ht she'd learned the game and played it absorbedly. Calhoun
was able to scrutinize her without appearing to do so, and he was
satisfied again. When he mentioned that the Med Ship should arrive off
Dara in eight hours more, she put the cards away and went into the
other cabin.

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

_The culture seems to have retained its normal characteristics
during long storage in the spore state. It received and reproduced
rapidly. I injected .5 cc. under my skin and in less than one hour
my temperature was 30.8 deg. C. An hour later it was 30.9 deg. C. This was
its peak. It immediately returned to normal. The only other
observable symptom was slightly increased thirst. 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 tail
draped carefully over his nose.

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

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

* * * * *

7

From the viewpoint of Darians, who were also blueskins, the decision
of Calhoun's guilt and the decision to execute him were reasonable
enough. Maril protested fiercely, and her testimony agreed with
Calhoun's in every respect, but from a blueskin viewpoint their own
statements were damning.

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

So far there was no disagreement. He'd proposed to make them more
competent pilots; more capable of driving a ship to Orede, for
example, to raid the enormous cattle herds there. And he'd had them
drive the Med Ship to Weald, against which there co