But just before arrival he had tricked all four of them by giving them drugged coffee.  He’d destroyed the lethal bacterial cultures they’d been ordered to dump on Weald.  Then he’d sent the four student pilots off separately, so he and Maril claimed, in huge ships crammed with grain.  But those ships were not to be believed in, anyhow.

Nobody believed in shiploads of grain to be had for the taking.  They did know that the only four partially experienced space pilots on Dara had been taken away and by Calhoun’s own story sent out of the ship after they’d been drugged.

Had they been trained, and had they been helped or even permitted to sow the seeds of plague on Weald, and had they come back prepared to pass on training to other men to handle other space ships now feverishly being built in hidden places on Dara, then Dara might have a chance of survival.

But a space battle with only partly trained pilots would be hazardous at best.  With no trained pilots at all, it would be hopeless.  So Calhoun, by his own story, appeared to have doomed every living being on Dara to massacre from the bombs of Weald.

It was this last angle which destroyed any chance of anybody believing in such fairy-tale objects as ships loaded down with grain.  Calhoun had shattered Dara’s feeble hope of resistance.  Weald had some ships and could build or buy others faster than Dara could hope to construct them.

Equally important, Weald had a plenitude of experienced spacemen to man some ships fully and train the crews of others.  If it had become desperately busy fighting plague, then a fleet to exterminate life on Dara would be delayed.  Dara might have gained time at least to build ships which could ram their enemies and destroy them that way.

But Calhoun had made it impossible.  If he told the truth and Weald already had a fleet of huge ships which only needed to be emptied of grain and filled with guns and men, then Dara was doomed.  But if he did not tell the truth it was equally doomed by his actions.  So Calhoun would be killed.

His execution was to take place in the open space of the landing-grid, with vision cameras transmitting the sight over all the blueskin planet.  Half-starved men with grisly blue blotches on their skins, marched him to the center of the largest level space on the planet which was not desperately being cultivated.  Their hatred showed in their expressions.  Bitterness and fury surrounded Calhoun like a wall.  Most of Dara would have liked to have seen him killed in a manner as atrocious as his crime, but no conceivable death would be satisfying.

So the affair was coldly businesslike, with not even insults offered to him.  He was left to stand alone in the very center of the landing-grid floor.  There were a hundred blasters which would fire upon him at the same instant.  He would not only be killed; he would be destroyed.  He would be vaporized by the blue-white flames poured upon him.