"This is the Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty," said Calhoun's voice, amplified to a shout. "I left Weald four days ago, one day after the cargo-ship from here arrived with everybody on board dead. On Weald they don't know how it happened, but they suspect blueskins. Sooner or later they'll search here. Get away! Cover up your tracks! Hide all signs that you've ever been here! Get the hell away, fast! One more warning! There's talk of fusion-bombing Dara. They're scared! If they find your traces, they'll be more scared still! So cover up your tracks and—get—away—from—here!"
The many-times-multiplied voice rolled and echoed among the hills. But it was very clear. Where it could be heard it could be understood, and it could be heard for miles.
But there was no response to it. Calhoun waited a reasonable time. Then he shrugged and seated himself at the control-board.
"It isn't easy," he observed, "to persuade desperate men that they've out-smarted themselves! Hold hard, Murgatroyd!"
The rockets bellowed. Then there was a tremendous noise to end all noises, and the ship began to climb. It sped up and up and up. By the time it was out of atmosphere it had velocity enough to coast to clear space and Calhoun cut the rockets altogether. He busied himself with those astrogational chores which began with orienting oneself to galactic directions after leaving a planet which rotates at its own individual speed. Then one computes the overdrive course to another planet, from the respective coördinates of the world one is leaving and the one one aims for. Then,—in this case at any rate—there was the very finicky task of picking out a fourth-magnitude star of whose planets one was his destination. He aimed for it with ultra-fine precision.
"Overdrive coming," he said presently. "Hold on!"
Space reeled. There was nausea and giddiness and a horrible sensation of falling in a wildly unlikely spiral. Then stillness, and solidity, and the blackness of the Pit outside the Med Ship. The little craft was in overdrive again.
After a long while, the girl Maril said uneasily.
"I don't know what you plan now—."
"I'm going to Dara," said Calhoun. "On Orede I tried to get the blueskins there to get going, fast. Maybe I succeeded. I don't know. But this thing's been mishandled! Even if there's a famine, people shouldn't do things out of desperation!"
"I know now that I was—very foolish—."
"Forget it," commanded Calhoun. "I wasn't talking about you. Here I run into a situation that the Med Service should have caught and cleaned up generations ago! But it's not only a Med Service obligation, it's a current mess! Before I could begin to get at the basic problem, those idiots on Orede—. It'd happened before I reached Weald! An emotional explosion triggered by a ship full of dead men that nobody intended to kill."
Maril shook her head.
"Those Darian characters," said Calhoun annoyedly, "shouldn't have gone to Orede in the first place. If they went there, they should at least have stayed on a continent where there were no people from Weald digging a mine and hunting cattle for sport on their off days! They could be spotted! I believe they were! And again, if it had been a long way from the mine installation, they could probably have wiped out the people who sighted them before they could get back with the news! But it looks like miners saw men hunting, and got close enough to see they were blueskins, and then got back to the mine with the news!"
She waited for him to explain.
"I know I'm guessing, but it fits!" he said distastefully. "So something had to be done. Either the mining settlement had to be wiped out or the story that blueskins were on Orede had to be discredited. The blueskins tried for both. They used panic-gas on a herd of cattle and it made them crazy and they charged the settlement like the four-footed lunatics they are! And the blueskins used panic-gas on the settlement itself as the cattle went through. It should have settled the whole business nicely. After it was over every man in the settlement would believe he'd been out of his head for a while, and he'd have the crazy state of the settlement to think about, and he wouldn't be sure of what he'd seen or heard beforehand. They might try to verify the blueskin story later, but they wouldn't believe anything certainly! It should have worked!"
Again she waited. So Calhoun said very wrily indeed;
"Unfortunately, when the miners panicked, they stampeded into the ship. Also unfortunately, panic-gas got into the ship with them. So they stayed panicked while the astrogator—in panic!—took off and headed for Weald and threw on the overdrive—which would be set for Weald anyhow—because that would be the fastest way to run away from whatever he imagined he feared. But he and all the men on the ship were still crazy with panic from the gas they were re-breathing until they died!"
Silence. After a long interval, Maril asked;
"You don't think the—Darians intended to kill?"
"I think they were stupid!" said Calhoun angrily. "Somebody's always urging the police to use panic-gas in case of public tumult. But it's too dangerous. Nobody knows what one man will do in a panic. Take a hundred or two or three and panic them all, and there's no limit to their craziness! The whole thing was handled wrong!"
"But you don't blame them?"
"For being stupid, yes," said Calhoun fretfully. "But if I'd been in their place, perhaps ..."
"Where were you born?" asked Maril suddenly.
Calhoun jerked his head around. He said;
"No! Not where you're guessing—or hoping. Not on Dara. Just because I act as if Darians were human doesn't mean I have to be one! I'm a Med Service man, and I'm acting as I think I should." His tone became exasperated. "Dammit, I'm supposed to deal with health situations, actual and possible causes of human deaths! And if Weald thinks it finds proof that blueskins are in space again and caused the death of Wealdians it won't be healthy! They're halfway set anyhow to drop fusion-bombs on Dara to wipe it out!"
Maril said fiercely;
"They might as well drop bombs. It'll be quicker than starvation, at least!"
Calhoun looked at her more exasperatedly than before.
"It is a crop failure again?" he demanded. When she nodded he said bitterly; "Famine conditions already?" When she nodded again he said drearily; "And of course famine is the great-grandfather of health problems! And that's right in my lap with all the rest!"
He stood up. Then he sat down again.
"I'm tired!" he said flatly. "I'd like to get some sleep."
Maril understood. She picked up a book and went into the other cabin.
Alone in the control compartment, he tried to relax, but it was not possible. He flung himself into a comfortable chair and considered the situation of the people of the planet Dara. Those people were marked by patches of blue pigment as an inherited consequence of a plague of three generations past. Dara was a planet of pariahs, excluded from the human race by those who had been conditioned to fear them.
And now there was famine on Dara for the second time, and they were of no mind to starve quietly. There was food on the planet Orede, monstrous herds of cattle without owners. It was natural enough for Darians to build a ship or ships and try to bring food back to its starving people. But that desperately necessary enterprise had now roused Weald to a frenzy of apprehension. Weald was if possible more hysterically afraid of blueskins than ever before, and even more implacably the enemy of the starving planet's population. Weald itself throve and prospered. Ironically, it had such an excess of foodstuffs that it stored them in unneeded space-ships in orbits about itself. Hundreds of thousands of tons of grain circled Weald in sealed-tight hulks, while the people of Dara starved and only dared try to steal—it could be called stealing—some of the innumerable wild cattle of Orede.