taught that
blueskins are now carriers of the disease they survived three
generations ago! That they hate everybody who isn't a blueskin. That
they are constantly scheming to introduce their plague here so most of
us will die and the rest become blueskins. That's beyond rationalizing.
It can't be true, but it's not safe to doubt it."

"Bad business," said Calhoun coldly. "That sort of thing usually costs
lives, in the end. It could lead to massacre!"

"Perhaps it has, in a way," said the doctor unhappily. "One doesn't like
to think about it." He paused, and said; "Twenty years ago there was a
famine on Dara. There were crop-failures. The situation must have been
very bad. They built a space-ship. They've no use for such things
normally, because no nearby planet will deal with them or let them land.
But they built a space-ship and came here. They went in orbit around
Weald. They asked to trade for shiploads of food. They offered any price
in heavy metals, gold, platinum, iridium, and so on. They talked from
orbit by vision communicators. They could be seen to be blueskins. You
can guess what happened!"

"Tell me," said Calhoun.

"We armed ships in a hurry," admitted the doctor, "We chased their
space-ship back to Dara. We hung in space off the planet. We told them
we'd blast their world from pole to pole if they ever dared take to
space again. We made them destroy their one ship, and we watched on
visionscreens as it was done."

"But you gave them food?"

"No," said the doctor ashamedly. "They were blueskins."

"How bad was the famine?"

"Who knows? Any number may have starved! And we kept a squadron of armed
ships in their skies for years. To keep them from spreading the plague,
we said. And some of us believed it, probably!"

The doctor's tone was purest irony.

"Lately," he said, "there's been a move for economy in our government.
Simultaneously, we began to have a series of over-abundant crops. The
government had to buy the excess grain to keep the price up. Retired
patrol-ships--built to watch over Dara--were available for
storage-space. We filled them up with grain and sent them out into
orbit. They're there now, hundreds of thousands or millions of tons of
grain!"

"And Dara?"

The Doctor shrugged. He stood up.

"Our hatred of Dara," he said, again ironically, "has produced one
thing. Roughly halfway between here and Dara there's a two-planet solar
system, Orede. There's a usable planet there. I