He stood up.  Then he sat down again.

“I’m tired!” he said flatly.  “I’d like to get some sleep.  Would you mind taking a book or something and going into the other cabin?  Murgatroyd and I would like a little relaxation from reality.  With luck, if I go to sleep, I may only have a nightmare.  It’ll be a terrific improvement on what I’m in now!”

Alone in the control compartment, he tried to relax, but it was not possible.  He flung himself into a comfortable chair and brooded.  There is brooding and brooding.  It can be a form of wallowing in self-pity, engaged in for emotional satisfaction.  But it can be, also, a way of bringing out unfavorable factors in a situation.  A man in optimistic mood can ignore them.  But no awkward situation is likely to be remedied while any of its elements are neglected.

Calhoun dourly considered the situation of the people of the planet Dara, which it was his job as a Med Service man to remedy or at least improve.  Those people were marked by patches of blue pigment as an inherited consequence of a plague of three generations past.  Because of the marking, which it was easy to believe a sign of continuing infection, they were hated and dreaded by their neighbors.  Dara was a planet of pariahs—­excluded from the human race by those who feared them.

And now there was famine on Dara for the second time, and they were of no mind to starve quietly.  There was food on the planet Orede, monstrous herds of cattle without owners.  It was natural enough for Darians to build a ship or ships and try to bring food back to its starving people.  But that desperately necessary enterprise had now roused Weald to a frenzy of apprehension.

Weald was, if possible, more hysterically afraid of blueskins than ever before, and even more implacably the enemy of the starving planet’s population.  Weald itself prospered.  Ironically, it had such an excess of foodstuffs that it stored them in unneeded spaceships in orbits about itself.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of grain circled Weald in sealed-tight hulks, while the people of Dara starved and only dared try to steal—­if it could be called stealing—­some of the innumerable wild cattle of Orede.

The blueskins on Orede could not trust Calhoun, so they pretended not to hear.  Or maybe that didn’t hear.  They’d been abandoned and betrayed by all of humanity off their world.  They’d been threatened and oppressed by guardships in orbit about them, ready to shoot down any spacecraft they might send aloft....

So Calhoun brooded, while Murgatroyd presently yawned and climbed to his cubbyhole and curled up to sleep with his furry tail carefully adjusted over his nose.

A long time later Calhoun heard small sounds which were not normal on a Med Ship in overdrive.  They were not part of the random noises carefully generated to keep the silence of the ship endurable.  Calhoun raised his head.  He listened sharply.  No sound could come from outside.