ment-patches involve moral and physical degradation, as I'm
assured is the case?"

"In the public schools," said the doctor, "the children are 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 will 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. "Twenty years ago there was a
famine on Dara. There were crop failures. The situation must have been
very bad: They built a spaceship.

"They've no use for such things normally, because no nearby planet
will deal with them or let them land. But they built a spaceship 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, irridium, 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
spaceship 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!"

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 overabundant 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 pro