He knocked on the door of the sleeping cabin.  The noises stopped instantly.

“Come out,” he commanded through the door.

“I’m—­I’m all right,” said Maril’s voice.  But it was not quite steady.  She paused.  “Did I make a noise?  I was having a bad dream.”

“I wish,” said Calhoun, “that you’d tell me the truth just occasionally!  Come out, please!”

There were stirrings.  After a little it opened and Maril appeared.  She looked as if she’d been crying.  She said, quickly, “I probably look queer, but it’s because I was asleep.”

“To the contrary,” said Calhoun, fuming.  “You’ve been lying awake crying.  I don’t know why.  I’ve been out here wishing I could, because I’m frustrated.  But since you aren’t asleep maybe you can help me with my job.  I’ve figured some things out.  For some others I need facts.  Will you give them to me?”

She swallowed.  “I’ll try.”

“Coffee?” he asked.

Murgatroyd popped his head out of his miniature sleeping cabin.

“Chee?” he asked interestedly.

“Go back to sleep!” snapped Calhoun.

He began to pace back and forth.

“I need to know something about the pigment patches,” he said jerkily.  “Maybe it sounds crazy to think of such things now—­first things first, you know.  But this is a first thing!  So long as Darians don’t look like the people of other worlds, they’ll be believed to be different.  If they look repulsive, they’ll be believed to be evil.

“Tell me about those patches.  They’re different sizes and different shapes and they appear in different places.  You’ve none on your face or hands, anyhow.”

“I haven’t any at all,” said the girl reservedly.

“I thought—­”

“Not everybody,” she said defensively.  “Nearly, yes.  But not all.  Some people don’t have them.  Some people are born with bluish splotches on their skin, but they fade out while they’re children.  When they grow up they’re just like the people of Weald or any other world.  And their children never have them.”

Calhoun stared.

“You couldn’t possibly be proved to be a Darian, then?”

She shook her head.  Calhoun remembered, and started the coffee.

“When you left Dara,” he said, “you were carried a long, long way, to some planet where they’d practically never heard of Dara, and where the name meant nothing.  You could have settled there, or anywhere else and forgotten about Dara.  But you didn’t.  Why not, since you’re not a blueskin?”

“But I am!” she said fiercely.  “My parents, my brothers and sisters, and Korvan—­”

Then she bit her lip.  Calhoun took note but did not comment on the name she’d mentioned.

“Then your parents had the splotches fade, so you never had them,” he said absorbedly.  “Something like that happened on Tralee, once!  There’s a virus, a whole group of virus particles!  Normally we humans are immune to them.  One has to be in terrifically bad physical condition for them to take hold and produce whatever effects they do.  But once they’re established they’re passed on from mother to child.  And when they die out it’s during childhood, too!”