He shook his head.

“I’m squeamish,” he admitted.  “The trouble on Dara is Med Service fault.  Before my time, but still ...  I’ll stick to rations until everybody eats.”

He watched her unobtrusively as the day went on.  Presently he considered that she was slightly flushed.  Shortly after the evening meal of singularly unappetizing Darian rations, she drank thirstily.  He did not comment.  He brought out cards and showed her a complicated game of solitaire in which mental arithmetic and expert use of probability increased one’s chance of winning.

By midnight she’d learned the game and played it absorbedly.  Calhoun was able to scrutinize her without appearing to do so, and he was satisfied again.  When he mentioned that the Med Ship should arrive off Dara in eight hours more, she put the cards away and went into the other cabin.

Calhoun wrote up the log.  He added the notes that Maril had made for him, of Murgatroyd’s pulse and blood pressure after the injection of the same culture that produced fever and thirstiness in himself and later, without contact with him or the culture, in Maril.  He put a professional comment at the end: 

The culture seems to have retained its normal characteristics during long storage in the spore state.  It received and reproduced rapidly.  I injected .5 cc. under my skin and in less than one hour my temperature was 30.8 deg.  C. An hour later it was 30.9 deg.  C. This was its peak.  It immediately returned to normal.  The only other observable symptom was slightly increased thirst.  Bloodpressure and pulse remained normal.  The other person in the Med Ship displayed the same symptoms, in prompt and complete repetition, without physical contact.

He went to sleep, with Murgatroyd curled up in his cubbyhole, his tail draped carefully over his nose.

The Med Ship broke out of overdrive at 1300 hours, ship-time.  Calhoun made contact with the grid and was promptly lowered to the ground.

It was almost two hours later, at 1500 hours ship-time, when the people of Dara were informed by broadcast that Calhoun was to be executed immediately.

* * * * *

7

From the viewpoint of Darians, who were also blueskins, the decision of Calhoun’s guilt and the decision to execute him were reasonable enough.  Maril protested fiercely, and her testimony agreed with Calhoun’s in every respect, but from a blueskin viewpoint their own statements were damning.

Calhoun had taken four young astrogators to space.  They were the only semiskilled space pilots Dara had.  There were no fully qualified men.  Calhoun had asked for them, and taken them out to emptiness, and there he had instructed them in modern guidance methods for ships of space.

So far there was no disagreement.  He’d proposed to make them more competent pilots; more capable of driving a ship to Orede, for example, to raid the enormous cattle herds there.  And he’d had them drive the Med Ship to Weald, against which there could be no objection.