, Calhoun would be escorted back to the
landing-grid, and lifted out to space, and he'd spend long empty days in
overdrive and land somewhere else to do the whole thing all over again.

It all happened exactly as he expected, with one exception. Every human
being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins. Blueskins and the
idea of blueskins obsessed everyone. Calhoun listened without asking
questions until he had the picture of what blueskins meant to the people
who talked of them. Then he knew there would be no use asking questions
at random. Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin. Nobody
mentioned a specific event in which a blueskin had at any named time
taken part. But everybody was afraid of blueskins. It was a patterned,
an inculcated, a stage-directed fixed idea. And it found expression in
shocked references to the vileness, the depravity, the monstrousness of
the blueskin inhabitants of Dara, from whom Weald must at all costs be
protected.

It did not make sense. So Calhoun listened politely until he found an
undistinguished medical man who wanted some special information about
gene-selection as practised halfway across the galaxy. He invited that
man to the Med Ship, where he supplied the information not hitherto
available. He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with that joyous awe a
man feels when he finds out something he has wanted long and badly to
know.

"Now," said Calhoun, "tell me something! Why does everybody on this
planet hate the inhabitants of Dara? It's light-years away. Nobody
claims to have suffered in person from them. Why make a point of hating
them?"

The Wealdian doctor grimaced.

"They've blue patches on their skins. They're different from us. So they
can be pictured as a danger and our political parties can make an
election issue out of competing for the privilege of defending us from
them. They had a plague on Dara, once. They're accused of still having
it ready for export."

"Hm," said Calhoun. "The story is that they want to spread contagion
here, eh? Doesn't anybody"--his tone was sardonic--"doesn't anybody urge
that they be massacred as an act of piety?"

"Yes--s--s--s," admitted the doctor reluctantly. "It's mentioned in
political speeches."

"But how's it rationalized?" demanded Calhoun. "What's the argument to
make pigment-patches involve moral and physical degradation, as I'm
assured is the case?"

"In the public schools," said the doctor, "the children are