Transcriber's note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed. 

 THIS WORLD IS TABOO

 by MURRAY LEINSTER

 ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y. 

 * * * * *

THIS WORLD IS TABOO

1

The little Med Ship came out of overdrive and the stars were strangeand the Milky Way seemed unfamiliar. Which, of course, was because theMilky Way and the local Cepheid marker-stars were seen from anunaccustomed angle and a not-yet-commonplace pattern of varyingmagnitudes. 

But Calhoun grunted in satisfaction. There was a banded sun off toport, which was good. A breakout at no more than sixty light-hoursfrom one's destination wasn't bad, in a strange sector of the galaxyand after three light-years of journeying blind. 

"Arise and shine, Murgatroyd, " said Calhoun. "Comb your whiskers. Getset to astonish the natives!"

A sleepy, small, shrill voice said: "_Chee!_"

Murgatroyd the _tormal_ came crawling out of the small cubbyhole whichwas his own. He blinked at Calhoun. 

"We're due to land shortly, " Calhoun observed. "You will impress thelocal inhabitants. I will get 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 andthen his left. Then he stood up and shook himself and lookedinterestedly at Calhoun. _Tormals_ are companionable small animals. They are charmed when somebody speaks to them. They find great, deepsatisfaction in imitating the actions of humans, as parrots andmynahs and parakeets imitate human speech. But _tormals_ have certainvaluable, genetically transmitted talents which make them much morevaluable than mere companions or pets. 

Calhoun got a light-reading for the banded sun. It could hardly be anaccurate measure of distance, but it was a guide. 

"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd!" he said. 

Murgatroyd watched. He saw Calhoun make certain gestures whichpresaged discomfort. He popped back into his cubbyhole. Calhoun threwthe overdrive switch and the Med Ship flicked back into thatquestionable state of being in which velocities of hundreds of timesthat of light are possible. The sensation of going into overdrive wasunpleasant. A moment later, the sensation of coming out was no lessso. 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 brightobject, enlarged its image to show details, and checked it against thelocal star-pilot. He calculated a moment. The distance was too shortfor even the briefest of overdrive hops, but it would take time to getthere on solar-system drive. 

He thumbed down the communicator button and spoke into a microphone. 

"Med Ship _Aesclipus Twenty_ reporting arrival and asking coordinatesfor landing, " he said matter-of-factly. "Purpose of landing isplanetary health inspection. Our mass is fifty tons, standard. Weshould arrive at a landing position in something under four hours. Repeat. Med Ship _Aesclipus Twenty_. .. . "

He finished the regular second transmission and made coffee forhimself while he waited for an answer. Murgatroyd came out for a cupof coffee for himself. Murgatroyd adored coffee. In minutes he held atiny 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 theInterstellar Medical Service to make a planetary health inspection onWeald. Check with your public health authorities. This is the firstMed Ship visit in twelve standard years, I believe--which isinexcusable. But your health authorities will know all about it. Checkwith them. "

The voice said truculently:

"What was your last port?"

Calhoun named it. This was not his home sector, but Sector Twelve hadgotten into a very bad situation. Some of its planets had goneunvisited for as long as twenty years, and twelve between inspectionswas almost commonplace. Other sectors had been called on to help itcatch up. 

Calhoun was one of the loaned Med Ship men, and because of theemergency he'd been given a list of half a dozen planets to beinspected one after another, instead of reporting back to sectorheadquarters after each visit. He'd had minor troubles before withlanding-grid operators in Sector Twelve. 

So he was very patient. He named the planet last inspected, the onefrom which he'd set out for Weald Three. The voice from thecommunicator 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 bedestroyed!"

Calhoun said coldly, "Listen, my fine feathered friend! I'm from theInterstellar Medical Service. You get in touch with planetary healthservices immediately! Remind them of the Interstellar MedicalInspection Agreement, signed on Tralee two hundred and forty standardyears ago. Remind them that if they do not cooperate in medicalinspection that I can put your planet under quarantine and your spacecommerce will be cut off like that!

"No ship will be cleared for Weald from any other planet in the galaxyuntil there has been a health inspection! Things have pretty well goneto pot so far as the Med Service in this sector is concerned, but it'sbeing straightened up. I'm helping straighten it! I give you twentyminutes to clear this! Then I am coming in, and if I'm not landed aquarantine 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, annoyed, "butthere are some people who demand it. The rule is, never get officialif you can help it, but when you must, out-official the official who'sofficialing you. "

Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" and sipped at his cup. 

Calhoun checked the course of the Med Ship. It bore on through space. There were tiny noises from the communicator. There were whisperingsand rustlings and the occasional strange and sometimes beautifulmusical notes whose origin is yet obscure, but which, since they arecarried by electromagnetic radiation of wildly varying wave lengths, are not likely to be the fabled music of the spheres. 

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 alwayswith 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 anxiouslystill, "are very anxious to be cooperative. We need Med Service help!We lose a lot of sleep over the blueskin! Could you tell us the nameof the last Med Ship to land here, and its inspector, and when thatinspection was made? We want to look up the record of the event to beable to assist you in every possible way. "

"He's lying, " Calhoun told Murgatroyd, "but he's more scared thanhostile. "

He picked up the order folio on Weald Three. He gave the informationabout the last Med Ship visit. 

"What?" he asked, "is a blueskin?"

He'd read the folio on Weald, of course, but as the ship swam onwardthrough emptiness he went through it again. The last medicalinspection had been only perfunctory. Twelve years earlier--instead ofthree--a Med Ship had landed on Weald. There had been officialconferences with health officials. There was a report on the birthrate, the death rate, the anomaly rate, and a breakdown of allreported communicable diseases. But that was all. There were nospecial comments and no overall picture. 

Presently Calhoun found the word in a Sector dictionary, where wordsof 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, nonfatal form of Dara plague and has been said to be noninfectious, though this is not certain. The etiology of Dara plague has not been worked out. The blueskin condition is hereditary but not a genetic modification, as markings appear in non-Mendelian distributions_. "

Calhoun puzzled over it. Nobody could have read the entire Sectordirectory, even with unlimited leisure during travel between solarsystems. Calhoun hadn't tried. But now he went laboriously throughindices and cross-references while the ship continued to travelonward. 

He found no other reference to blueskins. He looked up Dara. It waslisted as an inhabited planet, some four hundred years colonized, witha landing-grid and, at the time the main notice was written out, aflourishing interstellar commerce. But there was a memo, evidentlyadded to the entry in some change of editions: "_Since plague, speciallicense 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 fromWeald. "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!" saidCalhoun, annoyed. He called over his shoulder. "Murgatroyd! Comehere!"

Murgatroyd hopped to his lap and gazed interestedly at the screen. Thebland 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 coordinateswill be. .. . "

Calhoun wrote them down. He clicked off the communicator again andgrowled to Murgatroyd, "So I might have been a blueskin, eh? Andyou're my passport, because only Med Ships have members of your tribeaboard! What the hell's the matter, Murgatroyd? They act like theythink somebody's trying to get down on their planet with a load ofplague germs!"

He grumbled to himself for minutes. The life of a Med Ship man is notexactly a sinecure, at best. It means long periods in empty space inoverdrive, which is absolute and deadly tedium. Then two or three daysaground, checking official documents and statistics, and askingquestions to see how many of the newest medical techniques havereached this planet or that, and the supplying of information aboutsuch as have not arrived. 

Then the lifting out to space for long periods of tedium, to repeatthe process somewhere else. Med Ships carry only one man because twocould not stand the close contact without quarreling with each other. But Med Ships do carry _tormals_, like Murgatroyd, and a _tormal_ anda man can get along indefinitely, like a man and a dog. It is a highlyunequal friendship, but it seems to be satisfactory to both. 

Calhoun was very much annoyed with the way the Med Service had beenoperated in Sector Twelve. He was one of many men at work to correctthe results of incompetence in directing Med Service in this sector. But it is always disheartening to have to labor at making up forsomebody else's blundering, when there is so much new work that needsto be done. 

The condition shown by the landing-grid suspicions was a case inpoint. Blueskins were people who inherited a splotchy skinpigmentation from other people who'd survived a plague. Weald plainlymaintained a one-planet quarantine against them. But a quarantine isnormally an emergency measure. The Med Service should have taken over, wiped out the need for a quarantine, and then lifted it. It hadn'tbeen done. 

Calhoun fumed to himself. 

The world of Weald Three grew brighter and brighter and became a disk. The disk had icecaps and a reasonable proportion of land and watersurface. The ship decelerated, voices notifying observation from thesurface, and the little ship came to a stop some five planetarydiameters out from solidity. The landing field's force-field locked onto it, and its descent began. 

The business of landing was all very familiar, from the blue rim whichappeared at the limb of the planet from one diameter out, to thesingular flowing-apart of the surface features as the ship sank stilllower. There was the circular landing-grid, rearing skyward for nearlya mile. It could let down interstellar liners from emptiness and liftthem out to emptiness again, with great convenience and economy foreveryone. 

It landed the Med Ship in its center, and there were officials togreet Calhoun, and he knew in advance the routine part of his visit. There would be an interview with the planet's chief executive, bywhatever title he was called. There would be a banquet. Murgatroydwould be petted by everybody. There would be painful efforts toimpress Calhoun with the splendid conduct of public health matters onWeald. He would be told much scandal. 

He might find one man, somewhere, who passionately labored to advancethe welfare of his fellow humans by finding out how to keep them wellor, failing that, how to make them well when they got sick. And in twodays, or three, Calhoun would be escorted back to the landing-grid, and lifted out to space, and he'd spend long empty days in overdriveand land somewhere else to do the whole thing all over again. 

It all happened exactly as he expected, with one exception. Everyhuman being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins. Blueskinsand the idea of blueskins obsessed everyone. Calhoun listened withoutasking questions until he had the picture of what blueskins meant tothe people who talked of them. Then he knew there would be no useasking questions at random. 

Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin. Nobody mentioned aspecific event in which a blueskin had at any named time taken part. But everybody was afraid of blueskins. It was a patterned, aninculcated, a stage-directed fixed idea. And it found expression inshocked references to the vileness, the depravity, the monstrousnessof the blueskin inhabitants of Dara, from whom Weald must at all costsbe protected. 

It did not make sense. So Calhoun listened politely until he found anundistinguished medical man who wanted some special information aboutgene selection as practised halfway across the galaxy. He invited thatman to the Med Ship, where he supplied the information not hithertoavailable. He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with that joyous awea man feels when he finds out something he has wanted long and badlyto know. 

"Now, " said Calhoun, "tell me something? Why does everybody on thisplanet hate the inhabitants of Dara? It's light-years away. Nobodyclaims to have suffered in person from them. Why make a point ofhating them?"

The Wealdian doctor grimaced. 

"They've blue patches on their skins. They're different from us. Sothey can be pictured as a danger and our political parties can make anelection issue out of competing for the privilege of defending us fromthem. They had a plague on Dara, once. They're accused of still havingit ready for export. "

"Hm, " said Calhoun. "The story is that they want to spread contagionhere, eh? Doesn't anybody"--his tone was sardonic--"doesn't anybodyurge that they be massacred as an act of piety?"

"Yes-s-s-s, " admitted the doctor reluctantly. "It's mentioned inpolitical speeches. "

"But how's it rationalized?" demanded Calhoun. "What's the argument tomake pigment-patches involve moral and physical degradation, as I'massured is the case?"

"In the public schools, " said the doctor, "the children are taughtthat blueskins are now carriers of the disease they survived--threegenerations ago! That they hate everybody who isn't a blueskin. Thatthey are constantly scheming to introduce their plague here so most ofus will die and the rest will become blueskins. That's beyondrationalizing. It can't be true, but it's not safe to doubt it. "

"Bad business, " said Calhoun coldly. "That sort of thing usually costslives in the end. It could lead to massacre!"

"Perhaps it has, in a way, " said the doctor unhappily. "One doesn'tlike to think about it. " He paused. "Twenty years ago there was afamine on Dara. There were crop failures. The situation must have beenvery bad: They built a spaceship. 

"They've no use for such things normally, because no nearby planetwill deal with them or let them land. But they built a spaceship andcame here. They went in orbit around Weald. They asked to trade forshiploads of food. They offered any price in heavy metals--gold, platinum, irridium, and so on. They talked from orbit by visioncommunicators. They could be seen to be blueskins. You can guess whathappened!"

"Tell me, " said Calhoun. 

"We armed ships in a hurry, " admitted the doctor. "We chased theirspaceship back to Dara. We hung in space off the planet. We told themwe'd blast their world from pole to pole if they ever dared take tospace again. We made them destroy their one ship, and we watched onvisionscreens 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 ofarmed ships in their skies for years--to keep them from spreading theplague, we said. And some of us believed it!"

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 overabundant crops. Thegovernment had to buy the excess grain to keep the price up. Retiredpatrol ships, built to watch over Dara, were available for storagespace. We filled them up with grain and sent them out into orbit. They're there now, hundreds of thousands or millions of tons ofgrain!"

"And Dara?"

The doctor shrugged. He stood up. 

"Our hatred of Dara, " he said, again ironically, "has produced onething. Roughly halfway between here and Dara there's a two-planetsolar system, Orede. There's a usable planet there. It was proposed tobuild an outpost of Weald there, against blueskins. Cattle were landedto run wild and multiply and make a reason for colonists to settlethere. 

"They did, but nobody wants to move near to blueskins! So Orede stayeduninhabited until a hunting party, shooting wild cattle, found anoutcropping of heavy-metal ore. So now there's a mine there. Andthat's all. A few hundred men work the mine at fabulous wages. You maybe 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 toanyone else as I've done to you, I'd be lucky only to be driven intoexile!"

"I shan't give you away, " said Calhoun. He did not smile. 

 * * * * *

When the doctor had gone, Calhoun said deliberately, "Murgatroyd, youshould be grateful that you're a _tormal_ and not a man. There'snothing about being a _tormal_ to make you ashamed!"

Then he grimly changed his garments for the full-dress uniform of theMed Service. There was to be a banquet at which he would sit next tothe planet's chief executive and hear innumerable speeches about thesplendor of Weald. Calhoun had his own, strictly Med Service opinionof the planet's latest and most boasted-of achievement. It was a domedcity in the polar regions, where nobody ever had to go outdoors. 

He was less than professionally enthusiastic about the moving streets, and much less than approving of the dream broadcasts which suppliedhypnotic, sleep-inducing rhythms to anybody who chose to listen tothem. The price was that while asleep one would hear high praise ofcommercial products, and might believe them when awake. 

But it was not Calhoun's function to criticize when it could beavoided. Med Service had been badly managed in Sector Twelve. So atthe banquet Calhoun made a brief and diplomatic address in which hetemperately praised what could be praised, and did not mentionanything else. 

The chief executive followed him. As head of the government he paidsome tribute to the Med Service. But then he reminded his hearersproudly of the high culture, splendid health, and remarkableprosperity of the planet since his political party took office. This, he said, despite the need to be perpetually on guard against thegreatest and most immediate danger to which any world in all thegalaxy was exposed. 

He referred to the blueskins, of course. He did not need to tell thepeople of Weald what vigilance, what constant watchfulness wasnecessary against that race of deprived and malevolent deviants fromthe norm of humanity. But Weald, he said with emotion, held aloft thetorch of all that humanity held most dear, and defended not alone thelives of its people against blueskin contagion, but their nobleheritage of ideals against blueskin pollution. 

When he sat down, Calhoun said very politely, "It looks as if some dayit 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'sgood 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 witha written note for the chief executive. He read it and passed it toCalhoun. It was from the Ministry of Health. The spaceport reportedthat a ship had just broken out from overdrive within the Wealdiansolar system. Its tape-transmitter had automatically signaled itsarrival 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. Itdrifted like a derelict upon no course at all. It seemed ominous, andsince 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 nextdoor to Orede. That's who's done this. It wouldn't surprise me ifthey'd seeded Orede with their plague, and this ship came from thereto give us warning!"

"There's no evidence for anything of the sort, " protested Calhoun. "Aship simply came out of overdrive and didn't signal further. That'sall!"

"We'll see, " said the chief executive ominously. "We'll go to thespaceport. There we'll get the news as it comes in, and can frameorders on the latest information. "

He took Calhoun by the arm. Calhoun said sharply, "Murgatroyd!"

During the banquet, Murgatroyd had been visiting with the wives of thehigher-up officials. They had enough of their husbands normally, without listening to their official speeches. Murgatroyd was brought, his small paunch distended with cakes and coffee and such delicaciesas he'd been plied with. He was half comatose from overfeeding andoverpetting, but he was glad to see Calhoun. 

Calhoun held the little creature in his arms as the official groundcarraced through traffic with screaming sirens claiming the right of way. It reached the spaceport, where enormous metal girders formed amonster frame of metal lace against a star-filled sky. The chiefexecutive strode magnificently into the spaceport offices. There wasno news; 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 eerilyin no orbit, going nowhere, doing nothing. And panic was theconsequence. 

It seemed to Calhoun that the official handling of the matteraccounted for the terror that he could feel building up. Theunexplained bit of news was on the air all over the planet Weald. There was nobody awake of all the world's population who did notbelieve that there was a new danger in the sky. Nobody doubted that itcame from blueskins. The treatment of the news was preciselycalculated to keep alive the hatred of Weald for the inhabitants ofthe world Dara. 

Calhoun put Murgatroyd into the Med Ship and went back to thespaceport office. A small spaceboat, designed to inspect the circlinggrain ships from time to time, was already aloft. The landing-grid hadthrust it swiftly out most of the way. Now it droned and drove onsturdily toward the enigmatic ship. 

Calhoun took no part in the agitated conferences among the officialsand news reporters at the spaceport. But he listened to the talk abouthim. As the investigating small ship drew nearer to the deathly-stillcargo vessel, the guesses about the meaning of its breakout andfollowing silence grew more and more wild. 

But, singularly, there was no single suggestion that the mystery mightnot be the work of blueskins. Blueskins were scape-goats for all thefears and all the uneasiness a perhaps over-civilized world developed. 

Presently the investigating spaceboat reached the mystery ship andcircled it, beaming queries. No answer. It reported the cargo shipdark. No lights anywhere on or in it. There were no induction-surgesfrom even pulsing, idling engines. Delicately, the messenger craftmaneuvered until it touched the silent vessel. It reported thatmicrophones detected no motion whatever inside. 

"Let a volunteer go aboard, " commanded the chief executive. "Let himreport what he finds. "

A pause. Then the solemn announcement of an intrepid volunteer's name, from far, far away. Calhoun listened, frowning darkly. This pompousheroism wouldn't be noticed in the Med Service. It would be routinebehavior. 

Suspenseful, second-by-second reports. The volunteer had rocketedhimself across the emptiness between the two again separated ships. Hehad opened the airlock from outside. He'd gone in. He'd closed theouter airlock door. He'd opened the inner. He reported--

The relayed report was almost incoherent, what with horror andincredulity and the feeling of doom that came upon the volunteer. Theship was a bulk-cargo ore-carrier, designed to run between Orede andWeald with cargos of heavy-metal ores and a crew of no more than fivemen. There was no cargo in her holds now, though. 

Instead, there were men. They packed the ship. They filled thecorridors. They had crawled into every space where a man could findroom to push himself. There were hundreds of them. It was insanity. And it had been greater insanity still for the ship to have taken offwith so preposterous a load of living creatures. 

But they weren't living any longer. The air apparatus had beendesigned for a crew of five. It would purify the air for possiblytwenty or more. But there were hundreds of men in hiding as well as inplain view in the cargo ship from Orede. There were many, many timesmore than her air apparatus and reserve tanks could possibly havetaken care of. They couldn't even have been fed during the journeyfrom Orede to Weald. 

