uld be no
objection.

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

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

Had they been trained, and had they been helped or even permitted to
sow the seeds of plague on Weald, and had they come back prepared to
pass on training to other men to handle other space ships now
feverishly being built in hidden places on Dara, then Dara might have
a chance of survival.

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

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

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

But Calhoun had made it impossible. If he told the truth and Weald
already had a fleet of huge ships which only needed to be emptied of
grain and filled with guns and men, then Dara was doomed. But if he
did not tell the truth it was equally doomed by his actions. So
Calhoun 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 blueskin
planet. Half-starved men with grisly blue blotches on their skins,
marched him to the center of the largest level space on the planet
which was not desperately being cultivated. Their hatred showed in
their expressions. Bitterness and fury surrounded Calhou