held him close. There was confusion. And Calhoun found the
+Minister of Health at hand--he looked most harried of all the officials
+gathered to question Calhoun--and proposed that he get a look at the
+hospital situation right away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It wasn't practical. With all the population on half rations or less,
+when night came people needed to sleep. Most people, indeed, slept as
+many hours out of the traditional twenty-four as they could manage. It
+was much more pleasant to sleep than to be awake and constantly nagged
+at by continued hunger. And there was the matter of simple decency.
+Continuous gnawing hunger had an embittering effect upon everyone.
+Quarrelsomeness was a common experience. And people who would normally
+be the leaders of opinion felt shame because they were obsessed by
+thoughts of food. It was best when people slept.
+
+Still, Calhoun was in the hospitals by daybreak. What he found moved him
+to savage anger. There were too many sick children. In every case
+undernourishment contributed to their sickness. And there was not enough
+food to make them well. Doctors and nurses denied themselves food to
+spare it for their patients.
+
+Calhoun brought out hormones and enzymes and medicaments from the Med
+Ship while the guard in the ship looked on. He demonstrated the
+processes of synthesis and autocatalysis that enabled such small samples
+to be multiplied indefinitely. He was annoyed by a clamorous appetite.
+There were some doctors who ignored the irony of medical techniques
+being taught to cure non-nutritional disease, when everybody was
+half-fed, or less. They approved of Calhoun. They even approved of
+Murgatroyd when Calhoun explained his function.
+
+He was, of course, a Med Service _tormal_, and _tormals_ were creatures
+of talent. They'd originally been found on a planet in the Deneb area,
+and they were engaging and friendly small animals, but the remarkable
+fact about them was that they couldn't contract any disease. Not any.
+They had a built-in, explosive reaction to bacterial and viral toxins,
+and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism discovered to which a
+_tormal_ could not more or less immediately develop antibody-resistance.
+So that in interstellar medicine _tormals_ were priceless. Let
+Murgatroyd be infected with however localized, however specialized an
+inimical organism, and presently some highly valuable defensive
+substance could be isolated from his blood and he'd remain in his usual
+exuberant good health. When the antibody was analyzed by those
+techniques of microanalysis the Service had developed,--why--that was
+that. The antibody could be synthesized and one could attack any
+epidemic with confidence.
+
+The tragedy for Dara was, of course, that no Med Ship had come there,
+three generations ago, when the Dara plague raged. Worse, after the
+plague Weald was able to exert pressure which only a criminally
+incompetent Med Service director would have permitted. But criminal
+incompetence and its consequences was what Calhoun had been loaned to
+Sector Twelve to help remedy.
+
+He was not at ease, though. No ship arrived from Orede to bear out his
+account of an attempt to get that lonely world evacuated before Weald
+discovered it had blueskins on it. Maril had vanished, to visit or
+return to her family, or perhaps to consult with the mysterious Korvan
+who'd arranged for her to leave Dara to be a spy, and had advised her
+simply to make a new life somewhere else, abandoning a famine-ridden,
+despised, and outcast world. Calhoun had learned of two achievements
+the same Korvan had made for his world. Neither was remarkably
+constructive. He'd offered to prove the value of the second by dying of
+it. Which might make him a very admirable character, or he could have a
+passion for martyrdom,--which is much more common than most people
+think. In two days Calhoun was irritable enough from unaccustomed hunger
+to suspect the worst of him.
+
+And there was Weald to worry about. Weald was hysterically resolved to
+end what it considered the blueskin menace for once and for all. There
+were parallels to such unreasoning frenzy even in the ancient history of
+Earth. A word still remained in the dictionaries referring to it.
+Genocide.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile Calhoun worked doggedly; in the hospitals while the patients
+were awake and in the Med Ship--under guard--afterward. He had hunger
+cramps now, but he tested a plastic cube with a thriving biological
+culture in it. He worked at increasing his store of it. He'd snipped
+samples of pigmented skin from dead patients in the hospitals, and
+examined the pigmented areas, and very, very painstakingly verified a
+theory. It took an electron microscope to do it, but he found a virus in
+the blue patches which matched the type discovered on Tralee. The Tralee
+viruses had effects which were passed on from mother to child, and
+heredity had been charged with the observed results of quasi-living
+viral particles. And then Calhoun very, very carefully introduced into a
+virus culture the material he had been growing in a plastic cube. He
+watched what happened.
+
+He was satisfied, so much so that immediately afterward he barely
+managed to stagger off to bed.
+
+That night the ship from Orede came in, packed with frozen bloody
+carcasses of cattle. Calhoun knew nothing of it. But next morning Maril
+came back. There were shadows under her eyes and her expression was of
+someone who has lost everything that had meaning in her life.
+
+"I'm all right," she insisted, when Calhoun commented. "I've been
+visiting my family. I've seen--Korvan. I'm quite all right."
+
+"You haven't eaten any better than I have," Calhoun observed.
+
+"I--couldn't!" admitted Maril. "My sisters--my little sisters--so
+thin.... There's rationing for everybody and it's all efficiently
+arranged. They even had rations for me. But I couldn't eat! I--gave most
+of my food to my sisters and they--squabbled over it!"
+
+Calhoun said nothing. There was nothing to say. Then she said in a no
+less desolate tone;
+
+"Korvan said I was foolish to come back."
+
+"He could be right," said Calhoun.
+
+"But I had to!" protested Maril. "Because I--I've been eating all I
+wanted to, on Weald and in the ship, and I'm ashamed because they're
+half-starved and I'm not. And when you see what hunger does to them ...
+It's terrible to be half-starved and not able to think of anything but
+food!"
+
+"I hope," said Calhoun, "to do something about that. If I can get hold
+of an astrogator or two."
+
+"The--ship that was on Orede came in during the night," Maril told him
+shakily. "It was loaded with frozen meat, but one ship-load's not enough
+to make a difference on a whole planet! And if Weald hunts for us on
+Orede, we daren't go back for more meat."
+
+She said abruptly;
+
+"There are some prisoners. They were miners. They were crowded out of
+the ship. The Darians who'd stampeded the cattle took them prisoners.
+They had to!"
+
+"True," said Calhoun. "It wouldn't have been wise to leave Wealdians
+around on Orede with their throats cut. Or living, either, to tell about
+a rumor of blueskins. Even if their throats will be cut now. Is that the
+program?"
+
+Maril shivered.
+
+"No ... They'll be put on short rations like everybody else. And people
+will watch them. The Wealdians expect to die of plague any minute
+because they've been with Darians. So people look at them and laugh.
+But it's not funny."
+
+"It's natural," said Calhoun, "but perhaps lacking in charity. Look
+here! How about those astrogators? I need them for a job I have in
+mind."
+
+Maril wrung her hands.
+
+"C--come here," she said in a low tone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was an armed guard in the control-room of the ship. He'd watched
+Calhoun a good part of the previous day as Calhoun performed his
+mysterious work. He'd been off-duty and now was on duty again. He was
+bored. So long as Calhoun did not touch the control-board, though, he
+was uninterested. He didn't even turn his head when Maril led the way
+into the other cabin and slid the door shut.
+
+"The astrogators are coming," she said swiftly. "They'll bring some
+boxes with them. They'll ask you to instruct them so they can handle our
+ship better. They lost themselves coming back from Orede, no, they
+didn't lose themselves, but they lost time--enough time almost to make
+an extra trip for meat. They need to be experts. I'm to come along, so
+they can be sure that what you teach them is what you've been doing
+right along."
+
+Calhoun said;
+
+"Well?"
+
+"They're crazy!" said Maril vehemently. "They knew Weald would do
+something monstrous sooner or later. But they're going to try to stop it
+by more monstrousness sooner! Not everybody agrees, but there are
+enough. So they want to use your ship--it's faster in overdrive and so
+on. And they'll go to Weald--in this ship--and--they say they'll give
+Weald something to keep it busy without bothering us!"
+
+Calhoun said drily;
+
+"This pays me off for being too sympathetic with blueskins! But if I'd
+been hungry for a couple of years, and was despised to boot by the
+people who kept me hungry, I suppose I might react the same way. No," he
+said curtly as she opened her lips to speak again. "Don't tell me the
+trick. Considering everything, there's only one trick it could be. But I
+doubt profoundly that it would work. All right."
+
+He slid the door back and returned to the control-room. Maril followed
+him. He said detachedly;
+
+"I've been working on a problem outside of the food one. It isn't the
+time to talk about it right now, but I think I've solved it."
+
+Maril turned her head, listening. There were footsteps on the tarmac
+outside the ship. Both doors of the airlock were open. Four men came in.
+They were young men who did not look quite as hungry as most Darians,
+but there was a reason for that. Their leader introduced himself and the
+others. They were the astrogators of the ship Dara had built to try to
+bring food from Orede. They were not good enough, said their
+self-appointed leader. They overshot their destination. They came out of
+overdrive too far off line. They needed instructions.
+
+Calhoun nodded, and observed that he'd been asking for them.
+
+"We've got orders," said their leader, steadily, "to come on board and
+learn from you how to handle this ship. It's better than the one we've
+got."
+
+"I asked for you," repeated Calhoun. "I've an idea I'll explain as we go
+along. Those boxes?"
+
+Someone was passing in iron boxes through the airlock. One of the four
+very carefully brought them inside.
+
+"They're rations," said a second young man. "We don't go anywhere
+without rations--except Orede."
+
+"Orede, yes. I think we were shooting at each other there," said Calhoun
+pleasantly. "Weren't we?"
+
+"Yes," said the young man.
+
+He was neither cordial nor antagonistic. He was impassive. Calhoun
+shrugged.
+
+"Then we can take off immediately. Here's the communicator and there's
+the button. You might call the grid and arrange for us to be lifted."
+
+The young man seated himself at the control-board. Very professionally,
+he went through the routine of preparing to lift by landing-grid, which
+routine has not changed in two hundred years. He went briskly ahead
+until the order to lift. Then Calhoun stopped him.
+
+"Hold it!"