But they hadn't starved. Air-scarcity killed them before the ship cameout of overdrive. 

A remarkable thing was that there was no written message in the ship'slog which referred to its takeoff. There was no memorandum of thetaking on of such an impossible number of passengers. 

"The blueskins did it, " said the chief executive of Weald. He waspale. All about Calhoun men looked sick and shocked and terrified. "Itwas the blueskins! We'll have to teach them a lesson!" Then he turnedto Calhoun. "The volunteer who went on that ship--he'll have to staythere, won't he? He can't be brought back to Weald without bringingcontagion. "

Calhoun raged at him. 

 * * * * *

2

There was a certain coldness in the manner of those at the Wealdspaceport when the Med Ship left next morning. Calhoun was not popularbecause Weald was scared. It had been conditioned to scare easily, where blueskins might be involved. Its children were trained to reactexplosively when the word _blueskin_ was uttered in their hearing, andits adults tended to say it when anything causing uneasiness enteredtheir minds. So a planet-wide habit of irrational response had formedand was not seen to be irrational because almost everybody had it. 

The volunteer who'd discovered the tragedy on the ship from Orede wassafe, though. He'd made a completely conscientious survey of the shiphe'd volunteered to enter and examine. For his courage, he'd have beendoomed but for Calhoun. 

The reaction of his fellow citizens was that by entering the ship hemight have become contaminated by blueskin infectious material of theplague still existed, and _if_ the men in the ship had caught it (butthey certainly hadn't died of it), and _if_ there had been blueskinson Orede to communicate it (for which there was no evidence), and _if_blueskins were responsible for the tragedy. Which was at the momentpure supposition. But Weald feared he might bring death back to Wealdif he were allowed to return. 

Calhoun saved his life. He ordered that the guardship admit him to itsairlock, which then was to be filled with steam and chlorine. Thecombination would sterilize and even partly eat away his spacesuit, after which the chlorine and steam should be bled out to space, andair from the ship let into the lock. 

If he stripped off the spacesuit without touching its outer surface, and reentered the investigating ship while the suit was flung outsideby a man in another spacesuit, handling it with a pole he'd flingafter it, there could be no possible contamination brought back. 

Calhoun was quite right, but Weald in general considered that he'dpersuaded the government to take an unreasonable risk. 

There were other reasons for disapproving of him. Calhoun had beenunpleasantly frank. The coming of the death-ship stirred to frenzythose people who believed that all blueskins should be exterminated asa pious act. They'd appeared on every vision screen, citing not onlythe ship from Orede but other incidents which they interpreted ascrimes against Weald. 

They demanded that all Wealdian atomic reactors be modified to turnout fusion-bomb materials while a space fleet was made ready for ananti-blueskin crusade. They confidently demanded such a rain of fusionbombs on Dara that no blueskin, no animal, no shred of vegetation, nofish in the deepest ocean, not even a living virus particle of theblueskin plague could remain alive on the blueskin world. 

One of these vehement orators even asserted that Calhoun agreed thatno other course was possible, speaking for the Interstellar MedicalService. And Calhoun furiously demanded a chance to deny it bybroadcast, and he made a bitter and indiscreet speech from which aplanet-wide audience inferred that he thought them fools. 

He did. 

So he was definitely unpopular when his ship lifted from Weald. He'dcurtly given his destination as Orede, from which the death-ship hadcome. The landing-grid locked on, raised the small spacecraft untilWeald was a great shining ball below it, and then somehow scornfullycast him off. The Med Ship was free, in clear space where there wasnot 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 ofdizziness, of nausea, and of a spiraling fall to nothingness. Thenthere was silence. 

The Med Ship actually moved at a rate which was a preposterous numberof times the speed of light, but it felt absolutely solid, absolutelyfirm and fixed. A ship in overdrive feels exactly as if it were burieddeep in the core of a planet. There is no vibration. There is no signof anything but solidity and, if one looks out a port, there is onlyutter blackness plus an absence of sound fit to make one's eardrumscrack. 

But within seconds random tiny noises began. There was a reel andthere were sound-speakers to keep the ship from sounding like a grave. The reel played and the speakers gave off minute creakings, andmeaningless hums, and very tiny noises of every imaginable sort, allof which were just above the threshold of the inaudible. 

Calhoun fretted. Sector Twelve was in very bad shape. A conscientiousMed Service man would never have let the anti-blueskin obsession gounmentioned in a report on Weald. Health is not only a physicalaffair. There is mental health, also. When mental health goes acivilization can be destroyed more surely and more terribly than byany imaginable war or plague germs. A plague kills off those who aresusceptible to it, leaving immunes to build up a world again. Butimmunes are the first to be killed when a mass neurosis sweeps apopulation. 

Weald was definitely a Med Service problem world. Dara was another. And when hundreds of men jammed themselves into a cargo spaceshipwhich could not furnish them with air to breathe, and took off andwent into overdrive before the air could fail. .. . Orede called for noless of worry. 

"I think, " said Calhoun dourly, "that I'll have some coffee. "

_Coffee_ was one of the words that Murgatroyd recognized. Ordinarilyhe stirred immediately on hearing it, and watched the coffeemaker withbright, interested eyes. He'd even tried to imitate Calhoun's motionswith it, once, and had scorched his paws in the attempt. But this timehe did not move. 

Calhoun turned his head. Murgatroyd sat on the floor, his long tailcoiled reflectively about a chair leg. He watched the door of the MedShip's sleeping cabin. 

"Murgatroyd, " said Calhoun. "I mentioned coffee!"

"_Chee!_" shrilled Murgatroyd. 

But he continued to look at the door. The temperature was kept lowerin the other cabin, and the look of things was different than thecontrol compartment. The difference was part of the means by which aman 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 samepurpose. But none of them should cause Murgatroyd to stare fixedly andfascinatedly at the sleeping cabin door. Not when coffee was in themaking!

Calhoun considered. He became angry at the immediate suspicion thatoccurred to him. As a Med Service man, he was duty-bound to beimpartial. To be impartial might mean not to side absolutely withWeald in its enmity to blueskins. 

And the people of Weald had refused to help Dara in a time of famine, and had blockaded that pariah world for years afterward. And they hadother reasons for hating the people they'd treated badly. It wasentirely reasonable for some fanatic on Weald to consider that Calhounmust be killed lest he be of help to the blueskins Weald abhorred. 

In fact, it was quite possible that somebody had stowed away on theMed Ship to murder Calhoun, so that there would be no danger of anyreport favorable to Dara ever being presented anywhere. If so, such astowaway would be in the sleeping cabin now, waiting for Calhoun towalk in unsuspiciously, only to be shot dead. 

So Calhoun made coffee. He slipped a blaster into a pocket where itwould be handy. He filled a small cup for Murgatroyd and a large onefor himself, and then a second large one. 

He tapped on the sleeping cabin door, standing aside lest ablaster-bolt come 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 sardonicallystill. "It's not polite to keep me waiting!"

He listened, alert for a rush which would be a fanatic's desperateattempt to do murder despite premature discovery. He was prepared toshoot quite ruthlessly, because he was on duty and the Med Service didnot approve of the extermination of populations, however justifiedanother population might consider it. 

But there was no rush. Instead, there came hesitant foot-falls whosesound made Calhoun start. The door of the cabin slid slowly aside. Agirl appeared in the opening, desperately white and desperatelycomposed. 

"H-how did you know I was there?" she asked shakily. She moistened herlips. "You didn't see me! I was in a closet, and you didn't even enterthe room!"

Calhoun said grimly, "I've sources of information. Murgatroyd told methis time. May I present him? Murgatroyd, our passenger. Shake hands. "

Murgatroyd moved forward, stood on his hind legs and offered a skinny, furry paw. She did not move. She stared at Calhoun. 

"Better shake hands, " said Calhoun, as grimly as before. "It mightrelax the tension a little. And do you want to tell me your story? Youhave one ready, I'm sure. "

The girl swallowed. Murgatroyd shook hands gravely. He said, "_Chee-chee!_" in the shrillest of trebles and went back to his formerposition. 

"The story?" said Calhoun insistently. 

"There--there isn't any, " said the girl unsteadily. "Just that I--Ineed to get to Orede, and you're going there. There's no other way togo, now. "

"To the contrary, " said Calhoun. "There'll undoubtedly be a fleetheading for Orede as soon as it can be assembled and armed. But I'mafraid that as a story yours isn't good enough. 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 shipfirst!"

Her hand came from behind her. There was a tiny blaster in it. But itshook 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 ofthe situation the instant he saw that the stowaway was a girl. Now hehad to make another when her threat was not to kill him but to disablethe ship. Women are rarely assassins, and when they are they don't useenergy weapons. Daggers and poisons are more typical. But this girlthreatened to destroy the ship rather than its owner, so she was notactually an assassin at all. 

"I'd rather you didn't do that, " said Calhoun dryly. "Besides, you'dget deadly bored if we were stuck in a derelict waiting for our airand food to give out. "

Murgatroyd, for no reason whatever, felt it necessary to enter theconversation:

"_Chee-chee-chee!_"

"A very sensible suggestion, " observed Calhoun. "We'll sit down andhave 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 have a sweetheart there. .. . "

Calhoun shook his head. 

"No, " he said reprovingly. "Nearly all the mining colony had packeditself into the ship that came into Weald with everybody dead. But notall. And there's been no check of what men were in the ship and whatmen weren't. You wouldn't go to Orede if it were likely yoursweetheart had died on the way to you. Here's your coffee. Sugar orsaccho, 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 hespoke out of anger or something else--"we are do-gooders. We go aroundtrying to keep people from getting sick or dying. Sometimes we eventry to keep them from getting killed. It's our profession. We practiseit even on our own behalf. We want to stay alive. So since you makesuch 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 somethingmore believable presently. When did you eat last?"

"Yesterday. "

"Would you rather do your own cooking?" asked Calhoun politely. "Orwould you permit me to ready a snack?"

"I--I'll do it, " she said. 

She drank her coffee first, however, and then Calhoun showed her howto punch the readier for such-and-such dishes, to be extracted fromstorage and warmed or chilled, as the case might be, and served atdialed-for intervals. There was also equipment for preparing food foroneself, in one's own chosen manner--again an item to help makesolitude not unendurable. 

Calhoun deliberately immersed himself in the Galactic Directory, looking up the planet Orede. He was headed there, but he'd had noreason to inform himself about it before. Now he read with everyappearance of absorption. 

The girl ate daintily. Murgatroyd watched with highly amiableinterest. But she looked acutely uncomfortable. 

Calhoun finished with the Directory. He got out the micro-film reelswhich contained more information. He was specifically after the MedService history of all the planets in this sector. He went through thefilmed record of every inspection ever made on Weald and on Dara. 

But Sector Twelve had not been run well. There was no adequate accountof a plague which had wiped out three-quarters of the population of aninhabited planet! It had happened shortly after one Med Ship visit, and was over before another Med Ship came by. 

There should have been a painstaking investigation, even after thefact. There should have been a collection of infectious material and areasonably complete identification and study of the agent. It hadn'tbeen made. There was probably some other emergency at the time, and itslipped by. Calhoun, whose career was not to be spent in this sector, resolved on a blistering report about this negligence and itsconsequences. 

He kept himself casually busy, ignoring the girl. A Med Ship man hasresources of study and meditation with which to occupy himself duringoverdrive travel from one planet to another. Calhoun made use of thoseresources. He acted as if he were completely unconscious of thestowaway. 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 putyou out the airlock. It doesn't seem necessary. There's a cabin. Whenyou're sleepy, use it. Murgatroyd and I can make out quite well outhere. 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 youhave there. That's all. "

She stared at him. 

"But you don't believe what I've told you!"

"No, " agreed Calhoun, but didn't add to the statement. 

"But--I will tell you, " she offered. "The police were after me. I hadto 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 worldexcept 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 getsome sleep. Incidentally, there's no lock on the cabin door becausethere's only supposed to be one person on this ship at a time. But youcan brace a chair to fasten it somehow or other. Good night. "

She rose slowly. Twice her lips parted as if to speak again, but thenshe went into the other cabin and closed herself in. There was thesound of a chair being wedged against the door. 

Murgatroyd blinked at the place where she'd disappeared and thenclimbed up into Calhoun's lap, with complete assurance of welcome. Hesettled 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 placeshe'd dread worse than Orede, which would be Dara. But I doubt she'dbe afraid to land even on Dara. "

Murgatroyd liked to be talked to. He liked to pretend that he carriedon a conversation, like humans. 

"_Chee-chee!_" he said with conviction. 

"Definitely, " agreed Calhoun. "She's not doing this for her personaladvantage. Whatever she thinks she'd doing, it's more important to herthan her own life. Murgatroyd. .. . "

"_Chee?_" said Murgatroyd in an inquiring tone. 

"There are wild cattle on Orede, " said Calhoun. "Herds and herds ofthem. I have a suspicion that somebody's been shooting them. Lots ofthem. Do you agree? Don't you think that a lot of cattle have beenslaughtered on Orede lately?"

Murgatroyd yawned. He settled himself still more comfortably inCalhoun's lap. 

"_Chee_, " he said drowsily. 

He went to sleep, while Calhoun continued the examination of highlycondensed information. Presently he looked up the normal rate ofincrease, with other data, among herds of _bovis domesticus_ in a wildstate, on planets where there are no natural enemies. 

It wasn't unheard-of for a world to be stocked with useful types ofTerran fauna and flora before it was attempted to be colonized. Terranlife-forms could play the devil with alien ecological systems--verymuch to humanity's benefit. Familiar microorganisms and a standardvegetation added to the practicality of human settlements on otherwisealien worlds. But sometimes the results were strange. 

They weren't often so strange, however, as to cause some hundreds ofmen to pack themselves frantically aboard a cargo ship which couldn'tpossibly sustain them, so that every man must die while the ship wasin overdrive. 

Still, by the time Calhoun turned in on a spare pneumatic mattress, hehad calculated that as few as a dozen head of cattle, turned loose ona suitable planet, would have increased to herds of thousands or tensor even hundreds of thousands in much less time than had probablyelapsed. 

The Med Ship drove on in seemingly absolute solidity, with no soundfrom without, with no sight to be seen outside, with no evidence atall that it was not buried in the heart of a planet instead offlashing through emptiness at a speed so great as to have no meaning. 

Next ship-day the girl looked oddly at Calhoun when she appeared inthe control room. Murgatroyd regarded her with great interest. Calhounnodded politely and went back to what he'd been doing before sheappeared. 

"Shall I have breakfast?" she asked uncertainly. 

"Murgatroyd and I have, " he told her. "Why not?"

Silently, she operated the food-readier. She ate. Calhoun gave a verygood portrayal of a man who will respond politely when spoken to, butwho was busy with activities 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 tragedyin the ship. "

"I don't know, " said Calhoun. "But I disagree with the authorities onWeald. I don't think it was a planned atrocity of the blueskins. "

"Wh-what are blueskins?" asked the girl. 

Calhoun turned around and looked at her directly. 

"When lying, " he said mildly, "you tell as much by what you pretendisn't, as by what you pretend is. You know what blueskins are!"

"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 skinhad little scar pits here and there. At one time, back on Earth, itwas expected that everybody would catch smallpox sooner or later, anda large percentage would die of it. 

"And it was so much a matter of course that if they printed a pictureof a criminal they never mentioned it if he were pock-marked. It wasno distinction. But if he didn't have the markings, they'd mentionthat!" He paused. "Those pock-marks weren't hereditary, but otherwisea 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 everwent monkey. "

She turned abruptly away. But she glanced at him often during thatday. He continued to busy himself with those activities which make MedShip life consistent with retained sanity. 

Next day she asked without preliminary, "Don't you believe theblueskins planned for the ship with the dead men to arrive at Wealdand spread plague there?"

"No, " said Calhoun. 

"Why?"

"It couldn't possibly work, " Calhoun told her. "With only dead men onboard, the ship wouldn't arrive at a place where the landing-gridcould bring it down. So that would be no good. And plague-strickenliving men wouldn't try to conceal that they had the plague. Theymight ask for help, but they'd know they'd instantly be killed onWeald if they were found to be plague victims. So that would be nogood, 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 humanrace. You're slipping, though. When using the word _blueskin_ youshould say it uncomfortably, as if it were a word no refined personliked to pronounce. You don't. We'll land on Orede tomorrow, by theway. If you ever intend to tell me the truth, there's not much timeleft. "

She bit her lips. Twice, during the remainder of the day, she facedhim and opened her mouth as if to speak, and then turned away again. Calhoun shrugged. He had fairly definite ideas about her, by now. Hecarefully kept them tentative, but no girl born and raised on Wealdwould willingly go to Orede, with all of Weald believing that ashipload of miners preferred death to remaining there. It tied in, like everything else that was unpleasant, to blueskins. Nobody fromWeald would dream of landing on Orede! Not now!

A little before the Med Ship was due to break out from overdrive, thegirl said very carefully, "You've been very kind. I'd like to thankyou. I--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 addedregretfully. "I think you're . .. Really decent. But some thing. .. . "

Calhoun said caustically, "You've told me a great deal. You weren'tborn on Weald. You weren't raised there. The people of Dara--noticethat I don't say blueskins, though they are--the people of Dara havemade at least one space ship since Weald threatened them withextermination. There is probably a new food shortage on Dara now, leading to pure desperation. Most likely it's bad enough to make themrisk landing on Orede to kill cattle and freeze beef to help. They'veworked out--"

She gasped and sprang to her feet. She snatched out the tiny blasterin 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 offthe safety, Calhoun twisted the weapon from her fingers. He steppedback. 

"Good girl!" he said approvingly. "I'll give this back to you when weland. And thanks. Thanks very much!"

She wrung her hands. Then she stared at him. 

"Thanks? When I tried to kill you?"

"Of course!" said Calhoun. "I'd made guesses. I couldn't know thatthey 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 intouch with your friends. It's going to be tricky, because they must bepretty well scared about that ship. But it's a highly desirable thingto get done!"

He went to the ships' control board and sat down before it. 

"Twenty minutes to breakhour, " 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 toMurgatroyd, while the girl was fascinating. 

They'd made friends, awkwardly on the girl's part, very pleasantly onMurgatroyd's. But only moments ago there had been bitter emotion inthe air. Murgatroyd had fled to his cubbyhole to escape it. He wasdistressed. 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 wearen't blasted as we try to land, we should be able to make friendswith everybody and get something accomplished. "

The statement was hopelessly inaccurate. 

 * * * * *

3

There was no answer from the ground when breakout came and Calhoundrove the Med Ship to a favourable position for a call. He patientlyrepeated, over and over again, that the Med Ship _Aesclipus Twenty_notified its arrival and requested coordinates for landing. He addedthat its mass was fifty standard tons and that the purpose of itsvisit was a planetary health inspection. 

But there was no reply. There should have been a crisp description ofthe direction from the planet's center at which, a certain time somany hours or minutes later, the force-fields of the grid would findit convenient to lock onto and lower the Med Ship. But thecommunicator remained silent. 

"There is a landing-grid, " said Calhoun, frowning, "and if they'reusing 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. Maybethey 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 know, I might. So if I land on emergencyrockets the blueskins down below may decide that I come from Weald. And in that case it would be reasonable to blast me before I couldland and unload some fighting men. On the other hand, no ship fromWeald would conceivably land without impassioned assurance that itwas safe. It would drop bombs. " He turned to the girl. "How manyDarians down below?"

She shook her head. 

