ayed report was almost incoherent, what with horror and
incredulity and the feeling of doom that came upon the volunteer. The
ship was a bulk-cargo ore-carrier, designed to run between Orede and
Weald with cargoes of heavy-metal ores and a crew of no more than five
men. There was no cargo in her holds now, though. Instead, there were
men. They packed the ship. They filled the corridors. They had crawled
into every cargo and other space where a man could find room to push
himself. There were hundreds of them. It was insanity. And it had been
greater insanity still for the ship to have taken off with so
preposterous a load of living creatures.

But they weren't living any longer. The air apparatus had been designed
for a crew of five. It could purify the air for possibly twenty or more.
But there were hundreds of men in hiding as well as in plain view in the
cargo-ship from Orede. There were many, many times more than her air
apparatus and reserve tanks could possibly have serviced. They couldn't
even have been fed during the journey from Orede to Weald!

But they hadn't starved. Air-scarcity killed them before the ship came
out of overdrive.

A remarkable thing was that there was no written message in the ship's
log which referred to its take-off. There was no memorandum of the
taking on of such an impossible number of passengers.

"The blueskins did it," said the chief executive of Weald. He was pale.
All about Calhoun men looked sick and shocked and terrified. "It was the
blueskins! We'll have to teach them a lesson!" Then he turned to
Calhoun. "The volunteer who went on that ship ... He'll have to stay
there, won't he? He can't be brought back to Weald without bringing
contagion ..."

Calhoun raged at him.

CHAPTER 2

There was a certain coldness in the manner of those at the Weald
spaceport when the Med Ship left next morning. Calhoun was not popular
because Weald was scared. It had been conditioned to scare easily, where
blueskins might be involved. Its children were trained to react
explosively when the word "blueskin" was uttered in their hearing, and
its adults tended to say "blueskin" when anything to cause uneasiness
entered their minds. So a planet-wide habit of non-rational response had
formed and was not seen to be irrational because almost everybody had
it.

The volunteer who'd discovered the tragedy on the ship from Orede was
safe, though. He'd made a completely conscientious survey of th