th any meaning."

"Remarkable!" said Calhoun.

"Did you do it?" asked Maril. "Did you start a harmless epidemic that
wipes out the virus that makes blueskins?"

Calhoun said in feigned astonishment, "How can you think such a thing,
Maril?"

"Because I was there," said Maril. She said, somehow desperately, "I
know you did it! But the question is, are you going to tell? When
people find they're not blueskins any longer, when there's no such
thing as a blueskin any longer, will you tell them why?"

"Naturally not," said Calhoun. "Why?" Then he guessed. "Has Korvan--"

"He thinks," said Maril, "that he thought it up all by himself. He's
found the proof. He's very proud. I'd have to tell him how the ideas
got into his head if you were going to tell. And he'd be ashamed and
angry."

Calhoun considered, staring at her.

"How it happened doesn't matter," he said at last. "The idea of
anybody doing it deliberately would be disturbing, too. It shouldn't
get about. So it seems much the best thing for Korvan to discover
what's happened to the blueskin pigment, and how it happened. But not
why."

She read his face carefully.

"You aren't doing it as a favor to me," she decided. "You'd rather it
was that way."

She looked at him for a long time, until he squirmed. Then she nodded
and went away.

An hour later the Wealdian space fleet was reported massed in space
and driving for Dara.

* * * * *

8

There were small scout ships which came on ahead of the main fleet.
They'd originally been guard boats, intended for solar system duty
only and quite incapable of overdrive. They'd come from Weald in the
cargo holds of the liners now transformed into fighting ships. The
scouts swept low, transmitting fine-screen images back to the fleet,
of all they might see before they were shot down. They found the
landing-grid. It contained nothing larger than Calhoun's Med Ship,
_Aesclipus Twenty_.

They searched here and there. They flittered to and fro, scanning wide
bands of the surface of Dara. The planet's cities and highways and
industrial centers were wholly open to inspection from the sky. It
looked as if the scouts hunted most busily for the fleet of former
grain ships which Calhoun had said the blueskins had seized and rushed
away. If the scouts looked for them, they did not find them.

Dara offered no opposition to the ships. Nothing rose to space to
oppose or to resist their s