m drive the Med Ship to
Weald, against which there could be no objection.

But just before arrival he had tricked all four of them by giving them
drugged coffee. He'd destroyed the lethal bacterial cultures they'd been
ordered to dump on Weald. Then he'd sent the four student pilots off
separately--so he and Maril claimed--in huge ships crammed with grain.
But those ships were not to be believed in, anyhow. Nobody on Dara could
imagine stores of food bought up and stored away because it was useless;
to keep up prices. Nobody believed in shiploads of grain to be had for
the taking. They did know that the only four partially experienced
space-pilots on Dara had been taken away and by Calhoun's own story sent
out of the ship after they'd been drugged. Had they been trained, and
had they been helped or even permitted to sow the seeds of plague on
Weald, and had they come back prepared to pass on training to other men
to handle other space-ships now feverishly being built in hidden places
on Dara,--why--then Dara might have a chance of survival. But a
space-battle with only partly trained pilots would be hazardous at best.
With no trained pilots at all, it would be hopeless. So Calhoun, by his
own story, appeared to have doomed every living being on Dara to
massacre from the bombs of Weald.

It was this last angle which destroyed any chance of anybody believing
in such fairy-tale objects as ships loaded down with grain. Calhoun had
shattered Dara's feeble hope of resistance. Weald had some ships and
could build or buy others faster than Dara could hope to construct them.
Equally important, Weald had a plenitude of experienced spacemen to man
some ships fully and train the crews of others. If it had become
desperately busy fighting plague, then a fleet to exterminate life on
Dara would be delayed. Dara might have gained time at least to build
ships which could ram their enemies and destroy them that way.

But Calhoun had made it impossible. If he told the truth and Weald
already had a fleet of huge ships which only needed to be emptied of
grain and filled with guns and men--why--Dara was doomed. But if he did
not tell the truth it was equally doomed by his actions. So Calhoun
would be killed.

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