hey landed
nobody would think of Dara. They'd use makeup to cover the blue spots,
but maybe it was so far away that blueskins had never been heard of!"

Her face looked pinched, but she did not reply.

"Then they'd land half a dozen of you, with a supply of makeup for the
blue patches. And you'd separate, and take ships that went various
roundabout ways, and arrive on Weald one by one, to see what could be
done there to...." He stopped. "When did you find out positively that
there wasn't any plague any more?"

She began to grow pale.

"I'm not a mind-reader," said Calhoun. "But it adds up. You're from
Dara. You've been on Weald. It's practically certain that there are
other, agents, if you like that word better, on Weald. And there hasn't
been a plague on Weald so you people aren't carriers of it. But you
knew it in advance, I think. How'd you learn? Did a ship in some sort of
trouble land there, on Dara?"

"Y-yes," said the girl. "We wouldn't let it go again. But the people
didn't catch--they didn't die--they lived--."

She stopped short.

"It's not fair to trap me!" she cried passionately, "It's not fair!"

"I'll stop," said Calhoun.

He turned to the control-board. The Med Ship was only planetary
diameters from Orede, now, and the electron telescope showed shining
stars in leisurely motion across its screen. Then a huge, gibbous
shining shape appeared, and there were irregular patches of that muddy
color which is sea-bottom, and varicolored areas which were plains and
forests. Also there were mountains. Calhoun steadied the image and
squinted at it.

"The mine," he observed, "was found by members of a hunting-party,
killing wild cattle for sport."

* * * * *

Even a small planet has many millions of square miles of surface, and a
single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by
random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport
would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they
found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle
would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be
on a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would be near the edge of
mountains, not far from a prairie such as wild cattle would frequent,
and it would be in a temperate climate. Forested areas could be ruled
out. And there would be a landing-grid. Handling only one ship at a
time, it might be