But there was no response to it.  Calhoun waited a reasonable time.  Then he shrugged and seated himself at the control board.

“It isn’t easy,” he observed, “to persuade desperate men that they’ve outsmarted themselves!  Hold hard, Murgatroyd!”

The rockets bellowed.  Then there was a tremendous noise to end all noises, and the ship began to climb.  It sped up and up and up.  By the time it was out of atmosphere it had velocity enough to coast to clear space and Calhoun cut the rockets altogether.

He busied himself with those astrogational chores which began with orienting oneself to galactic directions after leaving a planet which rotates at its own individual speed.  Then one computes the overdrive course to another planet, from the respecting coordinates of the world one is leaving and the one one aims for.

Then, in this case at any rate, there was the very finicky task of picking out a fourth-magnitude star of whose planets one was his destination.  He aimed for it with ultra-fine precision.

“Overdrive coming,” he said presently.  “Hold on!”

Space reeled.  There was nausea and giddiness and a horrible sensation of falling in a wildly unlikely spiral.  Then stillness, and solidity, and the blackness outside the Med Ship.  The little craft was in overdrive again.

After a long while, the girl Maril said uneasily, “I don’t know what you plan now—­”

“I’m going to Dara,” said Calhoun.  “On Orede I tried to get the blueskins there to get going, fast.  Maybe I succeeded.  I don’t know.  But this thing’s been mishandled!  Even if there’s a famine people shouldn’t do things out of desperation!  Being desperate jogs the brain off-center.  One doesn’t think straight!”

“I know now that I was ... very foolish.”

“Forget it,” commanded Calhoun.  “I wasn’t talking about you.  Here I run into a situation that the Med Service should have caught and cleaned up generations ago!  But it’s not only a Med Service obligation; it’s a current mess!  Before I could begin to get at the basic problem, those idiots on Orede—­It’d happened before I reached Weald!  An emotional explosion triggered by a ship full of dead men that nobody intended to kill.”

Maril shook her head.

“Those Darian characters,” said Calhoun, annoyed, “shouldn’t have gone to Orede in the first place.  If they went there, they should at least have stayed on a continent where there were no people from Weald digging a mine and hunting cattle for sport on their off days!  They could be spotted!  I believe they were.

“And again, if it had been a long way from the mine installation, they could probably have wiped out the people who sighted them before they could get back with the news!  But it looks like miners saw men hunting, and got close enough to see they were blueskins, and then got back to the mine with the news!”

She waited for him to explain.