"You don't know, " said Calhoun, "or won't tell, yet. But they ought tobe told about the arrival of that ship at Weald, and what Weald thinksabout it! My guess is that you came to tell them. It isn't likely thatDara gets news directly from Weald. Where were you put ashore fromDara, when you set out to be a spy?"

Her lips parted to speak, but she compressed them tightly. She shookher head again. 

"It must have been plenty far away, " said Calhoun restlessly. "Yourpeople 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 landednobody would think of Dara. They'd use make-up to cover the bluespots, but maybe it was so far away that blueskins had never beenheard of!"

Her face looked pinched, but she did not reply. 

"Then they'd land half a dozen of you, with a supply of make-up forthe blue patches. And you'd separate, and take ships that went variousroundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by one, to see what could bedone there to--" He stopped. "When did you find out positively thatthere 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 fromDara. You've been on Weald. It's practically certain that there areother . .. Agents, if you like that word better, on Weald. And therehasn't been a plague on Weald so you people aren't carriers of it. Butyou knew it in advance, I think. How'd you learn? Did a ship in somesort of trouble land there, on Dara?"

"Y--yes, " said the girl. "We wouldn't let it go again. But the peopledidn'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 planetarydiameters from Orede, now, and the electron telescope showed shiningstars in leisurely motion across its screen. Then a huge, gibbousshining shape appeared, and there were irregular patches of that muddycolor which is seabottom, and varicolored areas which were plains andforests. Also there were mountains. Calhoun steadied the image, andsquinted 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, anda single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to findby random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting forsport would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. Soif they found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperatezone. 

Cattle would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The minewould not be on a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would benear the edge of mountains, not far from a prairie such as wild cattlewould 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. Itcould 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 atemperate zone. He found a speck. He enlarged it manyfold. It was themine on Orede. There were heaps of tailings. There was something whichcast a long, lacy shadow: the landing-grid. 

"But they don't answer our call, " observed Calhoun, "so we go downunwelcomed. "

He inverted the Med Ship and the emergency rockets boomed. The shipplunged planetward. 

A long time later it was deep in the planet's atmosphere. The noise ofits rockets had become thunderous, with air to carry and to reinforcethe sound. 

"Hold on to something, Murgatroyd, " commanded Calhoun. "We may have tododge 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 continuedto descend. It was not directly above the grid. 

It swept downward until almost level with the peaks of the mountainsin which the mine lay. It tilted again, and swept onward over themountaintops, and then tilted once more and went racing up the valleyin which the landing-grid was plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on anerratic course, lest there be opposition. 

But there was no sign. Then the rockets bellowed, and the ship slowedits forward motion, hovered momentarily, and settled to solidityoutside the framework of the grid. The grid was small, as Calhounreasoned. But it reached interminably toward the sky. 

The rockets cut off. Slender as the flames had been, they'd melted andbored thin drill-holes deep into the soil. Molten rock boiled andbubbled down below. But there seemed no other sound. There was noother motion. There was absolute stillness all around. But whenCalhoun switched on the outside microphones a faint, sweet melange ofhigh-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures hidden under thevegetation 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 certaingrimness. "I don't quite believe what the vision screens show. "

Minutes later he stepped down to the ground from the Med Ship's exitport. The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet from what once hadbeen a wooden building. In it, ore from the mines was concentrated andthe useless tailings carried away by a conveyer belt to make amonstrous pile of broken stone. But there was no longer a building. 

Next to it there had been a structure containing an ore-crusher. Themassive machinery could still be seen, but the structure was infragments. Next to that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters ofthe mine. They also were shattered practically to matchsticks. 

The look of the ground about the building sites was simply and purelyimpossible. It was a mass of hoofprints. Cattle by thousands and tensof thousands had trampled everything. Cattle had burst in the woodensides of the buildings. Cattle had piled themselves up against thebeams upholding roofs until the buildings collapsed. 

Then cattle had gone plunging over the wrecked buildings until therewas nothing left but indescribable chaos. Many, many cattle had diedin the crush. There were heaps of dead beasts about the metal girderswhich were the foundation of the landing-grid. The air was tainted bythe smell of carrion. 

The settlement had been destroyed, positively by stampeded cattle intens or hundreds of thousands charging blindly through and over andupon it. Senselessly, they'd trampled each other to horribleshapelessness. The mine shaft was not choked, because enormouslystrong timbers had fallen across and blocked it. But everything elsewas pure destruction. 

Calhoun said evenly, "Clever! Very clever! You can't blame men whenbeasts stampede. We should accept the evidence that some monstrousherd, making its way through a mountain pass, somehow went crazy andbolted for the plains. This settlement got in the way and it was toobad for the settlement! Everything's explained, except the ship thatwent to Weald. 

"A cattle stampede, yes. Anybody can believe that! But there was a manstampede. Men stampeded into the ship as blindly as the cattletrampled down this little town. The ship stampeded off into space asinsanely as the cattle. But a stampede of men and cattle, in the sameplace? That's a little too much!"

"But what--"

"How, " asked Calhoun directly, "do you intend to get in touch withyour friends here?"

"I--I don't know, " she said, distressed. "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 undesirablething, here, would be human footprints on top of cattle tracks. Ifyour friends are a meat-getting party from Dara, as I believe, theyshould cover up their tracks, get off-planet as fast as possible, andpray that no signs of their former presence are ever discovered. Thatwould 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 but so much time here. "

"You can leave me here. .. . "

He grunted and turned away. It was naturally unthinkable that heshould leave another human being on a supposedly uninhabited planet, with the knowledge that it might actually be uninhabited, and thefuture knowledge that any visitors would have the strongest ofpossible reasons to hide themselves away. 

He believed that there were Darians here, and the girl in the Medship, so he also believed, was also a Darian. But any who might behiding had so much to lose if they were discovered that they might behundreds or even thousands of miles from anywhere a space ship wouldnormally land--if they hadn't fled after the incident of thespaceship's departure with its load of doomed passengers. 

Considered detachedly, the odds were that there was again a foodshortage on Dara; that blueskins, in desperation, had raided or wereraiding or would raid the cattle herds of Orede for food to carry backto their home planet; that somehow the miners on Orede had found thatthey had blueskin neighbors, and died of the consequences of theirterror. It was a risky guess to make on such evidence as Calhounconsidered he had, but no other guess was possible. 

If his guess were right, he was under some obligation to do exactlywhat he believed the girl considered her mission--to warn allblueskins that Weald would presently try to find them on Orede, whenall hell must break loose upon Dara for punishment. But if there weremen here, he couldn't leave a written warning for them in default offriendly contact. 

They might not find it, and a search party of Wealdians might. All hecould possibly do was try to make contact and give warning by suchmeans as would leave no evidence behind that he'd done so. Wealdwould consider a warning sure proof of blueskin guilt. 

It was not satisfactory to be limited to broadcasts which might ormight not be picked up, and were unlikely to be acknowledged. But hesettled down with the communicator to make the attempt. 

He called first on a GC wave length and form. It was unlikely thatblueskins would use general communication bands to keep in touch witheach other, but it had to be tried. He broadcast, tuned as broadly aspossible, and went up and down the GC spectrum, repeating his warningpainstakingly and listening without hope for a reply. 

He did find one spot on the dial where there was re-radiation of hismessage, as if from a tuned receiver. But he could not get a fix onit: nobody might be listening. He exhausted the normal communicationpattern. Then he broadcast on old-fashioned amplitude modulation whicha modern communicator would not pick up at all, and which thereforemight be used by men in hiding. 

He worked for a long time. Then he shrugged and gave it up. He'drepeated to absolute tedium the facts that any Darians--blueskins--onOrede ought to know. There'd been no answer. And it was all too likelythat if he'd been received, that those who heard him took his messagefor a trick to discover if there were any hearers. 

He clicked off at last and stood up, shaking his head. Suddenly theMed Ship seemed empty. Then he saw Murgatroyd staring vexedly at theexit port. The inner door of that small airlock was closed. Thetelltale light said the outer door was not locked. Someone had goneout 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'dbeen left behind. He and the girl were close friends, now. If she'dleft Murgatroyd in the ship when he wanted to go with her, then shewasn't coming back. 

Calhoun swore. He made certain she was not in the ship. He flipped theoutside-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 voicewas by the speakers, she should hear him within a mile. She did notappear. He went to a small and inconspicuous closet and armed himself. A Med Ship man was not ever expected to fight, but there wereblast-rifles available for extreme emergency. 

When he'd slung a power-pack over his shoulder and reached theairlock, there was still no sign of his late stowaway. He stood in theairlock door for long minutes, staring angrily about. Almost certainlyshe wouldn't be looking in the mountains for men of Dara come here forcattle. He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification tosearch as wide an area down-valley as possible, and then at highestpower to search the most likely routes. 

He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a faraway hill crest. It washer head. It went down below the hilltop. 

He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when the _tormal_ was on theground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobodybut 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 tobe idiots too!"

He set out in pursuit. 

There was blue sky overhead, as was inevitable on anyoxygen-atmosphere planet of a Sol-type yellow sun. There weremountains, as is universal in planets whose surface rises and fallsand folds and bends from the effects of weather or vulcanism. Therewere plants, as has come about wherever microorganisms have brokendown rock to a state where it can nourish vegetation. And naturallythere were animals. 

There were even trees of severely practical design, and underbrush andground-cover equivalent to grass. There was, in short, a perfectlypredictable ecological system on Orede. The organic molecules involvedin life here would be made up of the same elements in the samecombinations as elsewhere where the same conditions of temperature andmoisture and sunshine obtained. 

It was a distinctly Earthlike world, as it could not help but be, andit was reasonable for cattle to thrive and increase here. Only men'sminds kept it from being a place where humans would thrive, too. 

But only Calhoun would have considered the splintered settlement aproof of that last. 

The girl had a long start. Twice Calhoun came to places where shecould have chosen either of two ways onward. Each time he had todetermine which she'd followed. That cost time. Then the mountainsabruptly ended and a vast undulating plain stretched away to thehorizon. There were at least two large masses and many smaller clumpsof 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 wasand 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 settlementtold 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 theplanet, they'd keep the landing-grid under observation. 

If they saw her leave that area and could see that she was alone, theyshould intercept her to find out the meaning of the Med Ship'slanding. Then she could identify herself as one of them and give themthe terribly necessary warning of Weald's suspicions. 

"But, " said Calhoun sourly, "if she's right, they'll have seen memarching after her now, which spoils her scheme. And I'd like to helpit, but the way she's going is too dangerous!"

He went down into one of the hollows of the uneven plain. He saw aclump of a dozen or so cattle a little distance away. The bull lookedup and snorted. The cows regarded him truculently. Their air was notone of bovine tranquility. 

He was up the farther hillside and out of sight before the bull workedhimself up to a charge. Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of theitems in the data about cattle he'd looked into just the other day. Hefelt himself grow pale. 

"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply. "We've got to catch up! Fast! Stay withme if you can, but--" he was jog-trotting as he spoke--"even if youget lost I have to hurry!"

He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces. He ran fifty and walkedfifty. He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground. She came to a fullstop. He ran. He saw her turn to retrace her steps. He flung off thesafety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the groundfor her to hear. 

Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him. He plunged on. Shevanished down into a hollow. Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'djust left. Cattle appeared. Four, a dozen fifteen, twenty! They movedominously in her wake. 

He saw her again, running frantically over another upward swell ofthe prairie. He let off another blast to guide her. He ran on at topspeed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind. From time to timeMurgatroyd called "_Chee-chee-chee!_" in frightened pleading not to beabandoned. 

More cattle appeared against the horizon. Fifty or a hundred. Theycame after the first clump. The first group of a bull and his haremwere moving faster, now. The girl fled from them, but it is theinstinct of beef-cattle on the open range--Calhoun had learned it onlytwo days before--to charge any human they find on foot. A mounted manto their dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but ahuman 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 cows, many times more deadly, charged with their eyes wide open and wickedlyalert, and with a lumbering speed much greater than the girl couldmanage. 

She came up over the last rise, chalky-white and gasping, her hairflying, in the last extremity of terror. The nearest of the pursuingcattle were within ten yards when Calhoun fired from twenty yardsbeyond. One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck. 

It went down and others crashed into it and swept over it, and morecame on. The girl saw Calhoun now, and ran toward him, panting. Heknelt very deliberately and began to check the charge by shooting theleading animals. 

He did not succeed. There were more cattle following the first, andmore and more behind them. It appeared that all the cattle on theplain joined in the blind and senseless charge. The thudding of hoofsbecame a mutter and then a rumble and then a growl. 

Plunging, clumsy figures rushed past on either side. But horns andheads heaved up over the mound of animals Calhoun had shot. He shotthem too. More and more cattle came pounding past the rampart of hisvictims, but always, it seemed, some elected to climb the heap oftheir dead and dying fellows, and Calhoun shot and shot. .. . 

But he split the herd. The foremost animals had been charging asighted human enemy. Others had followed because it is the instinct ofcattle to join their running fellows in whatever crazed urgency theyfeel. There was a dense, pounding, wailing, grunting, puffing, raisingthick and impenetrable clouds of dust which hid everything butgalloping beasts going past on either side. 

It lasted for minutes. Then the thunder of hoofs diminished. It endedabruptly, and Calhoun and the girl were left alone with the gruesomepile of animals which had divided the charging herd into two parts. They could see the rears of innumerable running animals, stupidlycontinuing the charge, hardly different, now, from a stampede, whoseoriginal objective none now remembered. 

Calhoun thoughtfully touched the barrel of his blast-rifle and wincedat its scorching heat. 

"I just realized, " he said coldly, "that I don't know your name. Whatis it?"

"Maril, " said the girl. She swallowed. "Th--thank you. "

"Maril, " said Calhoun, "you are an idiot! It was half-witted at bestto go off by yourself! You could have been lost! You could have costme days of hunting for you, days badly needed for more importantmatters!"

He stopped and took breath. "You may have spoiled what little chanceI've got to do something about the plans Weald's already making! Youhave just acted with the most concentrated folly, and the mostmagnificent imbecility that you or anybody else could manage!"

He said more bitterly still, "And I had to leave Murgatroyd behind toget 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 tothe 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 ofstill-roiling dust, Murgatroyd appeared forlornly. He wasdust-covered, and draggled, and his tail dropped, and he sneezedagain. He moved as if he could barely put one paw before another, butat sight of Calhoun he sneezed yet again and said "_Chee!_" in adisconsolate voice. Then he sat down and waited for Calhoun to comeand pick him up. 

When Calhoun did so, Murgatroyd clung to him pathetically and said"_Chee-chee!_" and again "_Chee-chee!_" with the intonation of onetelling of incredible horrors and disasters endured. And as a matterof fact the escape of a small animal like Murgatroyd was remarkable. He'd escaped the trampling hoofs of at least hundreds of charginganimals. Luck must have played a great part in it, but an hystericalagility in dodging must have been required, too. 

Calhoun headed back for the valley where the settlement had been, andthe Med Ship was. Murgatroyd clung to his neck. The girl Marilfollowed discouragedly. She was at that age when girls--and men ofcorresponding type--can grow most passionately devoted to ideals orcauses in default of a promising personal romance. When concerned withsuch causes they become splendidly confident that whatever they decideto do is sensible if only it is dramatic. But Maril was shaken, now. 

Calhoun did not speak to her again. He led the way. A mile back towardthe mountains, they began to see stragglers from the now-vanishedherd. A little farther, those stragglers began to notice them. Itwould have been a matter of no moment if they'd been domesticateddairy cattle, but these were range cattle gone wild. Twice, Calhounhad to use his blast-rifle to discourage incipient charges byirritated bulls or even more irritated cows. Those with calves darklysuspected Calhoun of designs upon their offspring. 

It was a relief to enter the valley again. But it was two miles moreto the landing-grid with the Med Ship beside it and the reek ofcarrion in the air. 

They were perhaps two hundred feet from the ship when a blast-riflecrashed and its bolt whined past Calhoun so close that he felt themonstrous heat. There had been no challenge. There was no warning. There was simply a shot which came horribly close to ending Calhoun'scareer in a completely arbitrary fashion. 

 * * * * *

4

Five minutes later Calhoun had located one would-be killer behind amass of splintered planking that once had been a wall. He set the woodafire by a blaster-bolt and then viciously sent other bolts all aroundthe man it had sheltered when he fled from the flames. He could havekilled him ten times over, but it was more desirable to opencommunication. So he missed intentionally. 

Maril had cried out that she came from Dara and had word for them, butthey did not answer. There were three men with heavy-dutyblast-rifles. One was the one Calhoun had burned out of his hidingplace. That man's rifle exploded when the flames hit it. Two remained. 

One, so Calhoun presently discovered--was working his way behindunderbrush to a shelf from which he could shoot down at Calhoun. Calhoun had dropped into a hollow and pulled Maril to cover at thefirst shot. The second man happily planned to get to a point where hecould 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, hopingthere was no protection from that direction for Calhoun. It would takesome time for him to manage it. 

So Calhoun industriously concentrated his fire on the man trying toget above him. He was behind a boulder, not too dissimilar toCalhoun's breastwork. Calhoun set fire to the brush at the point atwhich the other man aimed. That, then, made his effort useless. 

Then Calhoun sent a dozen bolts at the other man's rocky shield. Itheated up. Steam rose in a whitish mass and blew directly away fromCalhoun. He saw that antagonist flee. He saw him so clearly that hewas positive that there was a patch of blue pigment on the right-handside of the back of his neck. 

He grunted and swung to find the third. That man moved through thickundergrowth, and Calhoun set it on fire in a neat pattern of spreadingflames. Evidently, these men had had no training in battle tacticswith blast-rifles. The third man also had to get away. He did. Butsomething from him arched through the smoke. It fell to the grounddirectly upwind from Calhoun. White smoke puffed up violently. 

It was instinct that made Calhoun react as he did. He jerked the girlMaril to her feet and rushed her toward the Med Ship. Smoke from theflung bomb upwind barely swirled around him and missed Marilaltogether. Calhoun, though, got a whiff of something strange, notscorched or burning vegetation at all. He ceased to breathe andplunged 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 musclestwitched and tensed. He felt extraordinary symptoms like an extreme ofagitation. He swore, but a Med Ship man would not react to suchsymptoms as a non-medically-trained man would have done. Calhoun wasfamiliar enough with tear gas, used by police on some planets. 

But this was different and worse. Even as he helped and urged Marilonward, he automatically considered his sensations, and had it--panicgas. Police did not use it because panic is worse than rioting. Calhoun felt all the physical symptoms of fear and of gibberingterror. 

A man whose mind yields to terror experiences certain physicalsensations: wildly beating heart, tensed and twitching muscles, and afrantic impulse to convulsive action. A man in whom those physicalsensations are induced by other means will, ordinarily, find his mindyielding to terror. 

Calhoun couldn't combat his feelings, but his clinical attitudeenabled him to act despite them. The three from Weald reached the baseof the Med Ship. One of their enemies had lost his rifle and need notbe counted. Another had fled from flames and might be ignored for somemoments, anyhow. But a blast-bolt struck the ship's metal hull onlyfeet from Calhoun, and he whipped around to the other side and letloose a staccato rat-tat-tat of fire which emptied the rifle of allits charges. 

Then he opened the airlock door, hating the fact that he shook andtrembled. He urged the girl and Murgatroyd in. He slammed the outerairlock door just as another blast-bolt hit. 

"They--they don't realize, " said Maril desperately. "If they onlyknew. .. . "

"Talk to them, if you like, " said Calhoun. His teeth chattered and heraged, 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 toincrease the oxygenation of the bloodstream and muscles, and to makesuperhuman exertion possible if necessary. 