+
+He pointed to the airlock. Both doors were open. The young man at the
+control-board flushed vividly. One of the others closed and dogged the
+doors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ship lifted. Calhoun watched with seeming negligence. But he found
+occasion for a dozen corrections of procedure. This was presumably a
+training voyage of his own suggestion. Therefore when the blueskin pilot
+would have flung the Med Ship into undirected overdrive, Calhoun grew
+stern. He insisted on a destination. He suggested Weald. The young men
+glanced at each other and accepted the suggestion. He made the acting
+pilot look up the intrinsic business of its sun and measure its apparent
+brightness from just off Dara. He made him estimate the change in
+brightness to be expected after so many hours in overdrive, if one broke
+out to measure.
+
+The first blueskin student pilot ended a Calhoun-determined tour of duty
+with rather more of respect for Calhoun than he'd had at the beginning.
+The second was anxious to show up better than the first. Calhoun drilled
+him in the use of brightness-charts, by which the changes in apparent
+brightness of stars between overdrive hops could be correlated with
+angular changes to give a three-dimensional picture of the nearer
+heavens. It was a highly necessary art which had not been worked out on
+Dara, and the prospective astrogators became absorbed in this and other
+fine points of space-piloting. They'd done enough, in a few trips to
+Orede, to realize that they needed to know more. Calhoun showed them.
+
+Calhoun did not try to make things easy for them. He was hungry and
+easily annoyed. It was sound training tactics to be severe, and to
+phrase all suggestions as commands. He put the four young men in command
+of the ship in turn, under his direction. He continued to use Weald as a
+destination, but he set up problems in which the Med Ship came out of
+overdrive pointing in an unknown direction and with a precessory motion.
+He made the third of his students identify Weald in the celestial globe
+containing hundreds of millions of stars, and get on course in overdrive
+toward it. The fourth was suddenly required to compute the distance to
+Weald from such data as he could get from observation, without reference
+to any records.
+
+By this time the first man was chafing to take a second turn. Calhoun
+gave each of them a second gruelling lesson. He gave them, in fact, a
+highly condensed but very sound course in the art of travel in space.
+His young students took command in four-hour watches, with at least one
+breakout from overdrive in each watch. He built up enthusiasm in them.
+They ignored the discomfort of being hungry, though there had been no
+reason for them to stint on food in Orede--in growing pride in what they
+came to know.
+
+When Weald was a first-magnitude star, the four were not highly
+qualified astrogators, to be sure, but they were vastly better spacemen
+than at the beginning. Inevitably, their attitude toward Calhoun was
+respectful. He'd been irritable and right. To the young, the combination
+is impressive.
+
+Maril had served as passenger only. In theory she was to compare
+Calhoun's lessons with his practise when alone. But he did nothing on
+this journey which--teaching considered--was different from the two
+interstellar journeys Maril had made with him. She occupied the
+sleeping-cabin during two of the six watches of each ship-day. She
+operated the food-readier, which was almost completely emptied of its
+original store of food;--confiscated by the government of Dara. That
+amount of food would make no difference to the planet, but it was wise
+for everyone on Dara to be equally ill-fed.
+
+On the sixth day out from Dara, the sun of Weald had a magnitude of
+minus five-tenths.[A] The electron telescope could detect its larger
+planets, especially a gas-giant fifth-orbit world of high albedo.
+Calhoun had his four students estimate its distance again, pointing out
+the difference that could be made in breakout position if the Med Ship
+were mis-aimed by as much as one second of arc.
+
+  [A] Earth's sun, from Earth, is of magnitude roughly minus thirty-six.
+
+"That does it," Calhoun announced cheerfully. "That's the last order
+I'll give you. You're graduate pilots from here on! Relax and have some
+coffee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And now," said Calhoun, "I suppose you'll tell me the truth about those
+boxes you brought on board. You said they were rations, but they haven't
+been opened in six days. I have an idea what they mean, but you tell
+me."
+
+The four looked uncomfortable. There was a long pause.
+
+"They could be," said Calhoun detachedly, "cultures to be dumped on
+Weald. Weald is making plans to wipe out Dara. So some fool has decided
+to get Weald too busy fighting a plague of its own to bother with you.
+Is that right?"
+
+The young men stirred uneasily. "Well--l--l, sir," said one of them,
+unhappily, "that's what we were ordered to do."
+
+"I object," said Calhoun. "It wouldn't work. I just left Weald a little
+while back, remember. They've been telling themselves that some day Dara
+would try that. They've made preparations to fight any imaginable
+contagion you could drop on them. Every so often somebody claims it's
+happening. It wouldn't work."
+
+"But--"
+
+"In fact," said Calhoun, "I will not permit you to do anything of the
+kind."
+
+One of the young men, staring at Calhoun, nodded suddenly. His eyes
+closed. He jerked his head erect and looked bewildered. A second sank
+heavily into a chair. He said remotely, "Thish sfunny!" and abruptly
+went to sleep. The third found his knees giving away. He paid elaborate
+attention to them, stiffening them. But they yielded like rubber and he
+went slowly down to the floor. The fourth said thickly with difficulty,
+yet reproachfully;
+
+"'Thought y'were our frien'!"
+
+He collapsed.
+
+Calhoun very soberly tied them hand and foot and laid them out
+comfortably on the floor. Maril watched, white-faced, her hand to her
+throat. "What have you done to them? Are they dead?"
+
+"No," said Calhoun, "just drugged. They'll wake up presently."
+
+Maril said in a tense and desperate whisper;
+
+"You're--betraying us! You're going to take us to Weald."
+
+"No," said Calhoun. "We'll only orbit around it. First, though, I want
+to get rid of those damned packed-up cultures. They're dead, by the way.
+I killed them with supersonics a couple of days ago, while a fine
+argument was going on about distance-measurements by variable Cepheids
+of known period."
+
+He put the four boxes carefully in the waste-disposal unit. He operated
+it. The boxes and their contents streamed out to space in the form of
+metallic and other vapors. Calhoun sat at the control-desk.
+
+"I'm a Med Service man," he said detachedly. "I couldn't cooperate in
+the spread of plague, anyhow, though a useful epidemic might be another
+matter. But the important thing right now is not keeping Weald busy with
+troubles to increase their hatred of Dara. It's getting some food for
+Dara. And driblets won't help. What's needed is in thousands of
+tons,--or tens of thousands." Then he said; "Overdrive coming,
+Murgatroyd! Hold fast!"
+
+The universe vanished. The customary unpleasant sensations accompanied
+the change. Murgatroyd burped.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 6
+
+
+A large part of the firmament was blotted out by the blindingly bright
+half-disk of Weald, as it shone in the sunshine. It had ice-caps at its
+poles, and there were seas, and the mottled look of land which had that
+carefully maintained balance of woodland and cultivated areas which was
+so effective in climate control. The Med Ship floated free, and Calhoun
+fretfully monitored all the beacon frequencies known to man.
+
+There was relative silence inside the ship. Maril watched Calhoun in a
+sort of despairing indecision. The four young blueskins still slept,
+still bound hand and foot upon the control-room floor. Murgatroyd
+regarded them, and Maril, and Calhoun in turn, and his small and furry
+forehead wrinkled helplessly.
+
+"They can't have landed what I'm looking for!" protested Calhoun as his
+search had no result. "They can't. It would be too sensible for them to
+have done it!"
+
+Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a subdued voice.
+
+"But where the devil did they put them?" demanded Calhoun. "A polar
+orbit would be ridiculous! They--" Then he grunted in disgust. "Oh! Of
+course! Now, where's the landing-grid?"
+
+He worked busily for minutes, checking the position of the Wealdian
+landing-grid--mapped in the Sector Directory--against the look of
+continents and seas on the half-disk so plainly visible outside. He
+found what he wanted. He put on the ship's solar-system drive.
+
+"I wish," he complained to Maril, "I wish I could think straight the
+first time! And it's so obvious! If you want to put something out in
+space, and not have it interfere with traffic, in what sort of orbit and
+at what distance will you put it?"
+
+Maril did not answer.
+
+"Obviously," said Calhoun, "you'll put it as far as possible from the
+landing-pattern of ships coming in to the space-port. You'll put it on
+the opposite side of the planet. And you'll want it to stay out of the
+way, where anybody can know it is at any time of the day or night
+without having to calculate anything. So you'll put it out in orbit so
+it will revolve around Weald in exactly one day, neither more or less,
+and you'll put it above the equator. And then it will remain quite
+stationary above one spot on the planet, a hundred and eighty degrees
+longitude away from the landing-grid and directly over the equator."
+
+He scribbled for a moment.
+
+"Which means forty-two thousand miles high, give or take a few hundred,
+and--here! And I was hunting for it in a close-in orbit!"
+
+He grumbled to himself. He waited while the solar-system drive pushed
+the Med Ship a quarter of the way around the bright planet below. The
+sunset line vanished and the planet's disk became a complete circle.
+Then Calhoun listened to the monitor earphones again, and grunted once
+more, and changed course, and presently made a noise indicating
+satisfaction.
+
+Again presently he abandoned instrument-control and peered directly out
+of a port, handling the solar-system drive with great care. Murgatroyd
+said depressedly;
+
+"_Chee!_"
+
+"Stop worrying," commanded Calhoun. "We haven't been challenged, and
+there is a beacon transmitter at work, just to make sure that nobody
+bumps into what we're looking for. It's a great help, because we do want
+to bump,--gently."
+
+Stars swung across the port out of which he looked. Something dark
+appeared,--and then straight lines and exact curvings. Even Maril,
+despairing and bewildered as she was, caught sight of something vastly
+larger than the Med Ship, floating in space. She stared. The Med Ship
+maneuvered very cautiously. She saw another large object. A third. A
+fourth. There seemed to be dozens of them.
+
+They were space-ships, huge by comparison with Aesclipus Twenty. They
+floated as the Med Ship did. They did not drive. They were not in
+formation. They were not at even distances from each other. They did not
+point in the same direction. They swung in emptiness like derelicts.
+
+Calhoun jockeyed his small ship with infinite care. Presently there came
+the gentlest of impacts and then a clanking sound. The appearance out
+the vision-port became stationary, but still unbelievable. The Med Ship
+was grappled magnetically to a vast surface of welded metal.
+
+Calhoun relaxed. He opened a wall-panel and brought out a vacuum suit.
+He began briskly to get it on.
+
+"Things move smoothly," he commented. "We weren't challenged. So it's
+extremely unlikely that we were spotted. Our friends on the floor ought
+to begin to come to shortly. And I'm going to find out now whether I'm a
+hero or in sure-enough trouble!"
