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Updated: June 19, 2025
So if I land on emergency-rockets the blueskins down below may decide that I come from Weald. And in that case it would be reasonable to blast me before I could land and unload some fighting men. On the other hand, no ship from Weald would conceivably land without impassioned assurance that it was safe. It would drop bombs." He turned to the girl. "How many Darians down below?"
Darians have barricaded themselves in the control-rooms of most if not all your ships. You haven't got a fleet. If the few ships that will obey your orders, drop one bomb, our fleet off Weald will drop fifty. I don't think you'd better order offensive action. Instead, I think you'd better have your fleet medical officers come and learn some of the facts of life.
There's not a ship now aloft, which has been aground today, which hasn't from one to fifteen Darians no longer blueskins on board." The admiral roared. Then his face turned gray. "You can't take your fleet back to Weald," said Calhoun gently, "if you believe its crews have been exposed to carriers of the Dara plague. You wouldn't be allowed to land, anyhow."
The Darians who'd stampeded the cattle took them prisoners. They had to!" "True," said Calhoun. "It wouldn't have been wise to leave Wealdians around on Orede with their throats cut. Or living, either, to tell about a rumor of blueskins. Even if their throats will be cut now. Is that the program?" Maril shivered. "No. They'll be put on short rations like everybody else. And people will watch them.
"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.
Dara was a planet of pariahs, excluded from the human race by those who had been conditioned to fear them. And now there was famine on Dara for the second time, and they were of no mind to starve quietly. There was food on the planet Orede, monstrous herds of cattle without owners. It was natural enough for Darians to build a ship or ships and try to bring food back to its starving people.
Not where you're guessing, or hoping. Not on Dara. Just because I act as if Darians were human doesn't mean I have to be one! I'm a Med Service man, and I'm acting as I think I should." His tone became exasperated. "Dammit, I'm supposed to deal with health situations, actual, and possible causes of human deaths!
You'll have to keep on hiking." He plodded on. His memory of the terrain around the mining settlement told him that there was no definite destination in the girl's mind. But she was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost. She'd guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on the planet, they'd keep the landing-grid under observation.
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