He began to work his way out of his own vacuum-suit.

“Item,” he said.  “The ships are fuelled and provisioned.  A practical tribe, the Wealdians!  The ships are ready to take off as soon as they’re warmed up inside.  A half-degree sun doesn’t radiate heat enough to keep a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectively near zero Kelvin.  Here, point the heaters like this.”

He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers.  The fog disappeared where their beams played.  But the metal spacesuits glistened and steamed, and the steam disappeared within inches.  They were so completely and utterly cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, which re-evaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and was immediately replaced.

“Item,” said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of the vacuum-suit sleeves.  “The controls are pretty nearly standard.  Our sleeping friends will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble, provided only that nobody comes out here to bother us before they leave.”

He shed the last of the spacesuit, stepping out of its legs.

“And,” he finished wryly, “I brought back an emergency supply of ship provisions for everybody concerned, but find that I’m idiot enough to feel that they’ll choke me if I eat them while Dara’s still starving.”

Maril said, “But there isn’t any hope for Dara!  No real hope!”

He gaped at her.

“What do you think we’re here for?”

He set to work to restore his four recent students to consciousness.  It was not a difficult task.  The dosage mixed in the coffee given them as a graduation ceremony—­the ceremony which had consisted solely of drinking coffee and passing out—­allowed for waking-up processes.  Calhoun took the precaution of disarming them first, but presently four hot-eyed young men glared at him.

“I’m calling,” said Calhoun, holding a blaster negligently in his hand, “I’m calling for volunteers.  There’s a famine on Dara.  There’ve been unmanageable crop surpluses on Weald.  On Dara, the government grimly rations every ounce of food.  On Weald, the government has been buying surplus grain to keep the price up.

“To save storage costs, it’s loaded the grain into out-of-date spaceships it once used to stand sentry over Dara to keep it out of space when there was another famine there.  Those ships have been put out in orbit, where we’re hooked on to one of them.

“It’s loaded with half a million bushels of grain.  I’ve brought spacesuits from it, I’ve turned on the heaters in its interior, and I’ve set its overdrive unit for a hop to Dara.  Now I’m calling for volunteers to take half a million bushels of grain to where it’s needed.  Do I get any volunteers?”

He got four.  Not immediately, because they were ashamed that he’d made it impossible to carry out their original fanatic plan, and now offered something much better to make up for it.  They raged.  But half a million bushels of grain meant that people who must otherwise die might live.