Breathing ninety-five percent oxygen produced the effect theterror-inspiring gas strove for, so his heart slowed nearly to normaland his body relaxed. He held out his hand and it did not tremble. He'd been affronted to see it shake uncontrollably when he pushed themicrophone button for Maril. 

He turned to her. She hadn't spoken into the mike. 

"They may not be from Dara!" she said shakily. "I just thought! Theycould be somebody else, maybe criminals who planned to raid the minefor a shipload of its ore. "

"Nonsense, " said Calhoun. "I saw one of them clearly enough to besure. But they're skeptical characters. I'm afraid there may be moreon the way here from wherever they keep themselves. Anyhow, now weknow some of them are in hearing! I'll take advantage of that andwe'll go on. "

He took the microphone. An instant later his voice boomed in thestillness outside the ship, cutting through the thin shrill whirringof 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 thecargo ship from here arrived with everybody on board dead. On Wealdthey don't know how it happened, but they suspect blueskins. Sooner orlater they'll search here. 

"Get away! Cover up your tracks! Hide all signs that you've ever beenhere! Get the hell away, fast! One more warning! There's talk offusion-bombing Dara. They're scared! If they find your traces, they'llbe still more scared! So cover up your tracks and get away from here!"

The many-times-multiplied voice rolled and echoed among the hills. Butit was very clear. Where it could be heard it could be understood, andit 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'veoutsmarted themselves! Hold hard, Murgatroyd!"

The rockets bellowed. Then there was a tremendous noise to end allnoises, and the ship began to climb. It sped up and up and up. By thetime it was out of atmosphere it had velocity enough to coast to clearspace and Calhoun cut the rockets altogether. 

He busied himself with those astrogational chores which began withorienting oneself to galactic directions after leaving a planet whichrotates at its own individual speed. Then one computes the overdrivecourse to another planet, from the respecting coordinates of the worldone is leaving and the one one aims for. 

Then, in this case at any rate, there was the very finicky task ofpicking out a fourth-magnitude star of whose planets one was hisdestination. 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 sensationof falling in a wildly unlikely spiral. Then stillness, and solidity, and the blackness outside the Med Ship. The little craft was inoverdrive again. 

After a long while, the girl Maril said uneasily, "I don't know whatyou plan now--"

"I'm going to Dara, " said Calhoun. "On Orede I tried to get theblueskins there to get going, fast. Maybe I succeeded. I don't know. But this thing's been mishandled! Even if there's a famine peopleshouldn't do things out of desperation! Being desperate jogs the brainoff-center. One doesn't think straight!"

"I know now that I was . .. Very foolish. "

"Forget it, " commanded Calhoun. "I wasn't talking about you. Here Irun into a situation that the Med Service should have caught andcleaned up generations ago! But it's not only a Med Serviceobligation; it's a current mess! Before I could begin to get at thebasic problem, those idiots on Orede--It'd happened before I reachedWeald! An emotional explosion triggered by a ship full of dead menthat nobody intended to kill. "

Maril shook her head. 

"Those Darian characters, " said Calhoun, annoyed, "shouldn't have goneto Orede in the first place. If they went there, they should at leasthave stayed on a continent where there were no people from Wealddigging a mine and hunting cattle for sport on their off days! Theycould be spotted! I believe they were. 

"And again, if it had been a long way from the mine installation, theycould probably have wiped out the people who sighted them before theycould get back with the news! But it looks like miners saw menhunting, and got close enough to see they were blueskins, and then gotback to the mine with the news!"

She waited for him to explain. 

"I know I'm guessing, but it fits!" he said distastefully. "Sosomething had to be done. Either the mining settlement had to be wipedout 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 cattleand it made them crazy and they charged the settlement like thefour-footed lunatics they are!

"And the blueskins used panic gas on the settlement itself as thecattle went through. It should have settled the whole business nicely. After it was over every man in the settlement would believe he'd beenout of his head for a while, and he'd have the crazy state of thesettlement to think about. 

"He wouldn't be sure of what he'd seen or heard before-hand. Theymight try to verify the blueskin story later, but they wouldn'tbelieve anything with certainty. It should have worked!"

Again she waited. 

"Unfortunately, when the miners panicked, they stampeded into theship. Also unfortunately, panic gas got into the ship with them. Sothey stayed panicked while the astrogator--in panic!--took off. Theyheaded for Weald and threw on the overdrive--which would be set forWeald anyhow--because that would be the fastest way to run away fromwhatever he imagined he feared. But he and all the men on the shipwere still crazy with panic from the gas they kept breathing untilthey died!"

Silence. After a long interval, Maril asked, "You don't think theDarians intended to kill?"

"I think they were stupid!" said Calhoun angrily. "Somebody's alwaysurging the police to use panic gas in case of public tumult. But it'stoo dangerous. Nobody knows what one man will do in a panic. Take ahundred or two or three and panic them all, and there's no limit totheir 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 intheir place, perhaps--"

"Where were you born?" asked Maril suddenly. 

Calhoun jerked his head around. "No! Not where you're guessing, orhoping. Not on Dara. Just because I act as if Darians were humandoesn't mean I have to be one! I'm a Med Service man, and I'm actingas I think I should. " His tone became exasperated. 

"Dammit, I'm supposed to deal with health situations, actual, andpossible causes of human deaths! And if Weald thinks it finds proofthat blueskins are in space again and caused the death of Wealdians, it won't be healthy! They're halfway set anyhow to drop fusion-bombson Dara to wipe it out!"

Maril said fiercely, "They might as well drop bombs. It'll be quickerthan starvation, at least!"

Calhoun looked at her, more exasperated than before. 

"It is a crop failure again?" he demanded. When she nodded he saidbitterly, "Famine conditions already?" When she nodded again he saiddrearily, "And of course famine is the great-grandfather of healthproblems! 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. Would youmind taking a book or something and going into the other cabin?Murgatroyd and I would like a little relaxation from reality. Withluck, if I go to sleep, I may only have a nightmare. It'll be aterrific improvement on what I'm in now!"

Alone in the control compartment, he tried to relax, but it was notpossible. He flung himself into a comfortable chair and brooded. Thereis brooding and brooding. It can be a form of wallowing in self-pity, engaged in for emotional satisfaction. But it can be, also, a way ofbringing out unfavorable factors in a situation. A man in optimisticmood can ignore them. But no awkward situation is likely to beremedied while any of its elements are neglected. 

Calhoun dourly considered the situation of the people of the planetDara, which it was his job as a Med Service man to remedy or at leastimprove. Those people were marked by patches of blue pigment as aninherited consequence of a plague of three generations past. Becauseof the marking, which it was easy to believe a sign of continuinginfection, they were hated and dreaded by their neighbors. Dara was aplanet of pariahs--excluded from the human race by those who fearedthem. 

And now there was famine on Dara for the second time, and they were ofno mind to starve quietly. There was food on the planet Orede, monstrous herds of cattle without owners. It was natural enough forDarians to build a ship or ships and try to bring food back to itsstarving people. But that desperately necessary enterprise had nowroused Weald to a frenzy of apprehension. 

Weald was, if possible, more hysterically afraid of blueskins thanever before, and even more implacably the enemy of the starvingplanet's population. Weald itself prospered. Ironically, it had suchan excess of foodstuffs that it stored them in unneeded spaceships inorbits about itself. 

Hundreds of thousands of tons of grain circled Weald in sealed-tighthulks, while the people of Dara starved and only dared try tosteal--if it could be called stealing--some of the innumerable wildcattle of Orede. 

The blueskins on Orede could not trust Calhoun, so they pretended notto hear. Or maybe that didn't hear. They'd been abandoned and betrayedby all of humanity off their world. They'd been threatened andoppressed by guardships in orbit about them, ready to shoot down anyspacecraft they might send aloft. .. . 

So Calhoun brooded, while Murgatroyd presently yawned and climbed tohis cubbyhole and curled up to sleep with his furry tail carefullyadjusted over his nose. 

A long time later Calhoun heard small sounds which were not normal ona Med Ship in overdrive. They were not part of the random noisescarefully generated to keep the silence of the ship endurable. Calhounraised his head. He listened sharply. No sound could come fromoutside. 

He knocked on the door of the sleeping cabin. The noises stoppedinstantly. 

"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. "Did I make a noise? I was having a bad dream. "

"I wish, " said Calhoun, "that you'd tell me the truth justoccasionally! Come out, please!"

There were stirrings. After a little it opened and Maril appeared. Shelooked as if she'd been crying. She said, quickly, "I probably lookqueer, but it's because I was asleep. "

"To the contrary, " said Calhoun, fuming. "You've been lying awakecrying. I don't know why. I've been out here wishing I could, becauseI'm frustrated. But since you aren't asleep maybe you can help me withmy job. I've figured some things out. For some others I need facts. Will you give them to me?"

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 thingsfirst, you know. But this is a first thing! So long as Darians don'tlook like the people of other worlds, they'll be believed to bedifferent. If they look repulsive, they'll be believed to be evil. 

"Tell me about those patches. They're different sizes and differentshapes and they appear in different places. You've none on your faceor hands, anyhow. "

"I haven't any at all, " said the girl reservedly. 

"I thought--"

"Not everybody, " she said defensively. "Nearly, yes. But not all. Somepeople don't have them. Some people are born with bluish splotches ontheir skin, but they fade out while they're children. When they growup they're just like the people of Weald or any other world. And theirchildren 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. 

"When you left Dara, " he said, "you were carried a long, long way, tosome planet where they'd practically never heard of Dara, and wherethe name meant nothing. You could have settled there, or anywhere elseand forgotten about Dara. But you didn't. Why not, since you're not ablueskin?"

"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 thename she'd mentioned. 

"Then your parents had the splotches fade, so you never had them, " hesaid absorbedly. "Something like that happened on Tralee, once!There's a virus, a whole group of virus particles! Normally we humansare immune to them. One has to be in terrifically bad physicalcondition 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. Murgatroyd swung down to thefloor 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 patchesappeared after the plague, didn't they? After people recovered--whenthey recovered?"

Maril stared at him. His mind was filled with strictly professionalconsiderations. He was not talking to her as a person. She was purelya source of information. 

"So I'm told, " said Maril reservedly. "Are there any more humiliatingquestions you want to ask?"

He gaped at her. Then he said ruefully, "I'm stupid, Maril, but you'retouchy. There's nothing personal--"

"There is to me!" she said fiercely. "I was born among blueskins, andthey're of my blood, and they're hated and I'd have been killed onWeald if I'd been known as . .. What I am! And there's Korvan, whoarranged for me to be sent away as a spy and advised me to do justwhat 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 yourwish. All right, there'll be no more questions. "

She turned and moved toward the door to the cabin. Calhoun lookedafter her. 

"Maril. "

"What?"

"Why were you crying?"

"You wouldn't understand, " she said evenly. 

Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He was aprofessional man. In his profession he was not incompetent. But thereis no profession in which a really competent man tries to understandwomen. Calhoun, annoyed, had to let fate or chance or disaster takecare of Maril's personal problems. He had larger matters to cope with. 

But he had something to work on, now. He hunted busily in thereference tapes. He came up with an explicit collection of informationon exactly the subject he needed. He left the control room to go downinto the storage areas of the Med Ship's hull. He found an ultrafrigid storage box, whose contents were kept at the temperature ofliquid air. 

He donned thick gloves, used a special set of tongs, and extracted atiny block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of glass wasembedded. It frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storagebox was closed again the block was covered with a thick and opaquecoating of frozen moisture. 

He went back to the control room and pulled down the panel which madeavailable a small-scale but surprisingly adequate biologicallaboratory. He set the plastic block in a container which would raiseit very, very gradually to a specific temperature and hold it there. It was, obviously, a living culture from which any imaginable quantityof the same culture could be bred. Calhoun set the apparatus withgreat exactitude. 

"This, " he told Murgatroyd, "may be a good day's work. Now I think Ican rest. "

Then, for a long while, there was no sound or movement in the MedShip. The girl may have slept, or maybe not. Calhoun lay relaxed in achair which at the touch of a button became the most comfortable ofsleeping places. Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his tail curledover his nose. 

There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable murmurings now andagain. They kept the feeling of life alive in the ship. But for suchinfinitesimal stirrings of sound, carefully recorded for this exactpurpose, the feel of the ship would have been that of a tomb. 

But it was quite otherwise when another ship-day began with the tapedsounds of morning activities as faint as echoes but neverthelessestablishing an atmosphere of their own. 

Calhoun examined the plastic block and its contents. He read theinstruments which had cared for it while he slept. He put theblock--no longer frosted--in the culture microscope and saw itsenclosed, infinitesimal particles of life in the process ofmultiplying on the food that had been frozen with them when they werereduced to the spore condition. He beamed. He replaced the block inthe incubation oven and faced the day cheerfully. 

Maril greeted him with great reserve. They breakfasted, withMurgatroyd eating from his own platter on the floor, a tiny cup ofcoffee alongside. 

"I've been thinking, " said Maril evenly. "I think I can get you ahearing for whatever ideas you may have to help Dara. "

"Kind of you, " murmured Calhoun. 

In theory, a Med Service man had all the authority needed for this orany other emergency. The power to declare a planet in quarantine, socutting it off from all interstellar commerce, should be enough toforce cooperation from any world's government. But in practice Calhounhad exactly as much power as he could exercise. 

And Weald could not think straight where blueskins were concerned, andcertainly the authorities on Dara could not be expected to belevelheaded. They had a history of isolation and outlawry, and longexperience of being regarded as less than human. In cold fact, Calhounhad no power at all. 

"May I ask whose influence you'll exert?" asked Calhoun. 

"There's a man, " said Maril reservedly, "who thinks a great deal ofme. I don't know his present official position, but he was certain tobecome prominent. I'll tell him how you've acted up to now, and yourattitude, and of course that you're Med Service. He'll be glad to helpyou, I'm sure. "

"Splendid!" said Calhoun, nodding. "That will be Korvan. "

She started. "How did you know?"

"Intuition, " said Calhoun dryly. "All right. I'll count on him. "

But he did not. He worked in the tiny biological lab all that ship-dayand all the next. The girl was very quiet. Murgatroyd tried to enterinto pretended conversation with her, but she was not able to matchhis pretense. 

On the ship-day after, the time for breakout approached. While theship was practically a world all by itself, it was easy to lookforward with confidence to the future. But when contact and, in afashion, conflict with other and larger worlds loomed nearer, prospects seemed less bright. Calhoun had definite plans, now, butthere were so many ways in which they could be frustrated. 

Calhoun sat down at the control board and watched the clock. 

"I've got things lined up, " he told Maril, "if only they work out. IfI can make somebody on Dara listen, which is unlikely, and follow myadvice, which they probably won't; and if Weald doesn't get the ideasit probably will get; and isn't doing what I suspect it is--why, maybe something can be done. "

"I'm sure you'll do your best, " said Maril politely. 

Calhoun managed to grin. He watched the clock. There was no sensationattached to overdrive travel except at the beginning and the end. Itwas now time for the end. He might find most anything having happened. His plans might immediately be seen to be hopeless. Weald could havesent ships to Dara, or Dara might be in such a state ofdesperation. .. . 

As it turned out, Dara was desperate. The Med Ship came out nearly alight-month from the sun about which the planet Dara revolved. Calhounwent into a short hop toward it. Then Dara was on the other side ofthe blazing yellow star. It took time to reach it. 

He called down, identifying himself and the ship and asking forcoordinates so his ship could be brought to ground. There wasconfusion, as if the request were so unusual that the answers were notready. The grid, too, was on the planet's night side. Presently theship was locked onto by the grid's force-fields. It went downward. 

Calhoun saw that Maril sat tensely, twisting her fingers within eachother, 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 trainedon the Med Ship itself. 

"Come out!" rasped a voice. "If you try anything you get blasted! Yourship and its contents are seized by the planetary government!"

 * * * * *

5

It seemed that the smell of hunger was in the air. The armed men wereemaciated. Lights came on, and stark, harsh shadows lay black upon theground. Calhoun's captors were uniformed, but the uniforms hungloosely upon them. Where the lights struck upon their faces, theircheeks were hollow. They were cadaverous. And there were the splotchesof pigment of which Calhoun had heard. 

The man nearest the Med Ship's port had a monstrous, irregulardull-blue marking over half of one side of his face and up upon hisforehead. The man next to him had a blue throat. The next man againwas less marked, but his left ear was blue and there was what seemed asplashing of the same color on the skin under his hair. 

The leader of the truculent group--it might have been a firingsquad--made an imperious gesture with his hand. It was blue, exceptfor two fingers which in the glaring illumination seemed whiter thanwhite. 

"Out!" said that man savagely. "We're taking over your stock of food. You'll get your share of it, like everybody else, but--"

Maril spoke over Calhoun's shoulder. She uttered a cryptic sentence ortwo. It should have amounted to identification but there wasskepticism in 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 aremedicines and bacterial culture inside it. They shouldn't be meddledwith. Here on Dara you've had enough of plagues!"

The man with the blue hand said as sardonically as before, "I said thegovernment was taking over your ship! It won't be looted. But you'renot taking a full cargo of food away! In fact, it's not likely you'releaving!"

"And I want to speak to someone in authority, " snapped Calhoun. "We'vejust come from Weald. " He felt bristling hatred all about him as henamed Weald. "There's tumult there. They're talking about droppingfusion-bombs here. It's important that I talk to somebody with theauthority to take a few sensible precautions!"

He descended to the ground. There was a panicky "_Chee! Chee!_" frombehind him, and Murgatroyd came dashing to swarm up his body and clingapprehensively to his neck. 

"What's that?"

"A _tormal_" said Calhoun. "He's not a pet. Your medical men will knowsomething about him. This is a Med Ship and I'm a Med Ship man, andhe's an important member of the crew. He's a Med Ship _tormal_ and hestays with me!"

The man with the blue hand said harshly, "There's somebody waiting toask you questions. Here!"

A groundcar came rolling out from the side of the landing-gridenclosure. The groundcar ran on wheels, and wheels were not much usedon 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 youwant. But don't try to sneak back in this ship! It'll be guarded!"

The groundcar was enclosed, with room for a driver and the three fromthe Med Ship. But armed men festooned themselves about its exteriorand it went bumping and rolling to the massive ground-layer girders ofthe grid. It rolled out under them and onto a paved highway. It pickedup speed. 

There were buildings on either side of the road, but few showedlights. This was night, and the men at the landing-grid had set apattern of hunger, so that the silence and the dark buildings did notseem a sign of tranquility and sleep, but of exhaustion and despair. 

The highway lamps were few, by comparison with other inhabited worlds, and the groundcar needed lights of its own to guide its driver over apaved surface that needed repair. By those moving lights otherdepressing things could be seen: untidiness, buildings not kept up toperfection, evidences of apathy, the road, which hadn't been cleanedlately, litter here and there. 

Even the fact that there were no stars added to the feeling ofwretchedness 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. There was a splotchof blue pigment at the back of his neck. It extended upward into hishair. 

"I left two years ago, " said Maril. "It was just beginning then. Rationing hadn't started. "

The driver said evenly, "There's rationing now!"

The car went on and on. A vast open space appeared ahead. Lights aboutits perimeter seemed few and pale. 

"Everything seems worse. Even the lights. "

"Using all the power, " said the driver, "to warm up ground to growcrops 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 andthen make my way to Weald. I mailed reports of what I found out backto Trent. Somebody got them back to here whenever it was possible. "

The driver said, "Everybody knows the man on Trent disappeared. Maybehe got caught, maybe somebody saw him without make-up. Or maybe hejust quit being one of us. What's the difference? No use!"