+
+Maril said drearily;
+
+"I don't know what you've done, except--"
+
+Calhoun blinked at her, in the act of hauling the vacuum suit over his
+shoulders.
+
+"Isn't it self-evident?" he demanded. "I've been giving astrogation
+lessons to these characters. I certainly didn't do it to help them dump
+germ-cultures on Weald! I brought them here! Don't you see the point?
+These are space-ships. They're in orbit around Weald. They're not manned
+and they're not controlled. In fact, they're nothing but sky-riding
+storage bins!"
+
+He seemed to consider the explanation complete. He wriggled his arms
+into the sleeves and gloves of the suit. He slung the air-tanks over his
+shoulder and hooked them to the suit.
+
+"I'll be back," he said. "I hope with good news. I've reason to be
+hopeful, though, because these Wealdians are very practical men. They
+have things all prepared and tidy. I suspect I'll find these ships with
+stores of air and fuel--maybe even food--so that if Weald should manage
+to make a deal for the stuff stored out here in them, they'd only have
+to bring out crews."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He lifted the space-helmet down from its rack and put it on. He tested
+it, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage, and other data from
+the lighted miniature instruments visible through pinholes above his
+eye-level. He fastened a space-rope about himself, speaking through the
+helmet's opened face-plate.
+
+"If our friends should wake up before I get back," he added, "please
+restrain them. I'd hate to be marooned."
+
+He went waddling into the airlock with the coil of space-rope over one
+vacuum-suited arm. The inner lock door closed behind him A little later
+Maril heard the outer lock open. Then soundlessness.
+
+Murgatroyd whimpered a little. Maril shivered. Calhoun had gone out of
+the ship to nothingness. He'd said that what he was looking for--and
+what he'd found--was forty-two thousand miles from Weald. One could
+imagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn't imagine
+falling a light-year. Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a
+gigantic space-ship which floated among dozens of its fellows, all
+seeming derelicts and seemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the
+nearest because of magnetic-soled shoes. He trusted his life to them and
+to a flimsy space-rope which trailed after him out the Med Ship's
+airlock.
+
+Time passed. A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to the
+second which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Very
+small and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventing utter
+silence from hanging intolerably in the ship. They were traffic-sounds,
+recorded on a world no one knew how many light-years distant, and nobody
+knew when. There were sounds as of voices, too faint to suggest words,
+but imparting a feel of life and activity to a soundless ship.
+
+Maril found herself listening tensely for something else. One of the
+four bound blueskins snored, and stirred, and slept again. Murgatroyd
+gazed about unhappily, and swung down to the control-room floor, and
+then paused for lack of any place to go or thing to do. He sat down and
+began half-heartedly to lick his whiskers. Maril stirred.
+
+Murgatroyd looked at her hopefully.
+
+"_Chee?_" he asked shrilly.
+
+She shook her head. It became a habit to act as if Murgatroyd were a
+human being.
+
+"N-no," she said unsteadily. "Not yet."
+
+More time passed. An unbearably long time. Then there was the faintest
+of clankings. It repeated. Then, abruptly, there were noises in the
+airlock. They continued. They were fumbling noises.
+
+The outer airlock door closed. The inner door opened. Dense white fog
+came out of it. There was motion. Calhoun followed the fog out of the
+lock. He carried objects which had been weightless, but were suddenly
+heavy in the ship's gravity-field. There were two space-suits and a
+curious assortment of parcels. He spread them out, flipped aside the
+face-plate, and said briskly;
+
+"This stuff is cold! Turn a heater on it, will you Maril?"
+
+He began to work his way out of his vacuum-suit.
+
+"Item," he said. "The ships are fuelled _and_ provisioned. A practical
+tribe, the Wealdians! The ships are ready to take off as soon as they're
+warmed up inside. A half-degree sun doesn't radiate heat enough to keep
+a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectively near zero
+Kelvin. Here, point the heaters like this."
+
+He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers. The fog disappeared where their
+beams played. But the metal space-suits glistened and steamed,--and the
+steam disappeared within inches. They were so completely and utterly
+cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, which
+reevaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and was
+immediately replaced.
+
+"Item," said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of the vacuum-suit
+sleeves. "The controls are pretty nearly standard. Our sleeping friends
+will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble, provided
+only that nobody comes out here to bother us before they leave."
+
+He shed the last of the space-suit, stepping out of its legs.
+
+"And," he finished wrily, "I brought back an emergency supply of
+ship-provisions for everybody concerned, but find that I'm idiot enough
+to feel that they'll choke me if I eat them while Dara's still
+starving."
+
+Maril said;
+
+"But--there isn't any hope for Dara! No real hope!"
+
+He gaped at her.
+
+"What do you think we're here for?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He set to work to restore his four recent students to consciousness. It
+was not a difficult task. The dosage, mixed in the coffee he had given
+them earlier, was a light one. Calhoun took the precaution of disarming
+them first, but presently four hot-eyed young men glared at him.
+
+"I'm calling," said Calhoun, holding a blaster negligently in his hand,
+"I'm calling for volunteers. There's a famine on Dara. There've been
+unmanageable crop-surpluses on Weald. On Dara, the government grimly
+rations every ounce of food. On Weald, the government has been buying up
+surplus grain to keep the price up. To save storage costs, it's loaded
+the grain into out-of-date space-ships it once used to stand sentry
+over Dara to keep it out of space when there was another famine there.
+Those ships have been put out in orbit, where we're hooked on to one of
+them. It's loaded with half a million bushels of grain. I've brought
+space-suits from it, I've turned on the heaters in its interior, and
+I've set its overdrive unit for a hop to Dara. Now I'm calling for
+volunteers to take half a million bushels of grain to where it's needed.
+Do I get any volunteers?"
+
+He got four. Not immediately, because they were ashamed that he'd made
+it impossible to carry out their original fanatic plan, and now offered
+something much better to make up for it. They raged. But half a million
+bushels of grain meant that people who must otherwise die might live.
+
+Ultimately, truculently, first one and then another angrily agreed.
+
+"Good!" said Calhoun. "Now, how many of you dare risk the trip alone?
+I've got one grain-ship warming up. There are plenty of others around
+us. Every one of you can take a ship and half a million bushels to Dara,
+if you have the nerve?"
+
+The atmosphere changed. Suddenly they clamored for the task he offered
+them. They were still acutely uncomfortable. He'd bossed them and taught
+them until they felt capable and glamorous and proud. Then he'd pinned
+their ears back. But if they returned to Dara with four enemy ships and
+unimaginable quantities of food with which to break the famine....
+
+There was work to be done first, of course. Only one ship was so far
+warming up. Three more had to be entered, in space-suits, and each had
+to have its interior warmed so breathable air could exist inside it, and
+at least part of the stored provisions had to be brought up to
+reasonable temperature for use on the journey. Then the overdrive unit
+had to be inspected and set for the length of journey that a direct
+overdrive hop to Dara would mean, and Calhoun had to make sure again
+that each of the four could identify Dara's sun under all circumstances
+and aim for it with the requisite high precision, both before going into
+overdrive and after breakout. When all that was accomplished, Calhoun
+might reasonably hope that they'd arrive. But it wasn't a certainty.
+
+Still, presently his four students shook hands with him, with the fine
+tolerance of young men intending much greater achievements than their
+teacher. They wouldn't speak on communicator again, because their
+messages might be picked up on Weald.
+
+Of course for this action to be successful, it had to be performed with
+the stealth of sneak-thieves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What seemed a long time passed. Then one ship turned slowly upon some
+unseen axis. It wavered back and forth, seeking a point of aim. A second
+twisted in its place. A third put on the barest trace of solar-system
+drive to get clear of the rest. The fourth ...
+
+One ship vanished. It had gone into overdrive, heading for Dara at many
+times the speed of light. Another. Two more.
+
+That was all. The remainder of the fleet hung clumsily in emptiness. And
+Calhoun worriedly went over in his mind the lessons he'd given in such a
+pathetically small number of days. If the four ships reached Dara, their
+pilots would be heroes. Calhoun had presented them with that estate over
+their bitter objection. But they would glory in it, if they reached
+Dara.
+
+Maril looked at him with very strange eyes.
+
+"Now what?" she asked.
+
+"We hang around," said Calhoun, "to see if anybody comes up from Weald
+to find out what's happened. It's always possible to pick up a sort of
+signal when a ship goes into overdrive. Usually it doesn't mean a thing.
+Nobody pays any attention. But if somebody comes out here--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"It'll be regrettable," said Calhoun. He was suddenly very tired. "It'll
+spoil any chance of our coming back and stealing some more food--like
+interstellar mice. If they find out what we've done they'll expect us to
+try it again. They might get set to fight. Or they might simply land the
+rest of these ships."
+
+"If I'd realized what you were about," said Maril, "I'd have joined in
+the lessons. I could have piloted a ship."
+
+"You wouldn't have wanted to," said Calhoun. He yawned. "You wouldn't
+want to be a heroine."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Korvan," said Calhoun. He yawned again. "I've asked about him. He's
+been trying very desperately to deserve well of his fellow blueskins.
+All he's accomplished is develop a way to starve painlessly. He wouldn't
+feel comfortable with a girl who'd helped make starving unnecessary.
+He'd admire you politely, but he'd never marry you. And you know it."
+
+She shook her head, but it was not easy to tell whether she denied the
+reaction of Korvan--whom Calhoun had never met--or denied that he was
+more important to her than anything else. The last was what Calhoun
+plainly implied.
+
+"You don't seem to be trying to be a hero!" she protested.
+
+"I'd enjoy it," admitted Calhoun, "but I have a job to do. It's got to
+be done. It's much more important than being admired."
+
+"You could take another ship back," she told him. "It would be worth
+more to Dara than the Med Ship is! And then everybody would realize that
+you'd planned everything."
+
+"Ah!" said Calhoun. "But you've no idea how much this ship matters to
+Dara!"
+
+He seated himself at the controls. He slipped headphones over his ears.
+He listened. Very, very carefully, he monitored all the wave-lengths and
+wave-forms he could discover in use on Weald. There was no mention of
+the oddity of behavior of shiploads of surplus grain aloft. There was no
+mention of the ships at all. But there was plenty of mention of Dara,
+and blueskins, and of the vicious political fight now going on to see
+which political party could promise the most complete protection against
+blueskins.
