any conceivable contagion, do
whatever seemed necessary in the way of looting--but Calhoun did not
use the word--and then return to his fellows with no risk whatever of
bringing back infection. He gave exact details.

Then he said, "My radar says you've four ships converging on me to
blast me out of space. I sign off."

The Med Ship disappeared from normal space, and entered that
improbably stressed area of extension which it formed about itself and
in which physical constants were wildly strange. For one thing, the
speed of light in overdrive-stressed space had not been measured yet.
It was too high. For another, a ship could travel very many times
186,000 miles per second in overdrive.

The Med Ship did just that. There was nobody but Calhoun and
Murgatroyd on board. There was companionable silence, with only the
small threshold-of-perception sounds which one did not often notice.

Calhoun luxuriated in regained privacy. For seven days he'd had
twenty-four other human beings crowded into the two cabins of the
ship, with never so much as one yard of space between himself and
someone else. One need not be snobbish to wish to be alone sometimes!

Murgatroyd licked his whiskers thoughtfully.

"I hope," said Calhoun, "that things work out right. But they may
remember on Dara that I'm responsible for some ten million bushels of
grain reaching them. Maybe, just possibly, they'll listen to me and
act sensibly. After all, there's only one way to break a famine. Not
with ten million bushels for a whole planet! And certainly not with
bombs!"

Driving direct, without pausing for practising, the Med Ship could
arrive at Dara in a little more than five days. Calhoun looked forward
to relaxation. As a beginning he made ready to give himself an
adequate meal for the first time since first landing on Dara. Then,
presently, he sat down to a double meal of Darian famine-rations,
which were far from appetizing. But there wasn't anything else on
board.

He had some pleasure later, though, envisioning what went on in the
normal, non-overdrive universe. Suns flared, and comets hurtled on
their way, and clouds formed and dropped down rain, and all sorts of
celestial and meteorological phenomena took place. On Weald,
obviously, there would be purest panic.

The vanishing of the grain fleet wouldn't be charged against
twenty-four men. A Darian fleet would be suspected, and with the
suspicion would come terror, and with terror a gov