Calhoun found himself wincing a little. The driver was not angry. Hewas hopeless. But men should not despair. They shouldn't accepthostility from those about them as a device of fate for theirdestruction. 

Maril said quickly to Calhoun, "You understand? Dara's a heavy-metalsplanet. There aren't many light elements in our soil. Potassium isscarce. So our ground isn't very fertile. Before the Plague we tradedmetals and manufactured products for imports of food and potash. Butsince the Plague we've had no off-planet commerce. We've beenquarantined. "

"I gathered as much, " said Calhoun. "It was up to Med Service to seethat that didn't happen. It's up to Med Service now to see that itstops. "

"Too late now for anything, " said the driver. "Whatever Med Servicemay be! They're talking about cutting down our population so there'llbe food enough for some to live. There are two questions about it. Oneis who's to be kept alive, and the other is why. "

The groundcar aimed now for a cluster of faintly brighter lights onthe far side of the great open space. They enlarged as they grewnearer. Maril said hesitantly, "There was someone, Korvan--" Calhoundidn't catch the rest of the name. Maril said hesitantly, "He wasworking on food plants. I thought he might accomplish something. .. . "

The driver said caustically, "Sure! Everybody's heard about him! Hecame up with a wonderful thing! He and his outfit worked out a way toprocess weeds so they can be eaten. And they can. You can fill yourbelly and not feel hungry, but it's like eating hay. You starve justthe same. He's still working. Head of a government division. "

The groundcar passed through a gate. It stopped before a lighted door. The armed men hanging to its outside dropped off. They watched Calhounclosely as he stepped out with Murgatroyd riding on his shoulder. 

Minutes later they faced a hastily summoned group of officials of theDarian government. For a ship to land on Dara was so remarkable anevent that it called practically for a cabinet meeting. And Calhounnoted that they were no better fed than the guards at the spaceport. 

They regarded Calhoun and Maril with oddly burning, eyes. It was, ofcourse, because the two of them showed no signs of hunger. Theyobviously had not been on short rations. Darians had this, now, toincrease a hatred which was inevitable anyhow, directed at all peoplesoff their own planet. 

"My name is Calhoun, " said Calhoun briskly. "I've the usual MedService credentials. Now--"

He did not wait to be questioned. He told them of the appalling stateof things in the Twelfth Sector of the Med Service, so that men hadbeen borrowed from other sectors to remedy the intolerable, and he wasone of them. He told of his arrival at Weald and what had happenedthere, from the excessively cautious insistence that he prove he wasnot a Darian, to the arrival of the death-ship from Orede. 

He was giving them the news affecting them, as they had not heard itbefore. He went on to tell of his stop at Orede and his purpose, andhis encounter with the men he found there. When he finished there wassilence. He broke it. 

"Now, " he said, "Maril's an agent of yours. She can add to what I'vetold you. I'm Med Service. I have a job to do here to carry out whatwasn't done before. I should make a planetary health inspection andmake recommendations for the improvement of the state of things. I'llbe 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?" heasked 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 totalk to any space pilots you've got. Get your astrogators together andI think they'll approve my idea. "

The silence was totally skeptical. 

"Orede--"

"Not Orede, " said Calhoun. "Weald will be hunting that planet over forDarians. If they find any, they'll drop bombs here. "

"Our only space pilots, " said a tall man, presently, "are on Oredenow. If you've told the truth, they'll probably head back because ofyour warning. They should bring meat. "

His mouth worked peculiarly, and Calhoun knew that it was at thethought of food. 

"Which, " said another man sharply, "goes to the hospitals! I haven'ttasted 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 hishead. 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 informationand send it in secret writing to one of us on Trent. I have a familyhere. They'll know me! And I--there was someone who was working onfoods, and I believe he made it possible to use . .. All sorts ofvegetation for food. He will identify me. "

Someone laughed harshly. 

Maril swallowed. 

"I'd like to see him, " she repeated. "And my family. "

Some of the blue-splotched men turned away. A broad-shouldered mansaid bluntly, "Don't look for them to be glad to see you. And you'dbetter not show yourself in public. You've been well fed. You'll behated for that. "

Maril began to cry. Murgatroyd said bewilderedly, "_Chee! Chee!_"

Calhoun held him close. There was confusion. And Calhoun found theMinister of Health at hand. He looked most harried of all theofficials gathered to question Calhoun. He proposed that he get a lookat 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 asmany hours out of the traditional twenty-four as they could manage. Itwas much more pleasant to sleep than to be awake and constantly naggedat by continued hunger. 

And there was the matter of simple decency. Continuous gnawing hungerhad an embittering effect upon everyone. Quarrelsomeness was a commonexperience. And people who would normally be the leaders of opinionfelt shame because they were obsessed by thoughts of food. It was bestwhen people slept. 

Still, Calhoun was in the hospitals by daybreak. What he found movedhim to savage anger. There were too many sick children. In every caseundernourishment contributed to their sickness. And there was notenough food to make them well. Doctors and nurses denied themselvesfood to spare it for their patients. And most of that self-denial wasdoubtless voluntary, but it would not be discreet for anybody on Darato look conspicuously better fed than his fellows. 

Calhoun brought out hormones and enzymes and medicaments from the MedShip while the guard in the ship looked on. He demonstrated theprocesses of synthesis and auto-catalysis that enabled such smallsamples to be multiplied indefinitely. He was annoyed by a clamorousappetite. There were some doctors who ignored the irony of medicaltechniques being taught to cure nonnutritional disease, when everybodywas half-fed, or less. They approved of Calhoun. They even approved ofMurgatroyd when Calhoun explained his function. 

He was, of course, a Med Service _tormal_, and _tormals_ werecreatures of talent. They'd originally been found on a planet in theDeneb area, and they were engaging and friendly small animals. But theremarkable fact about them was that they couldn't contract anydisease. 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 whicha _tormal_ could not more or less immediately develop antibodyresistance. So that in interstellar medicine _tormals_ were priceless. 

Let Murgatroyd be infected with however localized, however specializedan inimical organism, and presently some highly valuable defensivesubstance could be isolated from his blood and he'd remain in hisusual exuberant good health. 

When the antibody was analyzed by those techniques of microanalysisthe Service had developed, that was that. The antibody could besynthesized and one could attack any epidemic with confidence. 

The tragedy for Dara was, of course, that no Med Ship had come to Darathree generations ago, when the Dara plague raged. Worse, after theplague Weald was able to exert pressure which only a criminallyincompetent Med Service director would have permitted. But criminalincompetence and its consequences was what Calhoun had been loaned toSector Twelve to help remedy. He was not at ease, though. No shiparrived from Orede to bear out his account of an attempt to get thatlonely world evacuated before Weald discovered it had blueskins on it. Maril had vanished, to visit or return to her family, or perhaps toconsult with the mysterious Korvan who'd arranged for her to leaveDara to be a spy, and had advised her simply to make a new lifesomewhere else, abandoning a famine-ridden, despised, and out-casteworld. 

Calhoun had learned of two achievements the same Korvan had made forhis world. Neither was remarkably constructive. He'd offered to provethe value of the second by dying of it. Which might make him a veryadmirable character, or he could have a passion for martyrdom, whichis much more common than most people think. In two days Calhoun wasirritable enough from unaccustomed hunger to suspect the worst of him. 

Meanwhile Calhoun worked doggedly; in the hospitals while the patientswere awake and in the Med Ship, under guard, afterward. He had hungercramps now, but he tested a plastic cube with a thriving biologicalculture in it. 

He worked at increasing his store of it. He'd snipped samples ofpigmented skin from dead patients in the hospitals, and examined thepigmented areas, and very, very painstakingly verified a theory. Ittook an electron microscope to do it, but he found a virus in the bluepatches which matched the type discovered on Tralee. 

The Tralee viruses had effects which were passed on from mother tochild, and heredity had been charged with the observed results ofquasi-living viral particles. And then Calhoun very, very carefullyintroduced into a virus culture the material he had been growing in aplastic cube. He watched what happened. 

He was satisfied, so much so that immediately afterward he yawned andyawned and barely managed to stagger off to bed. The watching guard inthe Med Ship watched him in amazement. 

That night the ship from Orede came in, packed with frozen bloodycarcasses of cattle. Calhoun knew nothing of it. But next morningMaril came back. There were shadows under her eyes and her expressionwas of someone who has lost everything that had meaning in her life. 

"I'm all right, " she insisted, when Calhoun commented. "I've beenvisiting 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 sothin. .. . There's rationing for everybody and it's all efficientlyarranged. They even had rations for me. But I couldn't eat! I gavemost of my food to my sisters and they--they squabbled over it!"

Calhoun said nothing. There was nothing to say. Then she said, in a noless desolate tone, "Korvan said I was foolish to come back. "

"He could be right, " said Calhoun. 

"But I had to!" protested Maril. "And now I--I've been eating all Iwanted to, in Weald and in the ship, and I'm ashamed because they'rehalf-starved and I'm not. And when you see what hunger does tothem. .. . It's terrible to be half-starved and not able to think ofanything but food!"

"I hope, " said Calhoun, "to do something about that. If I can get holdof an astrogator or two--"

"The ship that was on Orede came in during the night, " Maril told himshakily. "It was loaded with frozen meat, but one load's not enough tomake a difference on a whole planet! And if Weald hunts for us onOrede, we daren't go back for more meat. "

She said abruptly, "There are some prisoners. They were miners. Theywere crowded out of the ship. The Darians who'd stampeded the cattletook them prisoners. They had to!"

"True, " said Calhoun. "It wouldn't have been wise to leave Wealdiansaround on Orede with their throats cut. Or living, either, to tellabout a rumor of blueskins. Even if their throats will be cut now. Isthat the program?"

Maril shivered. 

"No. They'll be put on short rations like everybody else. And peoplewill watch them. The Wealdians expect to die of plague any minutebecause they've been with Darians. So people look at them and laugh. But it's not very funny. "

"It's natural, " said Calhoun, "but perhaps lacking in charity. Lookthere! How about those astrogators? I need them for a job I have inmind. "

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 watchedCalhoun a good part of the previous day as Calhoun performed hismysterious work. He'd been off-duty and now was on duty again. He wasbored. So long as Calhoun did not touch the control board, though, hewas uninterested. He didn't even turn his head when Maril led the wayinto the other cabin and slid the door shut. 

"The astrogators are coming, " she said swiftly. "They'll bring someboxes with them. They'll ask you to instruct them so they can handleour ship better. They lost themselves coming back from Orede. No, they didn't lose themselves, but they lost time, enough time almost tomake an extra trip for meat. They need to be experts. I'm to comealong, so they can be sure that what you teach them is what you'vebeen doing right along. "

Calhoun said, "Well?"

"They're crazy!" said Maril vehemently. "They knew Weald would dosomething monstrous sooner or later. But they're going to try to stopit by being more monstrous sooner! Not everybody agrees, but there areenough. So they want to use your ship--it's faster in overdrive and soon. And they'll go to Weald in this ship and--they say they'll giveWeald something to keep it busy without bothering us!"

Calhoun said dryly, "This pays me off for being too sympathetic withblueskins! But if I'd been hungry for a couple of years, and wasdespised to boot by the people who kept me hungry, I suppose I mightreact the same way. No, " he said curtly as she opened her lips tospeak again, "don't tell me the trick. Considering everything, there'sonly 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 followedhim. He said detachedly, "I've been working on a problem outside ofthe food one. It isn't the time to talk about it right now, but Ithink I've solved it. "

Maril turned her head, listening. There were footsteps on the tarmacoutside the ship. Both doors of the airlock were open. Four men camein. They were young men who did not look quite as hungry as mostDarians, but there was a reason for that. Their leader introducedhimself and the others. They were the astrogators of the ship Dara hadbuilt to try to bring food from Orede. They were not, said theirself-appointed leader, good enough. They'd overshot theirdestination. They came out of overdrive too far off line. They neededinstruction. 

Calhoun nodded, and observed that he'd been asking for them. Theywere, of course, blueskins. On one the only visible disfigurement wasa patch of blue upon his wrist. On another the appearance of a bluebirthmark appeared beside his eye and went back and up his temple. Athird had a white patch on his temple, with all the rest of his face adull blue. The fourth had blue fingers on one hand. 

"We've got orders, " said their leader, steadily, "to come on board andlearn from you how to handle this ship. It's better than the one we'vegot. "

"I asked for you, " repeated Calhoun. "I've an idea I'll explain as wego along. .. . Those boxes?"

Someone was passing in iron boxes through the airlock. One of the fourvery carefully brought them inside. 

"They're rations, " said a second young man. "We don't go anywherewithout rations, except Orede. "

"Orede, yes. I think we were shooting at each other there, " saidCalhoun pleasantly. "Weren't we?"

"Yes, " said the young man. 

He was neither cordial nor antagonistic. He was impassive. Calhounshrugged. 

"Then we can take off immediately. Here's the communicator and there'sthe button. You might call the grid and arrange for us to be lifted. "

The young man seated himself at the control board. Veryprofessionally, he went through the routine of preparing to lift bylanding-grid, which routine has not changed in two hundred years. Hewent 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 thecontrol board flushed vividly. One of the others closed and dogged thedoors. 

The ship lifted. Calhoun watched with seeming negligence. But he foundoccasion for a dozen corrections of procedure. This was presumably atraining voyage of his own suggestion. Therefore, when the blueskinpilot would have flung the Med Ship into undirected overdrive, Calhoungrew stern. He insisted on a destination. He suggested Weald. 

The young men glanced at each other and accepted the suggestion. Hemade the acting pilot look up the intrinsic brightness of its sun andmeasure its apparent brightness from just off Dara. He made himestimate the change in brightness to be expected after so many hoursin overdrive, if one broke out to measure. 

The first blueskin student pilot ended a Calhoun-determined tour ofduty with more respect for Calhoun then he'd had at the beginning. Thesecond was anxious to show up better than the first. Calhoun drilledhim in the use of brightness-charts, by which the changes in apparentbrightness of stars between overdrive hops could be correlated withangular changes to give a three-dimensional picture of the nearerheavens. 

It was a highly necessary art which had not been worked out on Dara, and the prospective astrogators became absorbed in this and other finepoints 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 andeasily annoyed. It was sound training tactics to be severe, and tophrase all suggestions as commands. He put the four young men incommand of the ship in turn, under his direction. He continued to useWeald as a destination, but he set up problems in which the Med Shipcame out of overdrive pointing in an unknown direction and with aprecessory motion. 

He made the third of his students identify Weald in the celestialglobe containing hundreds of millions of stars, and get on course inoverdrive toward it. The fourth was suddenly required to compute thedistance 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. Calhoungave each of them a second gruelling lesson. He gave them, in fact, ahighly condensed but very sound course in the art of travel in space. His young students took command in four-hour watches, with at leastone breakout from overdrive in each watch. 

He built up enthusiasm in them. They ignored the discomfort of beinghungry--though there had been no reason for them to stint on food onOrede--in growing pride in what they came to know. 

When Weald was a first-magnitude star, the four were not highlyqualified astrogators, to be sure, but they were vastly betterspacemen than at the beginning. Inevitably, their attitude towardCalhoun 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 compareCalhoun's lessons with his practise when alone. But he did nothing onthis journey which, teaching considered, was different from the twointerstellar journeys Maril had made with him. 

She occupied the sleeping cabin during two of the six watches of eachship-day. She operated the food-readier, which was almost completelyemptied of its original store of food, it having been confiscated bythe government of Dara. That amount of food would make no differenceto the planet, but it was wise for everyone on Dara to be equallyill-fed. 

On the sixth day out from Dara, the sun of Weald had a magnitude ofminus five-tenths. The electron telescope could detect its largerplanets, especially a gas-giant fifth-orbit world of high albedo. Calhoun had his four students estimate its distance again, pointingout the difference that could be made in breakout position if the MedShip were mis-aimed by as much as one second of arc. 

"And now, " he said briskly, "we'll have coffee. I'm going to graduateyou as pilots. Maril, four cups of coffee, please. "

Murgatroyd said "_Chee?_" The Med Ship was badly crowded with sixhumans and Murgatroyd in a space intended for Calhoun and Murgatroydalone. The little _tormal_ had spent most of his time in hiscubbyhole, watching with beady eyes as so many people moved about onwhat had been a spacious ship before. 

"No coffee for you, Murgatroyd, " said Calhoun. "You didn't do yourlessons. This is for the graduating class only. "

Murgatroyd came out of his miniature den. He found his little cup andoffered it insistently, saying, "_Chee! Chee! Chee!_"

"No!" said Calhoun firmly. He regarded his class of four young menwith their blueskin markings. "Drink it down!" he commanded. "That'sthe last order I'll give you. You're graduate pilots, now!"

They drank the coffee with a flourish. There was not one who did notadmire Calhoun for having made them admire themselves. They were, actually, almost as much better pilots as they believed. 

"And now, " said Calhoun, "I suppose you'll tell me the truth aboutthose boxes you brought on board. You said they were rations, butthey 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 onWeald. Weald is making plans to wipe out Dara. So some fool hasdecided to get Weald too busy fighting a plague of its own to botherwith you. Is that right?"

The young men stirred unhappily. Young men can very easily be madeinto fanatics. But they have to be kept stirred up. They can't beprovided with sound reason for self-respect. On the Med Ship there'dnot been a single reference to Weald except as an object toward whichthe Med Ship was being astrogated. There'd been no reference toblueskins or enemies or threats or anything but space-piloting. Thefour young men were now fanatical about the proper handling of a shipin emptiness. 

"Well, sir, " said one of them, unhappily, "that's what we were orderedto do. "

"I object, " said Calhoun. "It wouldn't work. I just left Weald alittle while back, remember. They've been telling themselves that someday Dara would try that. They've made preparations to fight anyimaginable contagion you could drop on them. Every so often somebodyclaims it's happening. It wouldn't work. I object!"

"But--"

"In fact, " said Calhoun, "I forbid it. I shall prevent it. You shan'tdo anything of the kind. "

One of the young men, staring at Calhoun, nodded suddenly. His eyesclosed. He jerked his head erect and looked bewildered. A second sankheavily into a chair. He said remotely, "Thish sfunny!" and abruptlywent to sleep. The third found his knees giving way. He paid elaborateattention to them, stiffening them. But they yielded like rubber andhe went slowly down to the floor. The fourth said thickly andreproachfully, "Thought y'were our frien'!"

He collapsed. 

Calhoun very soberly tied them hand and foot and laid them outcomfortably on the floor. Maril watched, white-faced, her hand to herthroat. Murgatroyd looked agitated. He said anxiously, "_Chee? Chee?_"

"No, " said Calhoun. "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 wantto get rid of those damned packed-up cultures. They're dead, by theway. I killed them with super-sonics a couple of days ago, while afine argument was going on about distance-measurements by variableCepheids of known period. "

He put the four boxes carefully in the disposal unit. He operated it. The boxes and their contents streamed out to space in the form ofmetallic and other vapors. Calhoun sat at the control desk. 

"I'm a Med Service man, " he said detachedly. "I couldn't cooperate inthe spread of plagues, anyhow, though a useful epidemic might beanother matter. But the important thing right now is not keeping Wealdbusy with troubles to increase their hatred of Dara. It's getting somefood for Dara. And driblets won't help. What's needed is thousands oftons, or tens of thousands. " Then he said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd! Hold fast!"

The universe vanished. The customary unpleasant sensations accompaniedthe change. Murgatroyd burped. 

