he vacuum-suit
sleeves. "The controls are pretty nearly standard. Our sleeping
friends will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble,
provided only that nobody comes out here to bother us before they
leave."

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

"And," he finished wryly, "I brought back an emergency supply of ship
provisions for everybody concerned, but find that I'm idiot enough to
feel that they'll choke me if I eat them while Dara's still starving."

Maril said, "But there isn't any hope for Dara! No real hope!"

He gaped at her.

"What do you think we're here for?"

He set to work to restore his four recent students to consciousness.
It was not a difficult task. The dosage mixed in the coffee given them
as a graduation ceremony--the ceremony which had consisted solely of
drinking coffee and passing out--allowed for waking-up processes.
Calhoun took the precaution of disarming them first, but presently
four hot-eyed young men glared at him.

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

"To save storage costs, it's loaded the grain into out-of-date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

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

He got four. Not immediately, because they were ashamed that he'd made
it impossible to carry out their original fanatic plan, and now
offered something much better to make up for it. They raged. But half
a million bushels of grain meant that people who must otherwise die
might live.

Ultimately, truculently, first one and then another angrily agreed.

"Good!" said Calhoun. "Now, how many of you dare risk the trip alone?
I've got one grain ship warming up. There are plenty of others around
us. Every one of you can take a ship and half a million bushels to
Dara, if you have