+
+After a full hour of it, Calhoun flipped off his receptor and swung the
+Med Ship to an exact, painstakingly precise aim at the sun around which
+Dara rolled. He said;
+
+"Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"
+
+Murgatroyd grabbed. The stars went out and the universe reeled and the
+Med Ship became a sort of cosmos all its own.
+
+Calhoun yawned again.
+
+"Now there's nothing to be done for a day or two," he said wearily, "and
+I'm beginning to understand why people sleep all they can, on Dara. It's
+one way not to feel hungry."
+
+Maril said tensely;
+
+"You're going back? After they took the ship from you?"
+
+"The job's not finished," he explained. "Not even the famine's ended,
+and the famine's a second-order effect. If there were no such thing as a
+blueskin, there'd be no famine. Food could be traded for. We've got to
+do something to make sure there are no more famines."
+
+She looked at him oddly.
+
+"It would be desirable," she said with irony. "But you can't do it."
+
+"Not today, no," he admitted. Then he said longingly, "I'm about to
+catch up on some sleep."
+
+Maril rose and went into the other cabin. He settled down into the chair
+and fell instantly asleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For very many ship-hours, then, there was no action or activity or
+happening of any imaginable consequence in the Med Ship. Very, very far
+away, light-years distant and light years apart, four shiploads of grain
+hurtled toward the famine-stricken planet of blueskins. Each great ship
+had a single semi-skilled blueskin for pilot and crew. Thousands of
+millions of suns blazed with violence appropriate to their stellar types
+in a galaxy of which a very small proportion had been explored and
+colonized by humanity. The human race was now to be counted in
+quadrillions on scores of hundreds of inhabited worlds, but the tiny Med
+Ship seemed the least significant of all possible created things. It
+could travel between star-systems and even star-clusters, but it was not
+yet capable of crossing the continent of suns on which the human race
+arose. And between any two solar systems the journeying of the Med Ship
+consumed much time. Which would be maddening for someone with no work to
+do or no resources in himself, or herself.
+
+On the second ship-day Calhoun labored painstakingly and somewhat
+distastefully at the little biological laboratory. Maril watched him in
+a sort of brooding silence. Murgatroyd slept much of the time, with his
+furry tail wrapped meticulously across his nose.
+
+Toward the end of the day Calhoun finished his task. He had a matter of
+six or seven cubic centimeters of clear liquid as the conclusion of a
+long process of culturing, and examination by microscope, and again
+culturing plus final filtration. He looked at a clock and calculated
+time.
+
+"Better wait until tomorrow," he observed, and put the bit of clear
+liquid in a temperature-controlled place of safe-keeping.
+
+"What is it?" asked Maril. "What's it for?"
+
+"It's part of a job I have on hand," said Calhoun. He considered. "How
+about some music?"
+
+She looked astonished. But he set up an instrument and fed microtape
+into it and settled back to listen. Then there was music such as she had
+never heard before. Again it was a device to counteract isolation and
+monotonous between-planet voyages. To keep it from losing its
+effectiveness, Calhoun rationed himself on music, as on other things.
+Calhoun deliberately went for weeks between uses of his recordings, so
+that music was an event to be looked forward to and cherished.
+
+When he tapered off the stirring symphonies of Kun Gee with
+tranquilizing, soothing melodies from the Rim School of composers, Maril
+regarded him with a very peculiar gaze indeed.
+
+"I think I understand now," she said slowly, "why you don't act like
+other people. Toward me, for example. The way you live gives you what
+other people have to try to get in crazy ways,--making their work feed
+their vanity, and justify pride, and make them feel significant. But you
+can put your whole mind on your work."
+
+He thought it over.
+
+"Med Ship routine is designed to keep one healthy in his mind," he
+admitted. "It works pretty well. It satisfies all my mental appetites.
+But naturally there are instincts--"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+She waited. He did not finish.
+
+"What do you do about instincts that work and music and such things
+can't satisfy?"
+
+Calhoun grinned wrily;
+
+"I'm stern with them. I have to be."
+
+He stood up and plainly expected her to go into the other cabin for the
+night. She did.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was after breakfast-time of the next ship-day when he got out the
+sample of clear liquid he'd worked so long to produce. "We'll see how it
+works," he observed. "Murgatroyd's handy in case of a slip-up. It's
+perfectly safe so long as he's aboard and there are only the two of us."
+
+She watched as he injected half a cc under his own skin. Then she
+shivered a little.
+
+"What will it do?"
+
+"That remains to be seen." He paused a moment. "You and I," he said with
+some dryness, "make a perfect test for anything. If you catch something
+from me, it will be infective indeed!"
+
+She gazed at him utterly without comprehension.
+
+He took his own temperature. He brought out the folios which were his
+orders, covering each of the planets he should give a standard Medical
+Service inspection. Weald was there. Dara wasn't. But a Med Service man
+has much freedom of action, even when only keeping up the routine of
+normal Med Service. When catching up on badly neglected operations, he
+necessarily has much more. Calhoun went over the folios.
+
+Two hours later he took his temperature again. He looked pleased. He
+made an entry in the ship's log. Two hours later yet he found himself
+drinking thirstily and looked more pleased still. He made another entry
+in the log and matter-of-factly drew a small quantity of blood from his
+own vein and called to Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd submitted amiably to the
+very trivial operation Calhoun carried out. Calhoun put away the
+equipment and saw Maril staring at him with a certain look of shock.
+
+"It doesn't hurt him," Calhoun explained. "Right after he's born there's
+a tiny spot on his flank that has the pain-nerves desensitized.
+Murgatroyd's all right. That's what he's for!"
+
+"But he's--your friend!"
+
+"He's my assistant. I don't ask anything of him that I can do myself.
+But we're both Med Service. And I do things for him that he can't do for
+himself. For example, I make coffee for him."
+
+Murgatroyd heard the familiar word. He said;
+
+"_Chee!_"
+
+"Very well," agreed Calhoun. "We'll all have some."
+
+He made coffee. Murgatroyd sipped at the cup especially made for his
+little paws. Once he scratched at the place on his flank which had no
+pain-nerves. It itched. But he was perfectly content. Murgatroyd would
+always be contented when he was somewhere near Calhoun.
+
+Another hour went by. Murgatroyd climbed up into Calhoun's lap and with
+a determined air went to sleep there. Calhoun disturbed him long enough
+to get an instrument out of his pocket. He listened to Murgatroyd's
+heartbeat with it while Murgatroyd dozed.
+
+"Maril," he said. "Write down something for me. The time, and
+ninety-six, and one-twenty over ninety-four."
+
+She obeyed, not comprehending. Half an hour later--still not stirring to
+disturb Murgatroyd--he had her write down another time and sequence of
+figures, only slightly different from the first. Half an hour later
+still, a third set. But then he put Murgatroyd down, well satisfied.
+
+He took his own temperature. He nodded.
+
+"Murgatroyd and I have one more chore to do," he told her. "Would you go
+in the other cabin for a moment?"
+
+She went disturbedly into the other cabin. Calhoun drew a sample of
+blood from the insensitive area on Murgatroyd's flank. Murgatroyd
+submitted with complete confidence in the man. In ten minutes Calhoun
+had diluted the sample, added an anticoagulant, shaken it up thoroughly,
+and filtered it to clarity with all red and white corpuscles removed.
+Another Med Ship man would have considered that Calhoun had had
+Murgatroyd prepare a splendid small sample of antibody-containing serum,
+in case something got out of hand. It would assuredly take care of two
+patients.
+
+But a Med Ship man would also have known that it was simply one of those
+scrupulous precautions a Med Ship man takes when using cultures from
+store.
+
+Calhoun put the sample away and called Maril back and offered no
+explanation. She said;
+
+"I'll fix lunch." She hesitated. "You brought some food from the first
+Weald ship. Do you want it?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I'm squeamish," he admitted. "The trouble on Dara is Med Service fault.
+Before my time, but still--I'll stick to rations until everybody eats."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He watched her unobtrusively as the day went on. Presently he considered
+that she was slightly flushed. Shortly after the evening meal of
+singularly unappetizing Darian rations, she drank thirstily. He did not
+comment. He brought out cards and showed her a complicated game of
+solitaire in which mental arithmetic and expert use of probability
+increased one's chance of winning.
+
+By midnight, ship-time, she'd learned the game and played it absorbedly.
+Calhoun was able to scrutinize her without appearing to do so, and he
+was satisfied again. When he mentioned that the Med Ship should arrive
+off Dara in eight hours more, she put the cards away and went into the
+other cabin.
+
+Calhoun wrote up the log. He added the notes that Maril had made for
+him, of Murgatroyd's pulse and blood-pressure after the injection of the
+same culture that produced fever and thirstiness in himself and
+later--without contact with him or the culture--in Maril. He put a
+professional comment at the end.
+
+"The culture seems to have retained its normal characteristics during
+long storage in the spore state. It revived and reproduced rapidly. I
+injected .5 cc under my skin and in less than one hour my temperature
+was 30.8 deg.C. An hour later it was 30.9 deg.C. This was its peak. It
+immediately returned to normal. The only other observable symptom was
+slightly increased thirst. Blood-pressure and pulse remained normal. The
+other person in the Med Ship displayed the same symptoms, in prompt and
+complete repetition, without physical contact."
+
+He went to sleep, with Murgatroyd curled up in his cubbyhole.
+
+The Med Ship broke out of overdrive at 1300 hours, ship time. Calhoun
+made contact with the grid and was promptly lowered to the ground.
+
+It was almost two hours later--1500 hours ship-time--when the people of
+Dara were informed by broadcast that Calhoun was publicly to be
+executed; immediately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 7
+
+
+From the viewpoint of Darians, the decision of Calhoun's guilt and the
+decision to execute him were reasonable enough. Maril protested
+fiercely, and her testimony agreed with Calhoun's in every respect, but
+from a blueskin viewpoint their own statements were damning.
+
+Calhoun had taken four young astrogators to space. They were the only
+semi-skilled space-pilots Dara had. There were no fully qualified men.
+Calhoun had asked for them, and taken them out to emptiness, and there
+he had instructed them in modern guidance-methods for ships of space. So
+far there was no disagreement. He'd proposed to make them more competent
+pilots; more capable of driving a ship to Orede, for example, to raid
+the enormous cattle-herds there. And he'd had them drive the Med Ship to
+Weald, against which there could be no objection.