 * * * * *

6

A large part of the firmament was blotted out by the blindingly brighthalf-disk of Weald, as it shone in the sunshine. It had icecaps at itspoles, and there were seas, and the mottled look of land which hadthat carefully maintained balance of woodland and cultivated areaswhich was so effective in climate control. The Med Ship floated free, and Calhoun fretfully monitored all the beacon frequencies known toman. 

There was relative silence inside the ship. Maril watched Calhoun in asort of despairing indecision. The four young blueskins still slept, still bound hand and foot upon the control room floor. Murgatroydregarded them, and Maril, and Calhoun in turn, and his small and furryforehead wrinkled helplessly. 

"They can't have landed what I'm looking for!" protested Calhoun ashis search had no result. "They can't! It would be too sensible forthem to have done it!"

Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a subdued voice. 

"But where the devil did they put them?" demanded Calhoun. "A polarorbit would be ridiculous! They--" Then he grunted in disgust. "Oh! Ofcourse! Now, where's the landing-grid?"

He worked busily for minutes, checking the position of the Wealdianlanding-grid, which was mapped in the Sector Directory, against thelook of continents and seas on the half-disk so plainly visibleoutside. He found what he wanted. He put on the ship's solar systemdrive. 

"I wish, " he complained to Maril, "I wish I could think straight thefirst time! And it's so obvious! If you want to put something out inspace, and not have it interfere with traffic, in what sort of orbitand at what distance will you put it?"

Maril did not answer. 

"Obviously, " said Calhoun, "you'll put it as far as possible from thelanding-pattern of ships coming in to the spaceport. You'll put it onthe opposite side of the planet. And you'll want it to stay out of theway, where anybody can know it is at any time of the day or nightwithout having to calculate anything. 

"So you'll put it out in orbit so it will revolve around Weald inexactly one day, neither more nor less, and you'll put it above theequator. And then it will remain quite stationary above one spot onthe planet, a hundred and eighty degrees longitude away from thelanding-grid and directly over the equator. "

He scribbled for a moment. 

"Which means forty-two thousand miles high, give or take a fewhundred, and--here! And I was hunting for it in a close-in orbit!"

He grumbled to himself. He waited while the solar-system drive pushedthe Med Ship a quarter of the way around the bright planet below. Thesunset line vanished and the planet's disk became a complete circle. Then Calhoun listened to the monitor earphones again, and grunted oncemore, and changed course, and presently made a noise indicatingsatisfaction. 

He abandoned instrument control and peered directly out of a port, handling the solar system drive with great care. Murgatroyd saiddepressedly, "_Chee!_"

"Stop worrying, " commanded Calhoun. "We haven't been challenged, andthere is a beacon transmitter at work, just to make sure that nobodybumps into what we're looking for. It's a great help, because we dowant to bump, but gently. "

Stars swung across the port out of which he looked. Something darkappeared, and then straight lines and exact curvings. Even Maril, despairing and bewildered as she was, caught sight of something vastlylarger than the Med Ship, floating in space. She stared. The Med Shipmaneuvered very cautiously. She saw another large object. A third. Afourth. There seemed to be dozens of them. 

They were spaceships, huge by comparison with _Aesclipus Twenty_. Theyfloated as the Med Ship did. They did not drive. They were not information. They were not at even distances from each other. They didnot point in the same direction. They swung in emptiness likederelicts. 

Calhoun jockeyed his small ship with infinite care. Presently therecame the gentlest of impacts and then a clanking sound. The appearanceout the vision port became stationary, but still unbelievable. The MedShip 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 moving smoothly, " he commented. "We weren't challenged. Soit's extremely unlikely that we were spotted. Our friends on the floorought to begin to come to shortly. And I'm going to find out nowwhether 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 up hischest and over his shoulders. 

"Isn't it self-evident?" he demanded. "I've been giving astrogationlessons to these characters. I certainly didn't do it to help themdump germ-cultures on Weald! I brought them here! Don't you see thepoint? These are space ships. They're in orbit around Weald. They'renot manned and they're not controlled. In fact, they're nothing butsky-riding storage bins!"

He seemed to consider the explanation complete. He wriggled his armsinto the sleeves and gloves of the suit. He slung the air tanks overhis shoulder and hooked them to the suit. 

"I'll be back, " he said. "I hope with good news. I've reason to behopeful, though, because these Wealdians are very practical men. Theyhave things all prepared and tidy. I suspect I'll find these shipswith stores of air and fuel, maybe even food, so that if Weald shouldmanage to make a deal for the stuff stored out here in them, they'donly have to bring out crews. "

He lifted the space helmet down from its rack and put it on. He testedit, reading the tank air-pressure, power-storage, and other data fromthe lighted miniature instruments visible through pinholes above hiseye-level. He fastened a space rope about himself, speaking throughthe helmet's opened faceplate. 

"If our friends should wake up before I get back, " he added, "pleaserestrain them. I'd hate to be marooned. "

He went waddling into the airlock with the coil of space rope over onevacuum-suited arm. The inner lock door closed behind him. A littlelater Maril heard the outer lock open. Then silence. 

Murgatroyd whimpered a little. Maril shivered. Calhoun had gone out ofthe ship to nothingness. He'd said that what he was looking for, andwhat he'd found, was forty-two thousand miles from Weald. One couldimagine falling forty-two thousand miles, where one couldn't imaginefalling a light-year. 

Calhoun was walking on the steel plates of a gigantic spaceship whichfloated among dozens of its fellows, all seeming derelicts andseemingly abandoned. He was able to walk on the nearest because ofmagnetic-soled shoes. He trusted his life to them and to a flimsyspace rope which trailed after him out the Med Ship's airlock. 

Time passed. A clock ticked in that hurried tempo of five ticks to thesecond which has been the habit of clocks since time immemorial. Verysmall and trivial noises came from the background tape, preventingutter silence from hanging intolerably in the ship. 

Maril found herself listening tensely for something else. One of thefour bound blueskins snored, and stirred, and slept again. Murgatroydgazed about unhappily, and swung down to the control room floor, andthen paused for lack of any place to go or anything to do. He sat downand 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 ahuman being. "No, " she said unsteadily. "Not yet. "

More time passed. An unbearably long time. Then there was the faintestof clankings. It repeated. Then, abruptly, there were noises in theairlock. They continued. They were fumbling noises. 

The outer airlock door closed. The inner door opened. Dense white fogcame out of it. There was motion. Calhoun followed the fog out of thelock. He carried objects which had been weightless, but were suddenlyheavy in the ship's gravity-field. There were two spacesuits and acurious assortment of parcels. He spread them out, flipped aside hisfaceplate, and said briskly, "This stuff is cold! Turn a heater on it, will you, Maril?"

He began to work his way out of his own vacuum-suit. 

"Item, " he said. "The ships are fuelled _and_ provisioned. A practicaltribe, the Wealdians! The ships are ready to take off as soon asthey're warmed up inside. A half-degree sun doesn't radiate heatenough to keep a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectivelynear zero Kelvin. Here, point the heaters like this. "

He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers. The fog disappeared wheretheir beams played. But the metal spacesuits glistened and steamed, and the steam disappeared within inches. They were so completely andutterly cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, whichre-evaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and wasimmediately replaced. 

"Item, " said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of the vacuum-suitsleeves. "The controls are pretty nearly standard. Our sleepingfriends will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble, provided only that nobody comes out here to bother us before theyleave. "

He shed the last of the spacesuit, stepping out of its legs. 

"And, " he finished wryly, "I brought back an emergency supply of shipprovisions for everybody concerned, but find that I'm idiot enough tofeel 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 given themas a graduation ceremony--the ceremony which had consisted solely ofdrinking coffee and passing out--allowed for waking-up processes. Calhoun took the precaution of disarming them first, but presentlyfour hot-eyed young men glared at him. 

"I'm calling, " said Calhoun, holding a blaster negligently in hishand, "I'm calling for volunteers. There's a famine on Dara. There'vebeen unmanageable crop surpluses on Weald. On Dara, the governmentgrimly rations every ounce of food. On Weald, the government has beenbuying surplus grain to keep the price up. 

"To save storage costs, it's loaded the grain into out-of-datespaceships it once used to stand sentry over Dara to keep it out ofspace when there was another famine there. Those ships have been putout in orbit, where we're hooked on to one of them. 

"It's loaded with half a million bushels of grain. I've broughtspacesuits from it, I've turned on the heaters in its interior, andI've set its overdrive unit for a hop to Dara. Now I'm calling forvolunteers to take half a million bushels of grain to where it'sneeded. Do I get any volunteers?"

He got four. Not immediately, because they were ashamed that he'd madeit impossible to carry out their original fanatic plan, and nowoffered something much better to make up for it. They raged. But halfa million bushels of grain meant that people who must otherwise diemight 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 aroundus. Every one of you can take a ship and half a million bushels toDara, if you have the nerve!"

The atmosphere changed. Suddenly they clamored for the task he offeredthem. They were still acutely uncomfortable. He'd bossed them andtaught them until they felt capable and glamorous and proud. Then he'dpinned their ears back. But if they returned to Dara with four enemyships and unimaginable quantities of food with which to break thefamine. .. . 

There was work to be done first, of course. Only one ship was so farwarming up. Three more had to be entered, in spacesuits, and each hadto have its interior warmed so breathable air could exist inside it, and at least part of the stored provisions had to be brought up toreasonable temperature for use on the journey. 

Then the overdrive unit had to be inspected and set for the length ofjourney that a direct overdrive hop to Dara would mean, and Calhounhad to make sure again that each of the four could identify Dara's sununder all circumstances and aim for it with the requisite highprecision, both before going into overdrive and after breakout. Whenall that was accomplished, Calhoun might reasonably hope that they'darrive. But it wasn't a certainty. 

Still, presently his four students shook hands with him, with the finetolerance of young men intending much greater achievements than theirteacher. They wouldn't speak on communicator again, because theirmessages might be picked up on Weald. 

Of course, for this high heroic action to be successful, it had to beperformed with the stealth of sneak-thieves. 

What seemed a long time passed. The one ship turned slowly upon someunseen axis. It wavered back and forth, seeking a point of aim. Asecond twisted in its place. A third put on the barest trace of solarsystem drive to get clear of the rest. The fourth--

One ship vanished. It had gone into overdrive, heading for Dara atmany 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 insuch a pathetically small number of days. If the four ships reachedDara, their pilots would be heroes. Calhoun had presented them withthat estate over their bitter objection. But they would glory init--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 Wealdto find out what's happened. It's always possible to pick up a sort ofsignal when a ship goes into overdrive. Usually it doesn't mean athing. 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 morefood, like interstellar mice. If they find out what we've done they'llexpect us to try it again. They might get set to fight. Or they mightsimply land the rest of these ships. "

"If I'd realized what you were about, " said Maril, "I'd have joined inthe lessons. I could have piloted a ship. "

"You wouldn't have wanted to, " said Calhoun. He yawned. "You wouldn'twant to be a heroine. No normal girl does. "

"Why?"

"Korvan, " said Calhoun. He yawned again. "I've asked about him. He'sbeen trying very desperately to deserve well of his fellow blueskins. All he's accomplished is develop a way to starve painlessly. Hewouldn't feel comfortable with a girl who'd helped make starvingunnecessary. He'd admire you politely, but he'd never marry you. Andyou know it. "

She shook her head, but it was not easy to tell whether she denied thereaction of Korvan, whom Calhoun had never met, or denied that he wasmore important to her than anything else. The last was what Calhounplainly 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 tobe done. It's more important than being admired. "

"You could take another ship back, " she told him. "It would be worthmore to Dara than the Med Ship is! And then everybody would realizethat you'd planned everything. "

"Ah, " said Calhoun, "but you've no idea how much this ship matters toDara!"

He seated himself at the controls. He slipped headphones over hisears. He listened. Very, very carefully, he monitored all the wavelengths and wave forms he could discover in use on Weald. There was nomention of the oddity of behavior of shiploads of surplus grain aloft. There was no mention of the ships at all. There was plenty of mentionof Dara, and blueskins, and of the vicious political fight now goingon to see which political party could promise the most completeprotection against blueskins. 

After a full hour of it, Calhoun flipped off his receptor and swungthe Med Ship to an exact, painstakingly precise aim at the sun aroundwhich Dara rolled. He said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"

Murgatroyd grabbed. The stars went out and the universe reeled and theMed Ship became a sort of cosmos all its own, into which no signalcould come, no danger could enter, and in which there could be nosound except those minute ones made to prevent silence. 

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, onDara. It's one way not to feel hungry. And one dreams such deliciousmeals! But looking hungry is a social requirement, on Dara. "

Maril said tensely, "You're going back? After they took the ship fromyou?"

"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 asa blueskin, there'd be no famine. Food could be traded for. We've gotto 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 didn't getmuch sleep on the way here, while running a seminar on astrogation. Ithink I'll take a nap. "

She rose and almost ostentatiously went into the other cabin, to leavehim alone. He shrugged. He settled down into the chair which, to let aMed Ship man break the monotony of life in unchanging surroundings, turned into a comfortable sleeping arrangement. He fell instantlyasleep. 

For very many ship-hours, then, there was no action or activity orhappening of any imaginable consequence in the Med Ship. Very, veryfar away, light-years distant and light-years apart, four shiploads ofgrain hurtled toward the famine-stricken planet of blueskins. Eachgreat ship had a single semiskilled blueskin for pilot and crew. 

Thousands of millions of suns blazed with violence appropriate totheir stellar types in a galaxy of which a very small proportion hadbeen explored and colonized by humanity. The human race was now to becounted in quadrillions on scores of hundreds of inhabited worlds, butthe tiny Med Ship seemed the least significant of all possible createdthings. 

It could travel between star-systems and even star-clusters, but itwas not yet capable of crossing the continent of suns on which thehuman race arose. And between any two solar systems the journeying ofthe Med Ship consumed much time. Which would be maddening for someonewith no work to do or no resources in himself, or herself. 

On the second ship-day Calhoun labored painstakingly and somewhatdistastefully at the little biological laboratory. Maril watched himin a sort of brooding silence. Murgatroyd slept much of the time, withhis furry tail wrapped meticulously across his nose. 

Toward the end of the day Calhoun finished his task. He had a matterof six or seven cubic centimeters of clear liquid as the conclusion ofa long process of culturing, and examination by microscope, and againculturing plus final filtration. He looked at a clock and calculatedtime. 

"Better wait until tomorrow, " he observed, and put the bit of clearliquid in a temperature-controlled place of safekeeping. 

"What is it?" asked Maril. "What's it for?"

"It's part of a job I have on hand, " said Calhoun. He considered. "Howabout some music?"

She looked astonished. But he set up an instrument and fed microtapeinto it and settled back to listen. Then there was music such as shehad never heard before. It was another device to counteract isolationand monotonous between-planet voyages. To keep it from losing itseffectiveness, Calhoun rationed himself on music, as on other things. 

Any indulgence frequently repeated would become a habit, in the sensethat it would give no special pleasure when indulged in, but wouldmake for stress if it were omitted. Calhoun deliberately went forweeks between uses of his recordings, so that music was an event to belooked forward to and cherished. 

When he tapered off the stirring symphonies of Kun Gee withtranquilizing, 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 likeother people. Toward me, for example. The way you live gives you whatother people have to get in crazy ways--making their work feed theirvanity, and justify pride, and make them feel significant. But you canput your whole mind on your work. "

He thought it over. 

"Med Ship routine is designed to keep one healthy in his mind, " headmitted. "It works pretty well. It satisfies all my mental appetites. But there are instincts. .. . "

She waited. He did not finish. 

"What do you do about the instincts that work and music and suchthings can't satisfy?"

Calhoun grinned wryly, "I'm stern with them. I have to be. "

He stood up and plainly expected her to go into the other cabin forthe night. She went. 

It was after breakfast time of the next ship-day when he got out thesample of clear liquid he'd worked so long to produce. 

"We'll see how it works, " he observed. "Murgatroyd's handy in case ofa slip-up. It's perfectly safe so long as he's aboard and there areonly the two of us. "

She watched as he injected half a cc. Under his own skin. Then sheshivered a little. 

"What will it do?"

"That remains to be seen. " He paused a moment. "You and I, " he saidwith some dryness, "make a perfect test for anything. If you catchsomething from me, it will be infectious indeed!"

She gazed at him utterly without comprehension. 

He took his own temperature. He brought out the folios which were hisorders, covering each of the planets he should give a standard MedicalService inspection. Weald was there. Dara wasn't. But a Med Serviceman has much freedom of action, even when only keeping up the routineof 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. Hemade an entry in the ship's log. Two hours later yet he found himselfdrinking thirstily and looked more pleased still. 

He made another entry in the log and matter-of-factly drew a smallquantity of blood from his own vein and called to Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd submitted amiably to the very trivial operation Calhouncarried out. Calhoun put away the equipment and saw Maril staring athim with a certain look of shock. 

"It doesn't hurt him, " Calhoun explained. "Right after he's bornthere's a tiny spot on his flank that has the pain-nervesdesensitized. Murgatroyd's all right. That's what he's for!"

"But he's your friend!" said Maril. 

Murgatroyd, despite his small size and furriness, had all the humanattributes an animal which lives with humans soon acquires. Calhounlooked at him with affection. 

"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 dofor 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 hislittle paws. Once he scratched at the place on his flank which had nopain nerves. It itched. But he was perfectly content. Murgatroydwould always be contented when he was somewhere near Calhoun. 

Another hour went by. Murgatroyd climbed up into Calhoun's lap andwith a determined air went to sleep there. Calhoun disturbed him longenough to get an instrument out of his pocket. He listened toMurgatroyd's heartbeat, while Murgatroyd dozed. 

"Maril, " he said. "Write down something for me. The time, andninety-six, and one-twenty over ninety-four. "

She obeyed, not comprehending. Half an hour later, still not stirringto disturb Murgatroyd, he had her write down another time and sequenceof figures, only slightly different from the first. Half an hour laterstill, 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 yougo in the other cabin for a moment?"

Disturbed, she went into the other cabin. Calhoun drew a small sampleof blood from the insensitive area on Murgatroyd's flank. Murgatroydsubmitted with complete confidence in the man. In ten minutes Calhounhad diluted the sample, added an anticoagulant, shaken it upthoroughly, and filtered it to clarity with all red and whitecorpuscles removed. Another Med Ship man would have considered thatCalhoun had had Murgatroyd prepare a splendid small sample ofantibody-containing serum, in case something got out of hand. It wouldassuredly take care of two patients. 

But a Med Ship man would also have known that it was simply one ofthose scrupulous precautions a Med Ship man takes when using culturesfrom store. 

Calhoun put the sample away and called Maril back. 

"It was nothing, " he explained, "but you might have feltuncomfortable. We simply had a bit of Med Service routine that had tobe gone through. It's all right now. "

He offered no further explanation. She said, "I'll fix lunch. " Shehesitated. "You brought some food from the first Weald ship. Do youwant to--"

He shook his head. 

"I'm squeamish, " he admitted. "The trouble on Dara is Med Servicefault. Before my time, but still . .. I'll stick to rations untileverybody eats. "

He watched her unobtrusively as the day went on. Presently heconsidered that she was slightly flushed. Shortly after the eveningmeal of singularly unappetizing Darian rations, she drank thirstily. He did not comment. He brought out cards and showed her a complicatedgame of solitaire in which mental arithmetic and expert use ofprobability increased one's chance of winning. 

By midnight she'd learned the game and played it absorbedly. Calhounwas able to scrutinize her without appearing to do so, and he wassatisfied again. When he mentioned that the Med Ship should arrive offDara in eight hours more, she put the cards away and went into theother cabin. 

