uniform to civilian garb. It would not look
eccentric here. Men's ordinary garments were extremely similar all
over the galaxy. Women's clothes were something else.

Now he and Murgatroyd rode in a ground car with four armed men of the
planetary police, plus the civilian who'd been introduced as the
Minister for Health for the planet. The car sped briskly toward the
spaceport gate. Masses of thick gray fog still clung to the ground
where the would-be assassins' car lay on its back and where the bodies
of the two dead men remained. The mist was being spread
everywhere--everywhere the men had touched ground or where their car
had run.

Calhoun had some experience with epidemics and emergency measures for
destroying contagion. He had more confidence in the primitive sanitary
value of fire. It worked, no matter how ancient the process of burning
things might be. But very many human beings, these days, never saw a
naked flame unless in a science class at school, where it might be
shown as a spectacularly rapid reaction of oxidation. But people used
electricity for heat and light and power. Mankind had moved out of the
age of fire. So here on Tallien it seemed inevitable that infective
material should be sprayed with antiseptics instead of simply set
ablaze.

"What," repeated Calhoun doggedly, "is a para?"

The Health Minister said unhappily:

"Paras are ... beings that once were sane men. They aren't sane any
longer. Perhaps they aren't men any longer. Something has happened to
them. If you'd landed a day or two later, you couldn't have landed at
all. We normals had planned to blow up the landing grid so no other
ship could land and be lifted off again to spread the ... contagion to
other worlds. If it is a contagion."

"Smashing the landing grid," said Calhoun practically, "may be all
right as a last resort. But surely there are other things to be tried
first!"

Then he stopped. The ground car in which he rode had reached the
spaceport gate. Three other ground cars waited there. One swung into
motion ahead of them. The other two took up positions behind. A
caravan of four cars, each bristling with blast weapons, swept along
the wide highway which began here at the spaceport and stretched
straight across level ground toward the city whose towers showed on
the horizon. The other cars formed a guard for Calhoun. He'd needed
protection before, and he might need it again.

"Medically," he said to the Minister for Heal