+
+But just before arrival he had tricked all four of them by giving them
+drugged coffee. He'd destroyed the lethal bacterial cultures they'd been
+ordered to dump on Weald. Then he'd sent the four student pilots off
+separately--so he and Maril claimed--in huge ships crammed with grain.
+But those ships were not to be believed in, anyhow. Nobody on Dara could
+imagine stores of food bought up and stored away because it was useless;
+to keep up prices. Nobody believed in shiploads of grain to be had for
+the taking. They did know that the only four partially experienced
+space-pilots on Dara had been taken away and by Calhoun's own story sent
+out of the ship after they'd been drugged. Had they been trained, and
+had they been helped or even permitted to sow the seeds of plague on
+Weald, and had they come back prepared to pass on training to other men
+to handle other space-ships now feverishly being built in hidden places
+on Dara,--why--then Dara might have a chance of survival. But a
+space-battle with only partly trained pilots would be hazardous at best.
+With no trained pilots at all, it would be hopeless. So Calhoun, by his
+own story, appeared to have doomed every living being on Dara to
+massacre from the bombs of Weald.
+
+It was this last angle which destroyed any chance of anybody believing
+in such fairy-tale objects as ships loaded down with grain. Calhoun had
+shattered Dara's feeble hope of resistance. Weald had some ships and
+could build or buy others faster than Dara could hope to construct them.
+Equally important, Weald had a plenitude of experienced spacemen to man
+some ships fully and train the crews of others. If it had become
+desperately busy fighting plague, then a fleet to exterminate life on
+Dara would be delayed. Dara might have gained time at least to build
+ships which could ram their enemies and destroy them that way.
+
+But Calhoun had made it impossible. If he told the truth and Weald
+already had a fleet of huge ships which only needed to be emptied of
+grain and filled with guns and men--why--Dara was doomed. But if he did
+not tell the truth it was equally doomed by his actions. So Calhoun
+would be killed.
+
+His execution was to take place in the open space of the landing-grid,
+with vision-cameras transmitting the sight over all the blueskin planet.
+Half-starved men, with grisly blue blotches on their skins, marched him
+to the center of the largest level space on the planet which was not
+desperately being cultivated. Their hatred showed in their expressions.
+Bitterness and fury surrounded Calhoun like a wall. Most of Dara would
+have liked to see him killed in a manner as atrocious as his crime, but
+no conceivable death would be satisfying.
+
+So the affair was coldly businesslike, with not even insults offered to
+him. He was left to stand alone in the very center of the landing-grid
+floor. There were a hundred blasters which would fire upon him at the
+same instant. He would not only be killed; he would be destroyed. He
+would be vaporized by the blue-white flames poured upon him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+His death was remarkably close. Nothing remained but the order to fire,
+when loudspeakers from the landing-grid office froze everything. One of
+the grain-ships from Weald had broken out of overdrive and its pilot was
+triumphantly calling for landing-coordinates. The grid office relayed
+his call to loudspeaker circuits as the quickest way to get it on the
+communication system of the whole planet.
+
+"_Calling ground_," boomed the triumphant voice of the first of the
+student pilots Calhoun had trained. "_Calling ground! Pilot Franz in
+captured ship requests coordinates for landing! Purpose of landing, to
+deliver half a million bushels of grain captured from the enemy!_"
+
+At first, nobody dared believe it. But the pilot could be seen on
+vision. He was known. No blueskin would be left alive long enough to be
+used as a decoy by the men of Weald! Presently the giant ship on its
+second voyage to Dara--the first had been a generation ago, when it
+threatened death and destruction--appeared as a dark pinpoint in the
+sky. It came down and down, and presently it hovered over the center of
+the tarmac, where Calhoun composedly stood on the spot where he was to
+have been executed.
+
+The landing-grid crew shifted the ship to one side, and only then did
+Calhoun stroll in a leisurely fashion toward the Med Ship by the grid's
+metal-lace wall.
+
+The big ship touched ground, and its exit-port revolved and opened, and
+the student pilot stood there grinning and heaving out handsful of
+grain. There was a swarming, yelling, deliriously triumphant crowd,
+then, where only minutes before there'd been a mob waiting to rejoice
+when Calhoun's living body exploded into flame.
+
+They no longer hated Calhoun, but he had to fight his way to the Med
+Ship, nevertheless. He was surrounded by now-ecstatically admiring
+citizens of Dara, only minutes since they'd thirsted for his blood.
+
+Two hours after the first ship, a second landed. Dara went wild again.
+Four hours later still, the third arrived. The fourth came down on the
+following day.
+
+Then Calhoun faced the executive and cabinet of Dara for the second
+time. His tone and manner were very dry.
+
+"Now," he said curtly, "I would like a few more astrogators to train. I
+think it likely that we can raid the Wealdian grain-fleet one time more,
+and in so doing get the beginning of a fleet for defense. I insist,
+however, that it must not be used in combat! We might as well be
+sensible about this situation! After all, four shiploads of grain won't
+break the famine! They'll help a lot, but they're only the beginning of
+what's needed for a planetary population!"
+
+"How much grain can we hope for?" demanded a man with a blue mark
+covering all his chin.
+
+Calhoun told him.
+
+"How long before Weald can have a fleet overhead, dropping fusion
+bombs?" demanded another, grimly.
+
+Calhoun named a time. But then he said;
+
+"I think we can keep them from dropping bombs if we can get the
+grain-fleet and some capable astrogators."
+
+"What do you have in mind?"
+
+He told them. It was not possible to tell the whole story of what he
+considered sensible behavior. An emotional program can be presented and
+accepted immediately. A plan of action which is actually intelligent,
+considering all elements of a situation, has to be accepted piecemeal.
+Even so, the military men growled.
+
+"We've plenty of heavy elements," said one, with one eye and half his
+forehead colored blue. "If we'd used our brains, we'd have more bombs
+than Weald can hope for! We could turn that whole planet into a smoking
+cinder!"
+
+"Which," said Calhoun acidly, "would give you some satisfaction but not
+an ounce of food! And food's more important than satisfaction. Now, I'm
+going to take off for Weald again. I'll want somebody to build an
+emergency device for my ship, and I'll want the four pilots I've trained
+and twenty more candidates. And I'd like to have some decent rations!
+When the last trip brought back two million bushels of grain, you can
+spare adequate food for twenty men for a few days!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took some time to get the special device constructed, but the Med
+Ship lifted in two days more. The device for which it had waited was
+simply a preventive of the disaster overtaking the ship from the mine on
+Orede. It was essentially a tank of liquid oxygen, packed in the space
+from which stores had been taken away. When the ship's air-supply was
+pumped past it, first moisture and then CO2 froze out. Then the air
+flowed over the liquefied oxygen at a rate to replace the CO2 with more
+useful breathing material. Then the moisture was restored to the air as
+it warmed again. For so long as the oxygen lasted, fresh air for any
+number of men could be kept purified and breathable. The Med Ship's
+normal equipment could take care of no more than ten. But with this it
+could journey to Weald with almost any complement on board.
+
+Maril stayed on Dara when the Med Ship left. Murgatroyd protested
+shrilly when he discovered her about to be closed out by the closing
+lock-door.
+
+"_Chee!_" he said indignantly. "_Chee! Chee!_"
+
+"No," said Calhoun, "we'll be crowded enough anyhow. We'll see her
+later."
+
+He nodded to one of the first four student pilots, and he crisply made
+contact with the landing-grid office. He very efficiently supervised as
+the grid took the ship up. The other three of the four first-trained men
+explained every move to sub-classes assigned to each. Calhoun moved
+about, listening and making certain that the instruction was up to
+standard.
+
+He felt queer, acting as the supervisor of an educational institution in
+space. He did not like it. There were twenty-four men beside himself
+crowded into the Med Ship's small interior. They got in each other's
+way. They trampled on each other. There was always somebody eating, and
+always somebody sleeping, and there was no need whatever for the
+background tape to keep the ship from being intolerably quiet. But the
+air-system worked well enough, except once when the reheater unit quit
+and the air inside the ship went down below freezing before the trouble
+could be found and corrected.
+
+The journey to Weald, this time, took seven days because of the training
+program in effect. Calhoun bit his nails over the delay. But it was
+necessary for each of the students to make his own line-ups on Weald's
+sun, and compute distances, and for each of them to practise
+maneuverings that would presently be called for. Calhoun hoped
+desperately that preparations for active warfare--or massacre--did not
+move fast on Weald. He believed, however, that in the absence of direct
+news from Dara, Wealdian officials would take the normal course of
+politicos. They had proclaimed the deathship from Orede an attack from
+Dara. Therefore they would specialize on defensive measures before
+plumping for offense. They'd get patrol-ships out to spot invasion ships
+long before they worked on a fleet to destroy the blueskins. It would
+meet the public demand for defense.
+
+Calhoun was right. The Med Ship made its final approach to Weald under
+Calhoun's own control. He'd made brightness-measurements on his previous
+journey and he used them again. They would not be strictly accurate,
+because a sunspot could knock all meaning out of any reading beyond two
+decimal places. But the first breakout was just far enough from the
+Wealdian system for Calhoun to be able to pick out its planets with
+electron telescope at maximum magnification. He could aim for Weald
+itself,--allowing, of course, for the lag in the apparent motion of its
+image because of the limited speed of light. He tried the briefest of
+overdrive hops, and came out within the solar system and well inside any
+watching patrol.
+
+That was pure fortune. It continued. He'd broken through the screen of
+guard-ships in undetectable overdrive. He was within half an hour's
+solar-system drive of the grain-fleet. There was no alarm, at first. Of
+course radars spotted the Med Ship as an object, but nobody paid
+attention. It was not headed for Weald. It was probably assumed to be a
+guard-boat itself. Such mistakes do happen. It reached the grain-fleet.
+
+Again from the storage-space from which supplies had been removed,
+Calhoun produced vacuum suits. The four first students went out, each
+escorting a less-accustomed neophyte and all fastened firmly together
+with space-ropes. They warmed the interiors of four ships and went on to
+others. Presently there were eight ships making ready for an
+interstellar journey, each with a scared but resolute new pilot
+familiarizing himself with its controls. There were sixteen ships.