Calhoun wrote up the log. He added the notes that Maril had made forhim, of Murgatroyd's pulse and blood pressure after the injection ofthe same culture that produced fever and thirstiness in himself andlater, without contact with him or the culture, in Maril. He put aprofessional comment at the end:

 _The culture seems to have retained its normal characteristics during long storage in the spore state. It received and reproduced rapidly. I injected . 5 cc. Under my skin and in less than one hour my temperature was 30. 8° C. An hour later it was 30. 9° C. This was its peak. It immediately returned to normal. The only other observable symptom was slightly increased thirst. Bloodpressure 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, his taildraped carefully over his nose. 

The Med Ship broke out of overdrive at 1300 hours, ship-time. Calhounmade contact with the grid and was promptly lowered to the ground. 

It was almost two hours later, at 1500 hours ship-time, when thepeople of Dara were informed by broadcast that Calhoun was to beexecuted immediately. 

 * * * * *

7

From the viewpoint of Darians, who were also blueskins, the decisionof Calhoun's guilt and the decision to execute him were reasonableenough. Maril protested fiercely, and her testimony agreed withCalhoun's in every respect, but from a blueskin viewpoint their ownstatements were damning. 

Calhoun had taken four young astrogators to space. They were the onlysemiskilled space pilots Dara had. There were no fully qualified men. Calhoun had asked for them, and taken them out to emptiness, and therehe had instructed them in modern guidance methods for ships of space. 

So far there was no disagreement. He'd proposed to make them morecompetent pilots; more capable of driving a ship to Orede, forexample, to raid the enormous cattle herds there. And he'd had themdrive the Med Ship to Weald, against which there could be noobjection. 

But just before arrival he had tricked all four of them by giving themdrugged coffee. He'd destroyed the lethal bacterial cultures they'dbeen ordered to dump on Weald. Then he'd sent the four student pilotsoff separately, so he and Maril claimed, in huge ships crammed withgrain. But those ships were not to be believed in, anyhow. 

Nobody believed in shiploads of grain to be had for the taking. Theydid know that the only four partially experienced space pilots on Darahad been taken away and by Calhoun's own story sent out of the shipafter they'd been drugged. 

Had they been trained, and had they been helped or even permitted tosow the seeds of plague on Weald, and had they come back prepared topass on training to other men to handle other space ships nowfeverishly being built in hidden places on Dara, then Dara might havea chance of survival. 

But a space battle with only partly trained pilots would be hazardousat best. With no trained pilots at all, it would be hopeless. SoCalhoun, by his own story, appeared to have doomed every living beingon Dara to massacre from the bombs of Weald. 

It was this last angle which destroyed any chance of anybody believingin such fairy-tale objects as ships loaded down with grain. Calhounhad shattered Dara's feeble hope of resistance. Weald had some shipsand could build or buy others faster than Dara could hope to constructthem. 

Equally important, Weald had a plenitude of experienced spacemen toman some ships fully and train the crews of others. If it had becomedesperately busy fighting plague, then a fleet to exterminate life onDara would be delayed. Dara might have gained time at least to buildships which could ram their enemies and destroy them that way. 

But Calhoun had made it impossible. If he told the truth and Wealdalready had a fleet of huge ships which only needed to be emptied ofgrain and filled with guns and men, then Dara was doomed. But if hedid not tell the truth it was equally doomed by his actions. SoCalhoun 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 blueskinplanet. Half-starved men with grisly blue blotches on their skins, marched him to the center of the largest level space on the planetwhich was not desperately being cultivated. Their hatred showed intheir expressions. Bitterness and fury surrounded Calhoun like a wall. Most of Dara would have liked to have seen him killed in a manner asatrocious as his crime, but no conceivable death would be satisfying. 

So the affair was coldly businesslike, with not even insults offeredto him. He was left to stand alone in the very center of thelanding-grid floor. There were a hundred blasters which would fireupon him at the same instant. He would not only be killed; he would bedestroyed. He would be vaporized by the blue-white flames poured uponhim. 

His death was remarkably close, nothing remaining but the order tofire, when loudspeakers from the landing-grid office froze everything. One of the grain ships from Weald had broken out of overdrive and itspilot was triumphantly calling for landing coordinates. The gridoffice relayed his call to loudspeaker circuits as the quickest way toget it on the communication system of the whole planet. 

"Calling ground, " boomed the triumphant voice of the first of thestudent pilots Calhoun had trained. "Calling ground! Pilot Franz incaptured ship requests coordinates for landing! Purpose of landing isto deliver half a million bushels of grain captured from the enemy!"

At first, nobody dared believe it. But the pilot could be seen onvision. He was known. No blueskin would be left alive long enough tobe used as a decoy by the men of Weald! Presently the giant ship onits second voyage to Dara--the first had been a generation ago, whenit threatened death and destruction--appeared as a dark pinpoint inthe sky. It came down and down, and presently it hovered over thecenter of the tarmac, where Calhoun composedly stood on the spot wherehe was to have been executed. 

The landing-grid crew shifted the ship to one side, and only then didCalhoun stroll in a leisurely fashion toward the Med Ship by thegrid'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 handfuls ofgrain. There was a swarming, yelling, deliriously triumphant crowd, then, where only minutes before there'd been a mob waiting to rejoicewhen Calhoun's living body exploded into flame. 

They no longer hated Calhoun, but he had to fight his way to the MedShip, nevertheless. He was surrounded by ecstatically admiringcitizens of Dara. They shouted praise and rejoicing in his ears untilhe was half-deafened, and they almost tore his clothing from them intheir desire to touch, to pat, to assure him of their gratitude andaffection, 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 toground on the following day. 

When Calhoun faced the executive and cabinet of Dara for the secondtime 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 moretime, and in so doing get the beginning of a fleet for defense. Iinsist, however, that it must not be used in combat. We might as wellbe sensible about this situation! After all, four shiploads of grainwon't break the famine! They'll help a lot, but they're only thebeginning of what's needed for a planetary population!"

"How much grain can we hope for?" demanded a man with a blue markcovering all his chin. 

Calhoun told him. 

"How long before Weald can have a fleet overhead, dropping fusionbombs?" demanded another, grimly. 

Calhoun named a time. But then he said, "I think we can keep them fromdropping bombs if we can get the grain fleet and some capableastrogators. "

"How?"

He told them. It was not possible to tell the whole story of what heconsidered sensible behavior. An emotional program can be presentedand accepted immediately. A plan of action which is actuallyintelligent, considering all elements of a situation, has to beaccepted piecemeal. Even so, the military men growled. 

"We've plenty of heavy elements, " said one. "If we'd used our brains, we'd have more bombs than Weald can hope for! We could turn that wholeplanet into a smoking cinder!"

"Which, " said Calhoun acidly, "would give you some satisfaction butnot 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 tobuild an emergency device for my ship, and I'll want the four pilotsI've trained and twenty more candidates. And I'd like to have somedecent rations! The last trip brought back two million bushels ofgrain. You can certainly spare adequate food for twenty men for a fewdays!"

It took some time to get the special device constructed, but the MedShip lifted in two days more. The device for which it had waited wassimply a preventive of the disaster overtaking the ship from the mineon Orede. It was essentially a tank of liquid oxygen, packed in thespace from which stores had been taken away. When the ship's airsupply was pumped past it, first moisture and then CO_{2} froze out. 

Then the air flowed over the liquefied oxygen at a rate to replace theCO_{2} with more useful breathing material. Then the moisture wasrestored to the air as it warmed again. For so long as the oxygenlasted, fresh air for any number of men could be kept purified andbreathable. The Med Ship's normal equipment could take care of no morethan ten. But with this it could journey to Weald with almost anycomplement on board. 

Maril stayed on Dara when the Med Ship left. Murgatroyd protestedshrilly when he discovered her about to be closed out by the closingairlock. 

"_Chee!_" he said indignantly. "_Chee! Chee!_"

"No, " said Calhoun. "We'll be crowded enough anyhow. We'll see herlater. "

He nodded to one of the first four student pilots, who crisply madecontact with the landing-grid office, and very efficiently supervisedas the grid took the ship up. The other three of the fourfirst-trained men explained every move to sub-classes assigned toeach. Calhoun moved about, listening and making certain that theinstruction was up to standard. 

He felt queer, acting as the supervisor of an educational institutionin space. He did not like it. There were twenty-four men besidehimself crowded into the Med Ship's small interior. They got in eachother's way. They trampled on each other. There was always somebodyeating, and always somebody sleeping, and there was no need whateverfor the background tape to keep the ship from being intolerablyquiet. But the air system worked well enough, except once when thereheating unit quit and the air inside the ship went down belowfreezing before the trouble could be found and corrected. 

The journey to Weald, this time, took seven days because of thetraining program in effect. Calhoun bit his nails over the delay. Butit was necessary for each of the students to make his own line-ups onWeald's sun, and compute distances, and for each of them to practisemaneuverings that would presently be called for. Calhoun hopeddesperately that preparations for active warfare did not move fast onWeald. 

He believed, however, that in the absence of direct news from Dara, Wealdian officials would take the normal course of politicos. They hadproclaimed the ship from Orede an attack from Dara. Therefore, theywould specialize on defensive measures before plumping for offense. They'd get patrol ships out to spot invasion ships long before theyworked on a fleet to destroy the blueskins. It would meet the publicdemand for defense. 

Calhoun was right. The Med Ship made its final approach to Weald underCalhoun's own control. He'd made brightness-measurements on hisprevious journey and he used them again. They would not be strictlyaccurate, because a sunspot could knock all meaning out of any readingbeyond two decimal places. But the first breakout was just far enoughfrom the Wealdian system for Calhoun to be able to pick out itsplanets with the electron telescope at maximum magnification. He couldaim for Weald itself, allowing, of course, for the lag in the apparentmotion of its image because of the limited speed of light. He triedthe briefest of overdrive hops, and came out within the solar systemand well inside any watching patrol. 

That was pure fortune. It continued. He'd broken through the screen ofguard ships in undetectable overdrive. He was within half an hour'ssolar system drive of the grain fleet. There was no alarm, at first. Of course radars spotted the Med Ship as an object, but nobody paidattention. It was not headed for Weald. It was probably assumed to bea guard boat itself. Such mistakes do happen. 

Again from the storage space from which supplies had been removed, Calhoun produced vacuum suits. The four first students went out, eachescorting a less-accustomed neophyte and all fastened firmly togetherwith space ropes. They warmed the interiors of four ships and went onto others. Presently there were eight ships making ready for aninterstellar journey, each with a scared but resolute new pilotfamiliarizing himself with its controls. There were sixteen ships. Twenty. Twenty-three. 

A guard ship came humming out from Weald. It would be armed, ofcourse. It came droning, droning up the forty-odd thousand miles fromthe planet. Calhoun swore. He could not call his students and tellthem what was toward. The guard ship would overhear. He could nottrust untried young men to act rationally if they were unaware and theguard ship arrived and matter-of-factly attempted to board one ofthem. 

Then he was inspired. He called Murgatroyd, placed him before thecommunicator, and set it at voice-only transmission. This was familiarenough, 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 waspretending to converse like a human being. The speaker saidexplosively, "You there, identify yourself!"

"_Chee-chee-chee-chee!_" observed Murgatroyd. He wriggled withpleasure and added, reasonably enough, "_Chee!_"

The communicator bawled, "Calling ground! Calling ground! Listen tothis! 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 ofstill-lifeless grain ships. It was highly improbable that the guardboat would carry an electron telescope. Most likely it would have onlyan echo-radar, and so could determine only that an object of some sortmoved of its own accord in space. Calhoun let the Med Ship accelerate. That would be final evidence. The grain ships were between Weald andits sun. Even electron telescopes on the ground--and electrontelescopes were ultimately optical telescopes with electronicamplification--could not get a good image of the ship through sunlitatmosphere. 

"_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'sno human voice, " it said harshly. "Approach its ship and send back animage. Don't fire first unless it heads for ground. "

The guard ship swerved and headed for the Med Ship. It was still avery long way off. 

"_Chee-chee_, " said Murgatroyd encouragingly. 

Calhoun changed the Med Ship's course. The guard ship changed coursetoo. Calhoun let it draw nearer, but only a little. He led it awayfrom the fleet of grain ships. 

He swung his electron telescope on them. He saw a spacesuited figureoutside one, safely roped, however. It was easy to guess that someonehad 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 acommunicator. 

"_Chee!_" said Murgatroyd. 

The heavy voice boomed. "You there! This is a human-occupied world! Ifyou come in peace, cut your drive and let our guard ship approach!"

Murgatroyd replied in an interested but doubtful tone. The boomingvoice bellowed. Another voice of higher authority took over. Murgatroyd was entranced that so many people wanted to talk to him. Hemade what for him was practically an oration. The last voice spokepersuasively and suavely. 

"_Chee-chee-chee-chee_, " said Murgatroyd. 

One of the grain ships flickered and ceased to be. It had gone intooverdrive. Another. And another. Suddenly they began to flick out ofsight by twos and threes. 

"_Chee_, " said Murgatroyd with a note of finality. 

The last grain ship vanished. 

"Calling guard ship, " said Calhoun dryly. "This is Med Ship _AesclipusTwenty_. I called here a couple of weeks ago. You've been talking tomy _tormal_, Murgatroyd. "

A pause. A blank pause. Then profanity of deep and savageintemperance. 

"I've been on Dara, " said Calhoun. 

Dead silence fell. 

"There's a famine there, " said Calhoun deliberately. "So the grainships you've had in orbit have been taken away by men fromDara--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 suavevoice said waspishly, "Well? The Med Service will hear of yourinterference!"

"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 wasstored in. They'll pay in heavy metals--irridium, uranium, that sortof thing. "

The suave voice fairly curdled. 

"As if we'd allow anything that was ever on Dara to touch groundhere!"

"Ah! But there can be sterilization. To begin with metals, uraniummelts at 1150° centigrade, and tungsten at 3370° and irridium at2350°. You could load such things and melt them down in space and thentow them home. And you can actually sterilize a lot of other usefulmaterials!"

The suave voice was infuriated: "I'll report this! You'll suffer forthis!"

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 landon Dara, take whatever property they think wise--to pay for damagedone by blueskins, of course--and get back to Wealdian ships withabsolutely no danger of carrying contagion. If you'll make sure therecording's clear. .. . "

He described, clearly and specifically, exactly how a man could beoutfitted to walk into any area of any conceivable contagion, dowhatever seemed necessary in the way of looting--but Calhoun did notuse the word--and then return to his fellows with no risk whatever ofbringing back infection. He gave exact details. 

Then he said, "My radar says you've four ships converging on me toblast me out of space. I sign off. "

The Med Ship disappeared from normal space, and entered thatimprobably stressed area of extension which it formed about itself andin which physical constants were wildly strange. For one thing, thespeed of light in overdrive-stressed space had not been measured yet. It was too high. For another, a ship could travel very many times186, 000 miles per second in overdrive. 

The Med Ship did just that. There was nobody but Calhoun andMurgatroyd on board. There was companionable silence, with only thesmall threshold-of-perception sounds which one did not often notice. 

Calhoun luxuriated in regained privacy. For seven days he'd hadtwenty-four other human beings crowded into the two cabins of theship, with never so much as one yard of space between himself andsomeone 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 mayremember on Dara that I'm responsible for some ten million bushels ofgrain reaching them. Maybe, just possibly, they'll listen to me andact sensibly. After all, there's only one way to break a famine. Notwith ten million bushels for a whole planet! And certainly not withbombs!"

Driving direct, without pausing for practising, the Med Ship couldarrive at Dara in a little more than five days. Calhoun looked forwardto relaxation. As a beginning he made ready to give himself anadequate meal for the first time since first landing on Dara. Then, presently, he sat down to a double meal of Darian famine-rations, which were far from appetizing. But there wasn't anything else onboard. 

He had some pleasure later, though, envisioning what went on in thenormal, non-overdrive universe. Suns flared, and comets hurtled ontheir way, and clouds formed and dropped down rain, and all sorts ofcelestial and meteorological phenomena took place. On Weald, obviously, there would be purest panic. 

The vanishing of the grain fleet wouldn't be charged againsttwenty-four men. A Darian fleet would be suspected, and with thesuspicion would come terror, and with terror a governmental crisis. Then there'd be a frantic seizure of any craft that could take tospace, and the agitated improvisation of a space fleet. 

But besides that, biological-warfare technicians would examineCalhoun's instructions for equipment by which armed men could belanded on a plague-stricken planet and then safely taken off again. Military and governmental officials would come to the eminently saneconclusion that while Calhoun could not well take active measuresagainst blueskins, as a sane and proper citizen of the galaxy he wouldbe on the side of law and order and propriety and justice--in short, of Weald. So they ordered sample anticontagion suits made according toCalhoun's directions, and they had them tested. They worked admirably. 

On Dara, while Calhoun journeyed placidly back to it, grain wasdistributed lavishly, and everybody on the planet had their cerealration almost doubled. It was still not a comfortable ration, but therelief was great. There was considerable gratitude felt for Calhoun, which as usual included a lively anticipation of further favors tocome. Maril was interviewed repeatedly, as the person best able todiscuss him, and she did his reputation no harm. That was all thathappened on Dara. .. . 

No. There was something else. A very curious thing, too. There was aspread of mild symptoms which nobody could exactly call a disease. They lasted only a few hours. A person felt slightly feverish, and rana temperature which peaked at 30. 9° centigrade, and drank more waterthan usual. Then his temperature went back to normal and he forgot allabout it. There have always been such trivial epidemics. They arerarely recorded, because few people think to go to a doctor. That wasthe case here. 

Calhoun looked ahead a little, too. Presently the fleet of grain shipswould arrive and unload and lift again for Orede, and this time theywould make an infinity of slaughter among wild cattle herds, and bringback incredible quantities of fresh-slaughtered frozen beef. Almosteverybody would get to taste meat again, which would be mostgratifying. 

Then, the industries of Dara would labor at government-required tasks. An astonishing amount of fissionable material would be fashioned intobombs--a concession by Calhoun--and plastic factories would make anastonishing number of plastic sag-suits. And large shipments of heavymetals in ingots would be made to the planet's capital city and therewould be some guns and minor items. 

Perhaps somebody could have predicted any of these items in advance, but it was unlikely that anyone did. Nobody but Calhoun, however, would ever have put them together and hoped very urgently that thingswould work out. He could see a promising total result. In fact, in theMed Ship hurtling through space, on the fourth day of his journey, hethought of an improvement that could be made in the sum of all thosehappenings when they got mixed together. 

He got back to Dara. Maril came to the Med Ship. Murgatroyd greetedher with enthusiasm. 

"Something strange has happened, " said Maril, very much subdued. "Itold you that sometimes blueskin markings fade out on children, andthen neither they nor their children ever have markings again. "

"Yes, " said Calhoun. "I remember that you told me. "

"And you were reminded of a group of viruses on Tralee. You said theyonly took hold of people in terribly bad physical condition, but thenthey could be passed on from mother to child, until sometimes theydied out. "

Calhoun blinked. 

"Yes?"

"Korvan, " said Maril very carefully. "Has worked out an idea thatthat's what happens to the blueskin markings on Darians. He thinksthat people almost dead of the plague could get the virus, and if theyrecovered 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, "youwere working with some culture material. You wrote quite a lot aboutit in the ship's log. You gave yourself an injection. Remember? AndMurgatroyd? You wrote down your temperature, and Murgatroyd's?" Shemoistened her lips. "You said that if infection passed between us, something would be very infectious indeed?"

"This is a long discussion, " said Calhoun. "Does it arrive at apoint?"

