Maril said tensely, “You’re going back?  After they took the ship from you?”

“The job’s not finished,” he explained.  “Not even the famine’s ended, and the famine’s a second-order effect.  If there were no such thing as a blueskin, there’d be no famine.  Food could be traded for.  We’ve got to do something to make sure there are no more famines.”

She looked at him oddly.

“It would be desirable,” she said with irony.  “But you can’t do it.”

“Not today, no,” he admitted.  Then he said longingly, “I didn’t get much sleep on the way here, while running a seminar on astrogation.  I think I’ll take a nap.”

She rose and almost ostentatiously went into the other cabin, to leave him alone.  He shrugged.  He settled down into the chair which, to let a Med Ship man break the monotony of life in unchanging surroundings, turned into a comfortable sleeping arrangement.  He fell instantly asleep.

For very many ship-hours, then, there was no action or activity or happening of any imaginable consequence in the Med Ship.  Very, very far away, light-years distant and light-years apart, four shiploads of grain hurtled toward the famine-stricken planet of blueskins.  Each great ship had a single semiskilled blueskin for pilot and crew.

Thousands of millions of suns blazed with violence appropriate to their stellar types in a galaxy of which a very small proportion had been explored and colonized by humanity.  The human race was now to be counted in quadrillions on scores of hundreds of inhabited worlds, but the tiny Med Ship seemed the least significant of all possible created things.

It could travel between star-systems and even star-clusters, but it was not yet capable of crossing the continent of suns on which the human race arose.  And between any two solar systems the journeying of the Med Ship consumed much time.  Which would be maddening for someone with no work to do or no resources in himself, or herself.

On the second ship-day Calhoun labored painstakingly and somewhat distastefully at the little biological laboratory.  Maril watched him in a sort of brooding silence.  Murgatroyd slept much of the time, with his furry tail wrapped meticulously across his nose.

Toward the end of the day Calhoun finished his task.  He had a matter of six or seven cubic centimeters of clear liquid as the conclusion of a long process of culturing, and examination by microscope, and again culturing plus final filtration.  He looked at a clock and calculated time.

“Better wait until tomorrow,” he observed, and put the bit of clear liquid in a temperature-controlled place of safekeeping.

“What is it?” asked Maril.  “What’s it for?”

“It’s part of a job I have on hand,” said Calhoun.  He considered.  “How about some music?”

She looked astonished.  But he set up an instrument and fed microtape into it and settled back to listen.  Then there was music such as she had never heard before.  It was another device to counteract isolation and monotonous between-planet voyages.  To keep it from losing its effectiveness, Calhoun rationed himself on music, as on other things.