+Twenty. Twenty-three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A guard-ship came humming out from Weald. It would be armed, of course.
+It came droning, droning up the forty-odd thousand miles from the
+planet. Calhoun swore. He could not call his students and tell them what
+was happening. The guard-ship would overhear. He could not trust untried
+young men to act rationally if they were unwarned and the guard-ship
+arrived and matter-of-factly attempted to board one of them.
+
+Then he was inspired. He called Murgatroyd, placed him before the
+communicator, and set it at voice-only transmission. This was familiar
+enough, to Murgatroyd. He'd often seen Calhoun use a communicator.
+
+"_Chee!_" shrilled Murgatroyd. "_Chee-chee!_"
+
+A startled voice came out of the speaker.
+
+"_What's that?_"
+
+"_Chee_," said Murgatroyd zestfully.
+
+The communicator was talking to him. Murgatroyd adored three things in
+order. One was Calhoun. The second was coffee. The third was pretending
+to converse like a human being. The speaker said explosively;
+
+"_You there, identify yourself!_"
+
+"_Chee-chee-chee-chee!_" observed Murgatroyd. He wriggled with pleasure
+and added, reasonably enough, "_Chee!_"
+
+The communicator bawled;
+
+"_Calling ground! Calling ground! Listen to this! Something that ain't
+human's talking at me on a communicator! Listen in an' tell me what to
+do!_"
+
+Murgatroyd interposed with another shrill;
+
+"_Chee!_"
+
+Then Calhoun pulled the Med Ship slowly away from the clump of
+still-lifeless grain-ships. It was highly improbable that the guard-boat
+would carry an electron telescope. Most likely it would have only an
+echo-radar, and so could determine only that an object of some sort
+moved of its own accord in space. Calhoun let the Med Ship accelerate.
+That would be final evidence. The grain-ships were between Weald and its
+sun. Even electron telescopes on the ground--and electron-telescopes
+were ultimately optical telescopes with electronic amplification--even
+electron telescopes on the ground could not get a good image of the ship
+through sunlit atmosphere.
+
+"_Chee?_" asked Murgatroyd solicitously. "_Chee-chee-chee?_"
+
+"_Is it blueskins?_" shakily demanded the voice from the guard-boat.
+"_Ground! Ground! Is it blueskins?_"
+
+A heavy, authoritative voice came in with much greater volume.
+
+"_That's no human voice_," it said harshly. "_Approach its ship and send
+back an image. Don't fire first unless it heads for ground._"
+
+The guard-ship swerved and headed for the Med Ship. It was still a very
+long way off.
+
+"_Chee-chee_," said Murgatroyd encouragingly.
+
+Calhoun changed the Med Ship's course. The guard-ship changed course
+too. Calhoun let it draw nearer,--but only a little. He led it away from
+the fleet of grain-ships.
+
+He swung his electron telescope on them. He saw a space-suited figure
+outside one,--safely roped, however. It was easy to guess that someone
+had meant to return to the Med Ship for orders or to make a report, and
+found the Med Ship gone. He'd go back inside and turn on a communicator.
+
+"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd.
+
+The heavy voice boomed;
+
+"_You there! This is a human-occupied world! If you come in peace, cut
+your drive and let our guard-ship approach!_"
+
+Murgatroyd replied in an interested but doubtful tone. The booming voice
+bellowed. Another voice of higher authority took over. Murgatroyd was
+entranced that so many people wanted to talk to him. He made what for
+him was practically an oration. The last voice spoke persuasively and
+suavely.
+
+"_Chee-chee-chee-chee_," said Murgatroyd.
+
+One of the grain-ships flickered and ceased to be. It had gone into
+overdrive. Another. And another. Suddenly they began to flick out of
+sight by twos and threes.
+
+"_Chee_," said Murgatroyd with a note of finality.
+
+The last grain-ship vanished.
+
+"Calling guard-ship," said Calhoun drily. "This is Med ship Aesclipus
+Twenty. I called here a couple of weeks ago. You've been talking to my
+_tormal_, Murgatroyd."
+
+A pause. A blank pause. Then profanity of deep and savage intemperance.
+
+"I've been on Dara," said Calhoun.
+
+Dead silence fell.
+
+"There's a famine there," said Calhoun deliberately. "So the grain-ships
+you've had in orbit have been taken away by men from Dara--blueskins if
+you like--to feed themselves and their families. They've been dying of
+hunger and they don't like it."
+
+There was a single burst of the unprintable. Then the formerly suave
+voice said waspishly;
+
+"_Well? The Med Service will hear of your interference!_"
+
+"Yes," said Calhoun. "I'll report it myself. I have a message for you.
+Dara is ready to pay for every ounce of grain and for the ships it was
+stored in. They'll pay in heavy metals,--iridium, uranium,--that sort of
+thing."
+
+The suave voice fairly curdled.
+
+"_As if we'd allow anything that was ever on Dara to touch ground
+here!_"
+
+"Ah! But there can be sterilization. To begin with metals, uranium melts
+at 1150 deg. centigrade, and tungsten at 3370 deg. and iridium at 2350
+deg. You could load such things and melt them down in space and then tow
+them home. And you can actually sterilize a lot of other useful
+materials!"
+
+The suave voice said infuriatedly;
+
+"_I'll report this! You'll suffer for this!_"
+
+Calhoun said pleasantly;
+
+"I'm sure that what I say is being recorded, so that I'll add that it's
+perfectly practical for Wealdians to land on Dara, take whatever
+property they think wise,--to pay for damage done by blueskins, of
+course--and get back to Wealdian ships with absolutely no danger of
+carrying contagion. If you'll make sure the recording's clear."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He described, clearly and specifically, exactly how a man could be
+outfitted to walk into any area of any conceivable contagion, do
+whatever seemed necessary in the way of looting--but Calhoun did not use
+the word--and then return to his fellows with no risk whatever of
+bringing back infection. He gave exact details. Then he said;
+
+"My radar says you've four ships converging on me to blast me out of
+space. I sign off."
+
+The Med Ship disappeared from normal space, and entered that improbably
+stressed area of extension which it formed about itself and in which
+physical constants were wildly strange. For one thing, the speed of
+light in overdrive-stressed space had not been measured yet. It was too
+high. For another, a ship could travel very many times 186000 miles per
+second in overdrive.
+
+The Med Ship did just that. There was nobody but Calhoun and Murgatroyd
+on board. There was companionable silence,--there were only the small
+threshold-of-perception sounds which one did not often notice, but which
+it would have been intolerable to have stop.
+
+Calhoun luxuriated in regained privacy. For seven days he'd had
+twenty-four other human beings crowded into the two cabins of the ship,
+with never so much as one yard of space between himself and someone
+else. One need not be snobbish to wish to be alone sometimes!
+
+Murgatroyd licked his whiskers thoughtfully.
+
+"I hope," said Calhoun, "that things work out right. But they may
+remember on Dara that I'm responsible for some ten million bushels of
+grain reaching them. Maybe--just possibly--they'll listen to me and act
+sensibly. After all, there's only one way to break a famine. Not with
+ten million bushels for a whole planet! And certainly not with bombs!"
+
+Driving direct, without pausing for practisings, the Med Ship could
+arrive at Dara in little more than five days. Calhoun looked forward to
+relaxation. As a beginning he made ready to give himself an adequate
+meal for the first time since first landing on Dara. Then, presently, he
+sat down wrily to a double meal of Darian famine-rations, which were far
+from appetizing. But there wasn't anything else on board.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He had some pleasure later, though, envisioning what went elsewhere. On
+Weald, obviously, there would be purest panic. The vanishing of the
+grain fleet wouldn't be charged against twenty-four men. A Darian fleet
+would be suspected, and with the suspicion terror, and with terror a
+governmental crisis. Then there'd be a frantic seizure of any craft that
+could take to space, and the agitated improvisation of a space-fleet.
+
+But besides that, biological-warfare technicians would examine Calhoun's
+instructions for equipment by which armed men could be landed on a
+plague-stricken planet and then safely taken off again. Military and
+governmental officials would come to the eminently sane conclusion that
+while Calhoun could not well take active measures against blueskins, as
+a sane and proper citizen of the galaxy he would be on the side of law
+and order and propriety and justice,--in short, of Weald. So they
+ordered sample anti-contagion suits made according to Calhoun's
+directions, and they had them tested. They worked admirably.
+
+On Dara, while Calhoun journeyed back to it, grain was distributed
+lavishly, and everybody on the planet had their cereal ration almost
+doubled. It was still not a comfortable ration, but the relief was
+great. There was considerable gratitude felt for Calhoun, which as usual
+included a lively anticipation of further favors to come. Maril was
+interviewed repeatedly, as the person best able to discuss him, and she
+did his reputation no harm. That was not all that happened on Dara ...
+
+There was something else. Very curious thing, too. There was a curious
+spread of mild symptoms which nobody could exactly call a disease. It
+lasted only a few hours. A person felt slightly feverish, and ran a
+temperature which peaked at 30.9 deg. centigrade, and drank more water
+than usual. Then his temperature went back to normal and he forgot all
+about it. There have always been such trivial epidemics. They are rarely
+recorded, because few people think to go to a doctor. That was the case
+here.
+
+Calhoun looked ahead a little, too. Presently the fleet of grain-ships
+would arrive and unload and lift again for Orede, and this time they
+would make an infinity of slaughter among wild cattle-herds, and bring
+back incredible quantities of fresh-slaughtered frozen beef. Almost
+everybody would get to taste meat again, which would be most gratifying.
+
+Then, the industries of Dara would labor at government-required tasks.
+An astonishing amount of fissionable material would be fashioned into
+bombs--a concession by Calhoun--and plastic factories make an
+astonishing number of plastic sag-suits. And large shipments of heavy
+metals in ingots would be made to the planet's capital city and there
+would be some guns and minor items....
+
+Perhaps somebody could have found out any of these items in advance, but
+it was unlikely that anybody did. Nobody but Calhoun, however, would
+ever have put them together and hoped very urgently that that was the
+way things would work out. He could see a promising total result. In
+fact, in the Med ship hurtling through space, on the fourth day of his
+journey he thought of an improvement that could be made in the sum of
+all those happenings when they were put together.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He landed on Dara. Maril came to the Med Ship. Murgatroyd greeted her
+with enthusiasm.