"It does, " said Maril. "Thousands of people are having theirpigment-spots fade away. Not only children but grownups. And Korvanhas found out that it always seems to happen after a day when theyfelt feverish and very thirsty, and then felt all right again. Youtried out something that made you feverish and thirsty. I had it too, in the ship. Korvan thinks there's been an epidemic of something thatis obliterating the blue spots on everybody that catches it. There arealways trivial epidemics that nobody notices. Korvan's found evidenceof 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 thatwipes 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, "Iknow you did it! But the question is, are you going to tell? Whenpeople find they're not blueskins any longer, when there's no suchthing 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'sfound the proof. He's very proud. I'd have to tell him how the ideasgot into his head if you were going to tell. And he'd be ashamed andangry. "

Calhoun considered, staring at her. 

"How it happened doesn't matter, " he said at last. "The idea ofanybody doing it deliberately would be disturbing, too. It shouldn'tget about. So it seems much the best thing for Korvan to discoverwhat's happened to the blueskin pigment, and how it happened. But notwhy. "

She read his face carefully. 

"You aren't doing it as a favor to me, " she decided. "You'd rather itwas that way. "

She looked at him for a long time, until he squirmed. Then she noddedand went away. 

An hour later the Wealdian space fleet was reported massed in spaceand driving for Dara. 

 * * * * *

8

There were small scout ships which came on ahead of the main fleet. They'd originally been guard boats, intended for solar system dutyonly and quite incapable of overdrive. They'd come from Weald in thecargo holds of the liners now transformed into fighting ships. Thescouts swept low, transmitting fine-screen images back to the fleet, of all they might see before they were shot down. They found thelanding-grid. It contained nothing larger than Calhoun's Med Ship, _Aesclipus Twenty_. 

They searched here and there. They flittered to and fro, scanning widebands of the surface of Dara. The planet's cities and highways andindustrial centers were wholly open to inspection from the sky. Itlooked as if the scouts hunted most busily for the fleet of formergrain ships which Calhoun had said the blueskins had seized and rushedaway. If the scouts looked for them, they did not find them. 

Dara offered no opposition to the ships. Nothing rose to space tooppose or to resist their search. They went darting over every portionof the hungry planet, land and seas alike, and there was no sign ofmilitary preparedness against their coming. The huge ships of the mainfleet waited while the scouts reported monotonously that they saw nosign of the stolen fleet. But the stolen fleet was the only means bywhich the planet could be defended. There could be no point in apitched battle in emptiness. But a fleet with a planet to back itmight be dangerous. 

Hours passed. The Wealdian main fleet waited. There was no offensivemovement by the fleet. There was no defensive action from the ground. With fusion-bombs certain to be involved in any actual conflict, therewas something like an embarrassed pause. The Wealdian ships were readyto bomb. They were less anxious to be vaporized by possible suicidedashes of defending ships which might blow themselves up near contactwith their enemies. 

But a fleet cannot travel some light-years through space to make amere threat. And the Wealdian fleet was furnished with the materialfor total devastation. It could drop bombs from hundreds, orthousands, or even tens of thousands of miles away. It could cover theworld of Dara with mushroom clouds springing up and spreading to makea continuous pall of atomic-fusion products. And they could settledown and kill every living thing not destroyed by the explosionsthemselves. Even the creatures of the deepest oceans would die ofdeadly, purposely-contrived fallout particles. 

The Wealdian fleet contemplated its own destructiveness. It found nocapacity for defense on Dara. It moved forward. 

But then a message went out from the capital city of Dara. It saidthat a ship in overdrive had carried word to a Darian fleet in space. The Darian fleet now hurtled toward Weald. It was a fleet ofthirty-seven giant ships. They carried such-and-such bombs insuch-and-such quantities. Unless its orders were countermanded, itwould deliver those bombs on Weald, set to explode. If Weald bombedDara, the orders could not be withdrawn. So Weald could bomb Dara. Itcould destroy all life on the pariah planet. But Weald would die withit. 

The fleet ceased its advance. The situation was a stalemate with puredesperation on one side and pure frustration on the other. This was noway to end the war. Neither planet could trust the other, even forminutes. If they did not destroy each other simultaneously, as now waspossible, each would expect the other to launch an unwarned attack atsome other moment. Ultimately one or the other must perish, and thesurvivor would be the one most skilled in treachery. 

But then the pariah planet made a new proposal. It would send amessenger ship to stop its own fleet's bombardment if Weald wouldaccept payment of the grain ships and their cargos. It would pay iningots of irridium and uranium and tungsten, and gold if Weald wishedit, for all damages Weald might claim. 

It would even pay indemnity for the miners of Orede, who had died byaccident but perhaps in some sense through its fault. It would pay. But if it were bombed, Weald must spout atomic fire and the fleet ofWeald would have no home planet to return to. 

This proposal seemed both craven and foolish. It would allow the fleetof Weald to loot and then betray Dara. But it was Calhoun's idea. Itseemed plausible to the admirals of Weald. They felt only contempt forblueskins. Contemptuously, they accepted the semi-surrender. 

The broadcast waves of Dara told of agreement, and wild and fierceresentment filled the pariah planet's people. There was almostrevolution to insist upon resistance, however hopeless and howeverfatal. But not all of Dara realized that a vital change had come aboutin the state of things on Dara. The enemy fleet had not a hint of it. 

In menacing array, the invading fleet spread itself about the skies ofDara, well beyond the atmosphere. Harsh voices talked with increasingarrogance to the landing-grid staff. A monster ship of Weald cameheavily down, riding the landing-grid's force-fields. It touchedgently. Its occupants were apprehensive, but hungry for the loot theyhad been assured was theirs. The ship's outer hull would be sterilizedbefore it returned to Weald, of course. And there was adequateprotection for the landing-party. 

Men came out of the ship's ports. They wore the double, transparentsag-suits Calhoun had suggested, which had been painstakingly tested, and which were perfect protection against contagion. They were doublegarments of plastic, with air tanks inside the inner flexibleenvelope. 

Men wearing such sag-suits could walk about on Dara. They could workon Dara. They could loot with impunity and all contamination mustremain outside the suits, and on their return to their ships theywould simply stand in the airlocks while corrosive gases swirledaround them, killing any possible organism of disease. Then, for extraassurance, when air from Weald filled the airlock again, the men wouldburn the outer plastic covering and step into the ship without everhaving come within two layers of plastic of infection. 

What loot they gathered, obviously, could be decontaminated before itwas returned to Weald. Metals could be melted, if necessary. Gemscould be sterilized. It was a most satisfactory discovery, to realizethat blueskins could be not only scorned but robbed. There was onlyone bit of irrelevant information the space fleet of Weald did nothave. 

That information was that the people of Dara weren't blueskins anylonger. There'd been a trivial epidemic. .. . 

The sag-suited men of Weald went zestfully about their business. Theytook over the landing-grid's operation, driving the Darian operatorsaway. For the first time in history the operators of a landing-gridwore make-up to look like they did have blue pigment in their skins. They didn't. 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 thehuge stockpiles of precious metals, brought in readiness to besurrendered and carried away. Some men set to work to load these intothe holds of the ships of Weald. Some went forthrightly after personalloot. 

They came upon very few Darians. Those they saw kept sullenly awayfrom them. They entered shops and took what they fancied. Theyzestfully removed the treasure of banks. 

Triumphant and scornful reports went up to the hovering great ships. The blueskins, said the reports, were spiritless and cowardly. Theypermitted themselves to be robbed. They kept out of the way. It hadbeen observed that the population was streaming out of the city, fleeing because they feared the ships' landing-parties. The blueskinshad abjectly produced all they'd promised of precious metals, butthere 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 oftheir hulls began. There was jealousy among the ships in space forthose upon the ground. The first-landed ships had had their choice ofloot. There were squabblings about priorities, now that the navy ofWeald plainly had a license to steal. There was confusion among themembers of the landing-parties. Discipline disappeared. Men in plasticsag-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 withloot found their ships already lifted off to make room for others. They were pushed into re-embarking-parties of other ships. There weremore and more men to be found on ships where they did not belong, andmore and more not to be found where they did. 

By the time half the fleet had been aground, there was no longer anypretense of holding a ship down until all its crew returned. Therewere too many other ships' companies clamoring for their turn to loot. The rosters of many ships, indeed, bore no particular relationship tothe men actually on board. 

There were less than fifteen ships whose to-be-fumigated holds werestill emptied, when the watchful government of Dara broadcast a newmessage to the invaders. It requested that the looting stop. No matterwhat payment Weald claimed, it had taken payment five times over. Nowwas time to stop. 

It was amusing. The space admiral of Weald ordered his ships alertedfor action. The message ship, ordering the Darian fleet away fromWeald, had been sent off long since. No other ship could get away now!The Darians could take their choice: accept the consequences ofsurrender, or the fleet would rise to throw down bombs. 

Calhoun was asking politely to be taken to the Wealdian admiral whenthe trouble began. It wasn't on the ground, at all. Everything wasunder splendid control where a landing force occupied the grid and allthe ground immediately about it. The space admiral had headquarters inthe 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 offhorrified, panic-stricken yells. There were screamings. Intelligiblecommunications ceased. Ships plunged crazily this way and that. Somevanished in overdrive. At least one plunged at full power into aDarian ocean. 

The space admiral found himself in command of fifteen ships only outof all his former force. The rest of the fleet went through a periodof hysterical madness. In some ships it lasted for minutes only. Inothers it went on for half an hour or more. Then they hung overhead, but did not reply to calls. 

Calhoun arrived at the spaceport with Murgatroyd riding on hisshoulder. A bewildered officer in a sag-suit halted him. 

"I've come, " said Calhoun, "to speak to the admiral. My name isCalhoun and I'm Med Service, and I think I met the admiral at abanquet 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 toexplain it to the admiral. He needs to know what's happened, if he'sto take appropriate measures. "

There were jitterings. Many men in sag-suits had still no idea thatanything had gone wrong. Some appeared, brightly carrying loot. Somehung eagerly around the airlocks of ships on the grid tarmac, waitingtheir turns to stand in corrosive gases for the decontamination oftheir suits, when they would burn the outer layers and step, asepticand happy, into a Wealdian ship again. There they could think how richthey were going to be back on Weald. 

But the situation aloft was bewildering and very, very ominous. Therewas strident argument. Presently Calhoun stood before the Wealdianadmiral. 

"I came to explain something, " said Calhoun pleasantly. "The situationhas changed. You've noticed it, I'm sure. "

The admiral glared at him through two layers of plastic, which coveredhim almost like a gift-wrapped parcel. 

"Be quick!" he rasped. 

"First, " said Calhoun, "there are no more blueskins. An epidemic ofsomething or other has made the blue patches on the skins of Dariansfade 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 thissituation?"

"Why, everything, " said Calhoun mildly. "It seems that Darians canpass for Wealdians whenever they please. That they _are_ passing forWealdians. That they've been mixing with your men, wearing sag-suitsexactly like the one you're wearing now. They've been going aboardyour ships in the confusion of returning looters. There's not a shipnow aloft, which has been aground today, which hasn't from one tofifteen 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, "ifyou believe its crews have been exposed to carriers of the Daraplague. 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 alertedfor action, the Darians on each ship released panic gas. They onlyneeded tiny, pocket-sized containers of the gas for the job. They hadthem. They only needed to use air tanks from their sag-suits toprotect 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 havebarricaded themselves in the control rooms of most if not all yourships. You haven't got a fleet. The few ships who will obey yourorders--if they drop one bomb, our fleet off Weald will drop fifty. 

"I don't think you'd better order offensive action. Instead, I thinkyou'd better have your fleet medical officers come and learn some ofthe facts of life. There's no need for war between Dara and Weald, butif you insist. .. . "

The admiral made a choking noise. He could have ordered Calhounkilled, but there was a certain appalling fact. The men aground fromthe fleet were breathing Wealdian air from tanks. It would last solong only. If they were taken on board the still obedient shipsoverhead, Darians would unquestionably be mixed with them. There wasno way to take off the parties now aground without exposing them tocontact with Darians, on the ground or in the ships. There was no wayto sort out the Darians. 

"I--I will give the orders, " said the admiral thickly. "I do not knowwhat you devils plan, but--I do not know how to stop you. "

"All that's necessary, " said Calhoun warmly, "is an open mind. There'sa misunderstanding to be cleared up, and some principles of planetaryhealth practises to be explained, and a certain amount of prejudicethat has to be thrown away. But nobody need die of changing theirminds. The Interstellar Medical Service has proved that over andover!"

Murgatroyd, perched on his shoulder, felt that it was time to takepart in the conversation. He said, "_Chee-chee!_"

"Yes, " agreed Calhoun. "We do want to get the job done. We're behindschedule now. "

 * * * * *

It was not, of course, possible for Calhoun to leave immediately. Hehad to preside at various meetings of the medical officers of thefleet and the health officials of Dara. He had to make explanations, and correct misapprehensions, and delicately suggest such biologicalexperiments as would prove to the doctors of Weald that there was nolonger a plague on Dara, whatever had been the case three generationsbefore. 

He had to sit by while an extremely self-confident young Dariandoctor--one of his names was Korvan--rather condescendinglydemonstrated that the former blue pigmentation was a viral productquite unconnected with the plague, and that it had been wiped out by avery trivial epidemic of such and such. 

Calhoun regarded that young man with a detached interest. Marilthought him wonderful, even if she had to give him the material forhis work. He agreed with her that he was wonderful. Calhoun shruggedand went on with his own work. 

The return of loot, mutual, full, and complete agreement that Darianswere no longer carriers of plague, if they had ever been--unless Wealdconvinced other worlds of this, Weald itself would join Dara inisolation from neighboring worlds. A messenger ship had to recall thetwenty-seven ships once floating in orbit about Weald. Most of themwould be used for some time, to bring beef from Orede. Some would haulmore grain from Weald. It would be paid for. There would be a need forcommercial missions to be exchanged between Weald and Dara. Therewould have to be. .. . 

It was a full week before he could go to the little Med Ship andprepare 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. 

Maril came to the Med Ship again when he was almost ready to leave. She did not seem comfortable. 

"I wanted you to meet Korvan, " she said regretfully. 

"I met him, " said Calhoun. "I think he will be a most prominentcitizen, 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 desirableto you, which is something I couldn't manage. "

"You didn't try, " said Maril. "Just as I didn't try to be fascinatingto you. Why?"

Calhoun spread out his hands. But he looked at Maril with respect. Notevery woman could have faced the fact that a man did not feel impelledto make passes at her. It is simply a fact that has nothing to do withdesirability 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. "And I doubt he'll everlook at another woman. He looks forward to splendid discoveries. Iwish he didn't. "

Calhoun did not ask the obvious question. Instead, he saidthoughtfully, "There's something you could do. It needs to be done. The Med Service in this sector has been badly handled. There are anumber of discoveries that need to be made. I don't think your Korvanwould relish having things handed to him on a visible silver platter. But they should be known. .. . "

Maril said, "I can guess what you mean. I dropped hints about the waythe blueskin markings went away, yes. You've got books for me?"

Calhoun nodded. He found them. 

"If we had only fallen 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 willnever know, and he'll be a great man. " Then she added defensively, "But I don't think he'll only discover things from hints I drop him. He'll make wonderful discoveries. "

"Of which, " said Calhoun, "the most remarkable is you. Good luck, Maril!"

She went away smiling. But she wiped her eyes when she was out of theship. 

Presently the Med Ship lifted. Calhoun aimed it for the next planet onthe list of those he was to visit. After this one more he'd return tosector headquarters with a biting report to make on the way things hadbeen handled before him. 

"Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"

Then the stars went out and there was silence, and privacy, and afaint, faint, almost unbearable series of background sounds which keptthe Med Ship from being totally unendurable. 

Long, long days later the ship broke out of overdrive and Calhounguided it to a round and sunlit world. In due time he thumbed thecommunicator button. 

"Calling ground, " he said crisply. "Calling ground! Med Ship_Aesclipus Twenty_ reporting arrival and asking coordinates forlanding. Purpose of landing is planetary health inspection. Our massis fifty standard tons. "

There was a pause while the beamed message went many, many thousandsof miles. Then the speaker said, "_Aesclipus Twenty_, repeat youridentification!"

Calhoun repeated it patiently. Murgatroyd watched with bright eyes. Perhaps he hoped to be allowed to have another long conversation withsomebody by communicator. 

"You are warned, " said the communicator sternly, "that any deceit ordeception about your identity or purpose in landing will be severelypunished. We take few chances, here! If you wish to landnotwithstanding this warning--"

"I'm coming in, " said Calhoun. "Give me the coordinates. "

He wrote them down. His expression was slightly pained. The Med Shipdrove on, in solar system drive. Murgatroyd said, "_Chee-chee? Chee?_"

Calhoun sighed. 

"That's right, Murgatroyd! Here we go again!"

 * * * * *

FEAR RIDES THE ROCKETS

The Interstellar Medical Service was just about the only remaininggalactic organization that every one of the hundreds of inhabitedplanets respected. So when their service broke down in Star SectorTwelve, it created a very dangerous situation. 

When Calhoun took his Med ship out of overdrive near that sector'splanet Weald, he was vaguely aware of the risks. But the crisis camehome to him with a crash the moment he radioed in for landingcoordinates. 

"Contamination! Full mobilization! Red alert! Death to blueskins!"Such were the nature of his greetings. 

And it began to look like a case of the cosmic jitters that only themost drastic of orbital surgery could cure. 

Murray Leinster, whose real name is Will F. Jenkins, has beenentertaining the public with his exciting fiction for several decades. Called the dean of modern science-fiction, he was writing theseamazing super-science adventures back in the early twenties beforethere ever was such a thing as an all-fantasy magazine. His shortstories, novelettes, and serial novels have appeared in most of themajor American magazines, both slick and pulp, and many have beenreprinted all over the world. He has made a distinguished name forhimself (or rather two names) in the fields of adventure, historical, western, sea, and suspense stories. 

Ace Books has still available the following Murray Leinster novels:CITY ON THE MOON (D-277), THE PIRATES OF ZAN and THE MUTANT WEAPON(D-403), and THE FORGOTTEN PLANET (D-528). 

 * * * * *

Here's a quick checklist of recent releases ofACE SCIENCE-FICTION BOOKS

35¢

D-498 GALACTIC DERELICT by Andre Norton

D-504 MASTER OF THE WORLD by Jules Verne

D-507 MEETING AT INFINITY by John Brunner _and_ BEYOND THE SILVER SKY by Kenneth Bulmer

D-508 MORE MACABRE Edited by Donald A. Wollheim

D-509 THE BEAST MASTER by Andre Norton _and_ STAR HUNTER by Andre Norton

D-516 THE SWORDSMAN OF MARS by Otis Adelbert Kline

D-517 BRING BACK YESTERDAY by A. Bertram Chandler _and_ THE TROUBLE WITH TYCHO by Clifford Simak

40¢

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F-105 THE BEST FROM FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION Fifth Series. Edited by Anthony Boucher. 

F-108 THE SUN SABOTEURS by Damon Knight _and_ THE LIGHT OF LILITH by G. McDonald Wallis

F-109 STORM OVER WARLOCK by Andre Norton

F-113 REBELS OF THE RED PLANET by Charles Fontenay _and_ 200 YEARS TO CHRISTMAS by J. T. McIntosh

If you are missing any of these, they can be obtained directly fromthe publisher by sending the indicated sum, plus 5¢ handling fee, toAce Books, Inc. (Sales Dept. ), 23 West 47th St. , New York 36, N. Y.