e ship
he'd volunteered to enter and examine. For his courage, he'd have been
doomed but for Calhoun. The reaction of his fellow-citizens was that by
entering the ship he might have become contaminated by blueskin
infective material if the plague still existed, and if the men in the
ship had caught it--but they certainly hadn't died of it--and if there
had been blueskins on Orede to communicate it--for which there was no
evidence--and if blueskins were responsible for the tragedy. Which was
at the moment pure supposition. But Weald feared he might bring death
back to Weald if he were allowed to return.

Calhoun saved his life. He ordered that the guard-ship admit him to its
airlock, which then was to be filled with steam and chlorine. The
combination would sterilize and partly even eat away his space-suit,
after which the chlorine and steam should be bled out to space, and air
from the ship let into the lock. If he stripped off the space-suit
without touching its outer surface, and reentered the investigating ship
while the suit was flung outside by a man in another space-suit,
handling it with a pole he'd fling after it, there could be no possible
contamination brought back.

Calhoun was quite right, but Weald in general considered that he'd
persuaded the government to take an unreasonable risk.

There were other reasons for disapproving of him. Calhoun had been
unpleasantly frank. The coming of the death-ship stirred to frenzy those
people who believed that all blueskins should be exterminated as a pious
act. They'd appeared on every visionscreen, citing not only the ship
from Orede but other incidents which they interpreted as crimes against
Weald. They demanded that all Wealdian atomic reactors be modified to
turn out fusion-bomb materials while a space-fleet was made ready for an
anti-blueskin crusade. They confidently demanded such a rain of
fusion-bombs on Dara that no blueskin, no animal, no shred of
vegetation, no fish in the deepest ocean, not even a living
virus-particle of the blueskin plague could remain alive on the blueskin
world!

One of these vehement orators even asserted that Calhoun agreed that no
other course was possible, speaking for the Interstellar Medical
Service. And Calhoun furiously demanded a chance to deny it by
broadcast, and he made a bitter and indiscreet speech from which a
planet-wide audience inferred that he thought them fools. He did.

So he was definitely unpopular when his