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That information was that the people of Dara weren't blueskins any longer. There'd been a trivial epidemic. The sag-suited men of Weald went zestfully about their business. They took over the landing-grid's operation, driving the Darian operators away. For the first time in history the operators of a landing-grid wore makeup to look like they did have blue pigment in their skins.
"Chee!" he said indignantly. "Chee! Chee!" "No," said Calhoun. "We'll be crowded enough anyhow. We'll see her later." He nodded to one of the first four student pilots, who crisply made contact with the landing-grid office, and very efficiently supervised as the grid took the ship up. The other three of the four first-trained men explained every move to sub-classes assigned to each.
The landing-grid operator shook hands first. "Nice going! It could be lucky that you arrived. We normals need some luck!" He introduced a man in civilian clothes as the planetary Minister for Health. A man in uniform was head of the planetary police. The others weren't introduced. "We worked fast after your call came!" said the grid operator. "Things are lined up for you, but they're bad!"
It needed a long solar-system drive to make its planetfall. Bors's long-range radar picked it up before it was near enough to notify its arrival to the planet if it intended to notify at all. Most likely its program was simply and frighteningly to appear overhead and arrogantly demand the services of the landing-grid to lower it to the ground.
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.
Murgatroyd said "Chee!" in a subdued voice. "But where the devil did they put them?" demanded Calhoun. "A polar orbit would be ridiculous! They " Then he grunted in disgust. "Oh! Of course! Now, where's the landing-grid?"
He worked busily for minutes, checking the position of the Wealdian landing-grid, which was mapped in the Sector Directory, against the look of continents and seas on the half-disk so plainly visible outside. He found what he wanted. He put on the ship's solar system drive. "I wish," he complained to Maril, "I wish I could think straight the first time! And it's so obvious!
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.
The scouts swept low, transmitting fine-screen images back to the fleet, of all they might see before they were shot down. They found the landing-grid. It contained nothing larger than Calhoun's Med Ship, Aesclipus Twenty. They searched here and there. They flittered to and fro, scanning wide bands of the surface of Dara.
It swept downward until almost level with the peaks of the mountains in which the mine lay. It tilted again, and swept onward over the mountaintops, and then tilted once more and went racing up the valley in which the landing-grid was plainly visible. Calhoun swung it on an erratic course, lest there be opposition. But there was no sign.
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