ou. And you'd better not show
yourself in public. You've been well fed. You'll be hated for that."

Maril began to cry. Murgatroyd said bewilderedly;

"_Chee! Chee!_"

Calhoun held him close. There was confusion. And Calhoun found the
Minister of Health at hand--he looked most harried of all the officials
gathered to question Calhoun--and proposed that he get a look at the
hospital situation right away.

* * * * *

It wasn't practical. With all the population on half rations or less,
when night came people needed to sleep. Most people, indeed, slept as
many hours out of the traditional twenty-four as they could manage. It
was much more pleasant to sleep than to be awake and constantly nagged
at by continued hunger. And there was the matter of simple decency.
Continuous gnawing hunger had an embittering effect upon everyone.
Quarrelsomeness was a common experience. And people who would normally
be the leaders of opinion felt shame because they were obsessed by
thoughts of food. It was best when people slept.

Still, Calhoun was in the hospitals by daybreak. What he found moved him
to savage anger. There were too many sick children. In every case
undernourishment contributed to their sickness. And there was not enough
food to make them well. Doctors and nurses denied themselves food to
spare it for their patients.

Calhoun brought out hormones and enzymes and medicaments from the Med
Ship while the guard in the ship looked on. He demonstrated the
processes of synthesis and autocatalysis that enabled such small samples
to be multiplied indefinitely. He was annoyed by a clamorous appetite.
There were some doctors who ignored the irony of medical techniques
being taught to cure non-nutritional disease, when everybody was
half-fed, or less. They approved of Calhoun. They even approved of
Murgatroyd when Calhoun explained his function.

He was, of course, a Med Service _tormal_, and _tormals_ were creatures
of talent. They'd originally been found on a planet in the Deneb area,
and they were engaging and friendly small animals, but the remarkable
fact about them was that they couldn't contract any disease. Not any.
They had a built-in, explosive reaction to bacterial and viral toxins,
and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism discovered to which a
_tormal_ could not more or less immediately develop antibody-resistance.
So that in interstellar medicine _tormals_ were priceless. Let