+
+"Something unusual has happened," said Maril, very much subdued. "I told
+you that--sometimes blueskin markings fade out on children, and then
+neither they nor their children ever have blueskin markings again."
+
+"Yes," said Calhoun. "I remember."
+
+"And you were reminded of a group of viruses on Tralee. You said they
+only took hold of people in terribly bad physical condition, but then
+they could be passed on from mother to child. Until--sometimes--they
+died out."
+
+Calhoun blinked.
+
+"Yes...."
+
+"Korvan," said Maril very carefully, "Has worked out an idea that that's
+what happens to the blueskin markings on--us Darians. He thinks that
+people almost dead of the plague could get the--virus, and if they
+recovered from the plague pass the virus on and--be blueskins."
+
+"Interesting," said Calhoun, noncommittally.
+
+"And when we went to Weald," said Maril very carefully indeed, "you were
+working with some culture-material. You wrote quite a lot about it in
+the ship's log. You gave yourself an injection. Remember? And
+Murgatroyd? You wrote down your temperature, and Murgatroyd's?" She
+moistened her lips. "You said that if infection passed between us,
+something would be very infectious indeed?"
+
+"What are you driving at?"
+
+Maril continued slowly. "Th--thousands of people are having their
+pigment-spots fade away. Not only children but grownups. And--Korvan has
+found out that it always seems to happen after a day when they felt
+feverish and very thirsty--and then felt all right again. You tried out
+something that made you feverish and thirsty. I had it too, in the ship.
+Korvan thinks there's been an epidemic of something that--is
+obliterating the blue spots on everybody that catches it. There are
+always trivial epidemics that nobody notices. Korvan's found evidence of
+one that's making 'blueskin' no longer a word with any meaning."
+
+"Remarkable!" said Calhoun.
+
+"Did you--do it?" asked Maril. "Did you start a harmless epidemic
+that--wipes out the virus that makes blueskins?"
+
+Calhoun said in feigned astonishment;
+
+"How can you think such a thing, Maril?"
+
+"Because I was there," said Maril. She said somehow desperately; "I know
+you did it! But the question is--are you going to tell? When people find
+they're not blueskins any longer--when there's no such thing as a
+blueskin any longer--will you tell them why?"
+
+"Naturally not," said Calhoun. "Why?" Then he guessed. "Has Korvan--."
+
+"He thinks," said Maril, "that he thought it up all by himself. He's
+found the proof. He's--very proud. I'd have to tell him the truth if you
+were going to tell. And he'd be ashamed and--angry."
+
+Calhoun considered, staring at her.
+
+"How it happened doesn't matter," he said at last. "The idea of anybody
+doing it deliberately would be disturbing, too. It shouldn't get about.
+So it seems much the best thing for Korvan to discover what's happened
+to the blueskin pigment, and how it happened, but not why."
+
+She read his face carefully.
+
+"You aren't doing it as a favor to me," she decided. "You'd rather it
+was that way."
+
+She looked at him for a long time, until he squirmed. Then she nodded
+and went away.
+
+An hour later the Wealdian space-fleet was reported, massed in space and
+driving for Dara.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 8
+
+
+There were small scout-ships which came on ahead of the main fleet.
+They'd originally been guard-boats, intended for solar-system duty only
+and quite incapable of overdrive. They'd come from Weald in the
+cargo-holds of the liners now transformed into fighting ships. The
+scouts swept low, transmitting fine-screen images back to the fleet, of
+all that they might see before they were shot down. They found the
+landing-grid. It contained nothing larger than Calhoun's Med Ship,
+Aesclipus Twenty.
+
+They searched here and there. They flitted to and fro, scanning wide
+bands of the surface of Dara. The planet's cities and highways and
+industrial centers were wholly open to inspection from the sky. It
+looked as if the scouts hunted most busily for the fleet of former
+grain-ships which Calhoun had said blueskins had seized and rushed away.
+If the scouts looked for them, they did not find them.
+
+Dara offered no opposition to the scout-ships. Nothing rose to space to
+oppose or to resist their search. They went darting over every portion
+of the hungry planet, land and seas alike, and there was no sign of
+military preparedness against their coming. The huge ships of the main
+fleet waited while they reported monotonously that they saw no sign of
+the stolen fleet. But the stolen fleet was the only means by which the
+planet could be defended. There could be no point in a pitched battle in
+emptiness. But a fleet with a planet to back it might be dangerous.
+
+Hours passed. The Wealdian main fleet waited. There was no offensive
+movement by the fleet. There was no defensive action from the ground,
+With fusion-bombs certain to be involved in any actual conflict, there
+was something like an embarrassed pause. The Wealdian ships were ready
+to bomb. They were less anxious to be vaporized by possible
+suicide-dashes of defending ships who might blow themselves up near
+contact with their enemies.
+
+But a fleet cannot travel some light-years through space to make a mere
+threat. And the Wealdian fleet was furnished with the material for total
+devastation. It could drop bombs from hundreds, or thousands, or even
+tens of thousands of miles away. It could cover the world of Dara with
+mushroom clouds springing up and spreading to make a continuous pall of
+atomic-fusion products. And they could settle down and kill every living
+thing not destroyed by the explosions themselves. Even the creatures of
+the deepest oceans would die of deadly, purposely-contrived fallout
+particles.
+
+The Wealdian fleet contemplated its own destructiveness. It found no
+capacity for defense on Dara. It moved forward.
+
+But then a message went out from the capital city of Dara. It said that
+a ship in overdrive had carried word to a Darian fleet in space. The
+Darian fleet now hurtled toward Weald. It was a fleet of thirty-seven
+giant ships. They carried such-and-such bombs in such-and-such
+quantities. Unless its orders were countermanded, it would deliver those
+bombs on Weald--set to explode. If Weald bombed Dara, the orders could
+not be withdrawn. So Weald could bomb Dara. It could destroy all life on
+the pariah planet. But Weald would die with it.
+
+The fleet ceased its advance. The situation was a stalemate with pure
+desperation on one side and pure frustration on the other. This was no
+way to end the war. Neither planet could trust the other, even for
+minutes. If they did not destroy each other simultaneously, as now was
+possible, each would expect the other to launch an unwarned attack at
+some other moment. Ultimately one or the other must perish, and the
+survivor would be the one most skilled in treachery.
+
+But then the pariah planet made a new proposal. It would send a
+messenger-ship to stop its own fleet's bombardment if Weald would accept
+payment for the grain-ships and their cargoes. It would pay in ingots of
+iridium and uranium and tungsten--and gold if Weald wished it--for all
+damages Weald might claim. It would even pay indemnity for the miners of
+Orede, who had died by accident but perhaps in some sense through its
+fault. It would pay.... But if it were bombed, Weald must spout atomic
+fire and the fleet of Weald would have no home planet to return to.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This proposal seemed both craven and foolish. It would allow the fleet
+of Weald to loot and then betray Dara. But it was Calhoun's idea. It
+seemed plausible to the admirals of Weald. They felt only contempt for
+blueskins. Contemptuously, they accepted the semi-surrender.
+
+The broadcast waves of Dara told of agreement, and wild and fierce
+resentment filled the pariah planet's people. There was
+almost--almost!--revolution to insist upon resistance, however hopeless
+and however fatal. But not all of Dara realized that a vital change had
+come about in the state of things on Dara. The enemy fleet had not a
+hint of it. And therefore--
+
+In menacing array, the invading fleet spread itself about the skies of
+Dara, well beyond the atmosphere. Harsh voices talked with increasing
+arrogance to the landing-grid staff. A monster ship of Weald came
+heavily down, riding the landing-grid's force-fields. It touched gently.
+Its occupants were apprehensive, but hungry for the loot they had been
+assured was theirs. The ship's outer hull would be sterilized before it
+returned to Weald, of course. And there was adequate protection for the
+landing-party.
+
+Men came out of the ship's ports. They wore the double, transparent
+sag-suits Calhoun had suggested, which had been painstakingly tested,
+and which were perfect protection against contagion. They could loot
+with impunity, and all contamination would remain outside the suits.
+What loot they gathered, obviously, could be decontaminated before it
+was returned to Weald. It was a most satisfactory discovery, to realize
+that blueskins could be not only scorned but robbed. There was only one
+bit of relevant information the space-fleet of Weald did not have.
+
+That information was that the people of Dara weren't blueskins any
+longer. There'd been a trivial epidemic.
+
+The sag-suited men of Weald went zestfully about their business. They
+took over the landing-grid's operation, driving the Darian operators
+away. For the first time in history the operators of a landing-grid wore
+makeup to look like they did have blue pigment in their skins. The
+Wealdian landing-party tested the grid's operation. They brought down
+another giant ship. Then another. And another.
+
+Parties in the shiny sag-suits spread through the city. There were the
+huge stock-piles of precious metals, brought in readiness to be
+surrendered and carried away. Some men set to work to load these into
+the holds--to be sterilized later. Some went forthrightly after personal
+loot.
+
+They came upon very few Darians. Those they saw kept sullenly away from
+them. They entered shops and took what they fancied. They zestfully
+removed the treasure of banks.
+
+Triumphal and scornful reports went up to the hovering great ships. The
+blueskins, said the reports were spiritless and cowardly. They permitted
+themselves to be robbed. They kept out of the way. It had been observed
+that the population was streaming out of the city, fleeing because they
+feared the ships' landing-parties. The blueskins had abjectly produced
+all they'd promised of precious metals, but there was more to be taken.
+
+More ships came down, and more. Some of the first, heavily loaded, were
+lifted to emptiness again and the process of decontamination of their
+hulls began. There was jealousy among the ships in space for those upon
+the ground. The first-landed ships had had their choice of loot. There
+were squabblings about priorities, now that the navy of Weald plainly
+had a license to steal. There was confusion among the members of the
+landing-parties. Discipline disappeared. Men in plastic sag-suits roved
+about as individuals, seeking what they might loot.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were armed and alerted landing-parties around the grid itself, of
+course, but the capital city of Dara lay open. Men coming back with loot
+found their ships already lifted off to make room for others. They were
+pushed into reembarking-parties of other ships. There were more and more
+men to be found on ships where they did not belong, and more and more
+not to be found where they did. By the time half the fleet had been
+aground, there was no longer any pretense of holding a ship down until
+all its crew returned. There were too many other ships' companies
+clamoring for their turn to loot. The rosters of many ships, indeed,
+bore no particular relationship to the men actually on board.
