ied objects which had been weightless, but were suddenly
heavy in the ship's gravity-field. There were two space-suits and a
curious assortment of parcels. He spread them out, flipped aside the
face-plate, and said briskly;

"This stuff is cold! Turn a heater on it, will you Maril?"

He began to work his way out of his vacuum-suit.

"Item," he said. "The ships are fuelled _and_ provisioned. A practical
tribe, the Wealdians! The ships are ready to take off as soon as they're
warmed up inside. A half-degree sun doesn't radiate heat enough to keep
a ship warm, when the rest of the cosmos is effectively near zero
Kelvin. Here, point the heaters like this."

He adjusted the radiant-heat dispensers. The fog disappeared where their
beams played. But the metal space-suits glistened and steamed,--and the
steam disappeared within inches. They were so completely and utterly
cold that they condensed the air about them as a liquid, which
reevaporated to make fog, which warmed up and disappeared and was
immediately replaced.

"Item," said Calhoun again, getting his arms out of the vacuum-suit
sleeves. "The controls are pretty nearly standard. Our sleeping friends
will be able to astrogate them back to Dara without trouble, provided
only that nobody comes out here to bother us before they leave."

He shed the last of the space-suit, stepping out of its legs.

"And," he finished wrily, "I brought back an emergency supply of
ship-provisions for everybody concerned, but find that I'm idiot enough
to feel that they'll choke me if I eat them while Dara's still
starving."

Maril said;

"But--there isn't any hope for Dara! No real hope!"

He gaped at her.

"What do you think we're here for?"

* * * * *

He set to work to restore his four recent students to consciousness. It
was not a difficult task. The dosage, mixed in the coffee he had given
them earlier, was a light one. Calhoun took the precaution of disarming
them first, but presently four hot-eyed young men glared at him.

"I'm calling," said Calhoun, holding a blaster negligently in his hand,
"I'm calling for volunteers. There's a famine on Dara. There've been
unmanageable crop-surpluses on Weald. On Dara, the government grimly
rations every ounce of food. On Weald, the government has been buying up
surplus grain to keep the price up. To save storage costs, it's loaded
the grain into out-of-date space-ships it once used to stand sentry