+
+There were less than fifteen ships whose to-be-fumigated holds were
+still empty, when the watchful government of Dara broadcast a new
+message to the invaders. It requested that the looting stop. No matter
+what payment Weald claimed, it had taken payment five times over. Now
+was time to stop.
+
+It was amusing. The space-admiral of Weald ordered his ships alerted for
+action. The message-ship, ordering the Darian fleet away from Weald,
+had been sent off long since. No other ship could get away now! The
+Darians could take their choice; accept the consequences of surrender,
+or the fleet would rise to throw down bombs.
+
+Calhoun was asking politely to be taken to the Wealdian admiral when the
+trouble began. It wasn't on the ground, at all. Everything was under
+splendid control where a landing-force occupied the grid and all the
+ground immediately about it. The space admiral had headquarters in the
+landing-grid office. Reports came in, orders were issued, admirably
+crisp salutes were exchanged among sag-suited men.... Everything was in
+perfect shape there.
+
+But there was panic among the ships in space. Communicators gave off
+horrified, panic-stricken yells. There were screamings. Intelligible
+communications ceased. Ships plunged crazily this way and that. Some
+vanished in overdrive. At least one plunged at full power into a Darian
+ocean.
+
+The space-admiral found himself in command of fifteen ships only, out of
+all his former force. The rest of the fleet went through a period of
+hysterical madness. In some ships it lasted for minutes only. In others
+it went on for half an hour or more. Then they hung overhead, but did
+not reply to calls.
+
+Calhoun arrived at the space-port with Murgatroyd riding on his
+shoulder. A bewildered officer in a sag-suit halted him.
+
+"I've come," said Calhoun, "to speak to the admiral. My name is Calhoun
+and I'm Med Service, and I think I met the Admiral at a banquet a few
+weeks ago. He'll remember me."
+
+"You'll have to wait," protested the officer. "There's some trouble--"
+
+"Yes," said Calhoun. "I know about it. I helped design it. I want to
+explain it to the admiral. He needs to know what's happened, if he's to
+take appropriate measures."
+
+There were jitterings. Many men in sag-suits had still no idea that
+anything had gone wrong. Some appeared, brightly carrying loot. Some
+hung eagerly around the airlocks of ships on the grid tarmac, waiting
+their turns to stand in corrosive gases for the decontamination of their
+suits, when they would burn the outer layers and step, aseptic and
+happy, into a Wealdian ship again. There they could think how rich they
+were going to be back on Weald.
+
+But the situation aloft was bewildering and very, very ominous. There
+was strident argument. Presently Calhoun stood before the Wealdian
+admiral.
+
+"I came to explain something," said Calhoun pleasantly. "The situation
+has changed. You've noticed it, I'm sure."
+
+The admiral glared at him through two layers of plastic, which covered
+him almost like a gift-wrapped parcel.
+
+"Be quick!" he rasped.
+
+"First," said Calhoun, "there are no more blueskins. An epidemic of
+something or other has made the blue patches on the skins of Darians
+fade out. There have always been some who didn't have blue patches. Now
+nobody has them."
+
+"Nonsense!" rasped the admiral. "And what has that got to do with this
+situation?"
+
+"Why, everything," said Calhoun mildly. "It means that Darians can pass
+for Wealdians whenever they please. That they are passing for Wealdians.
+That they've been mixing with your men, wearing sag-suits exactly like
+the one you're wearing now. They've been going aboard your ships in the
+confusion of returning looters. There's not a ship now aloft, that has
+been aground today, that hasn't from one to fifteen Darians--no longer
+blueskins--on board."
+
+The admiral roared. Then his face turned gray.
+
+"You can't take your fleet back to Weald," said Calhoun gently, "if you
+believe its crews have been exposed to carriers of the Dara plague. You
+wouldn't be allowed to land, anyhow."
+
+The admiral said through stiff lips;
+
+"I'll blast--"
+
+"No," said Calhoun, again gently. "When you ordered all ships alerted
+for action, the Darians on each ship released panic-gas. They only
+needed tiny, pocket-sized containers of the gas for the job. They had
+them. They only needed to use air-tanks from their sag-suits to protect
+themselves against the gas. They kept them handy. On nearly all your
+ships aloft your crews are crazy from panic-gas. They'll stay that way
+until the air is changed. Darians have barricaded themselves in the
+control-rooms of most if not all your ships. You haven't got a fleet. If
+the few ships that will obey your orders, drop one bomb, our fleet off
+Weald will drop fifty. I don't think you'd better order offensive
+action. Instead, I think you'd better have your fleet medical officers
+come and learn some of the facts of life. There's no need for war
+between Dara and Weald, but if you insist...."
+
+The Admiral made a choking noise. He could have ordered Calhoun killed,
+but there was a certain appalling fact. The men aground from the fleet
+were breathing Wealdian air from tanks. It would last so long only. If
+they were taken on board the still obedient ships overhead, Darians
+would unquestionably be mixed with them. There was no way to take off
+the parties now aground without exposing them to contact with Darians,
+on the ground or in the ships. There was no way to sort out the Darians.
+
+"I--I will give the orders," said the admiral thickly. "I--do not know
+what you devils plan, but--I don't know how to stop you."
+
+"All that's necessary," said Calhoun warmly, "is an open mind. There's a
+misunderstanding to be cleared up, and some principles of planetary
+health practises to be explained, and a certain amount of prejudice that
+has to be thrown away. But nobody need die of changing their minds. The
+Interstellar Medical service has proved that over and over!"
+
+Murgatroyd, perched on his shoulder, felt that it was time to take part
+in the conversation. He said;
+
+"_Chee-chee!_"
+
+"Yes," agreed Calhoun. "We do want to get the job done. We're behind
+schedule now."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not, of course, possible for Calhoun to leave immediately. He had
+to preside at various meetings of the medical officers of the fleet with
+the health officials of Dara. He had to make explanations, and correct
+misapprehensions, and delicately suggest such biological experiments as
+would prove to the doctors of Weald that there was no longer a plague on
+Dara, whatever had been the case three generations before. He had to sit
+by while an extremely self-confident young Darian doctor named Korvan
+rather condescendingly demonstrated that the former blue pigmentation
+was a viral product quite unconnected with the plague, and that it had
+been wiped out by a very trivial epidemic of--such and such. Calhoun
+regarded that young man with a detached interest. Maril thought him
+wonderful, even if she had to give him the material for his work.
+Calhoun shrugged and went on with his work.
+
+The return of loot. Mutual, full, and complete agreement that Darians
+were no longer carriers of plague, if they had ever been. Unless Weald
+convinced other worlds of this, Weald itself would join Dara in
+isolation from neighboring worlds. A messenger ship to recall the
+twenty-seven ships once floating in orbit about Weald. Most of them
+would be used for some time, now, to bring beef from Orede. Some would
+haul more grain from Weald. It would be paid for. There would be a need
+for commercial missions to be exchanged between Weald and Dara.
+
+It was a full week before he could go to the little Med Ship and prepare
+for departure. Even then there were matters to be attended to. All the
+food-supplies that had been removed could not be replaced. There were
+biological samples to be replaced and some to be destroyed.... The
+air-tanks....
+
+Maril came to the Med Ship again when he was almost ready to leave. She
+did not seem comfortable.
+
+"I wish you could like Korvan," she said regretfully.
+
+"I don't dislike him," said Calhoun. "I think he will be a most
+prominent citizen, in time. He has all the talents for it."
+
+Maril smiled very faintly.
+
+"But you don't admire him."
+
+"I wouldn't say that," protested Calhoun. "After all, he is attractive
+to you, which is something I couldn't manage."
+
+"You didn't try," said Maril. "Just as I didn't try to be fascinating to
+you. Why?"
+
+Calhoun spread out his hands. But he looked at Maril with respect. Not
+every woman could have faced the fact that a man did not feel impelled
+to make passes at her. It is simply a fact that has nothing to do with
+desirability or charm or anything else.
+
+"You're going to marry him," he said. "I hope you'll be very happy."
+
+"He's the man I want," said Maril frankly. "He looks forward to splendid
+discoveries. I'm sorry it's so important to him."
+
+Calhoun did not ask the obvious question. Instead, he said thoughtfully;
+
+"There's something you could do.... It needs to be done. The Med Service
+in this sector has been badly handled. There are a number
+of--discoveries that need to be made. I don't think your Korvan would
+relish having things handed to him on a visible silver platter. But they
+should be known...."
+
+Maril said wrily;
+
+"I can guess what you mean. I never went into detail about how the
+blueskin markings disappeared, but a few hints--You've got books for
+me?"
+
+Calhoun nodded. He brought them to her.
+
+"If we only fell in love with each other, Maril, we'd be a team! Too
+bad! These are a wedding present you'll do well to hide."
+
+She put her hands in his.
+
+"I like you--almost as much as I like Murgatroyd! Yes! Korvan will never
+know, and he'll be a great man." Then she added defensively, "And not
+just from these books! He'll make his own wonderful discoveries."
+
+"Of which," said Calhoun, "the most remarkable is you. Good luck
+Maril!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently the Med Ship lifted. Calhoun aimed it for the next planet on
+the list of those he was to visit. After this one more he'd return to
+sector headquarters with a biting report to make on the way things had
+been handled before him. He said;
+
+"Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"
+
+Then the stars went out and there was silence, and privacy, and a faint,
+faint, almost unhearable series of background sounds which kept the Med
+Ship from being totally unendurable.
+
+Long, long days later the ship broke out of overdrive and Calhoun guided
+it to a round and sunlit world. In due time he thumped the
+communicator-button.
+
+"Calling ground," he said crisply. "Calling ground! Med Ship Aesclipus
+Twenty reporting arrival and asking coordinates for landing. Purpose of
+landing, planetary health inspection. Our mass is fifty standard tons."
+
+There was a pause while the beamed message went many, many thousands of
+miles. Then the speaker said;
+
+"_Aesclipus Twenty, repeat your identification!_"
+
+Murgatroyd said;
+
+"_Chee-chee? Chee?_"
+
+Calhoun sighed.
+
+"That's right, Murgatroyd! Here we go again!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pariah Planet, by Murray Leinster
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