ithout listening to their official speeches. Murgatroyd was brought,
his small paunch distended with cakes and coffee and such delicacies
as he'd been plied with. He was half comatose from overfeeding and
overpetting, but he was glad to see Calhoun.

Calhoun held the little creature in his arms as the official groundcar
raced through traffic with screaming sirens claiming the right of way.
It reached the spaceport, where enormous metal girders formed a
monster frame of metal lace against a star-filled sky. The chief
executive strode magnificently into the spaceport offices. There was
no news; the situation remained unchanged.

A ship from Orede had come out of overdrive and lay dead in emptiness.
It did not answer calls. It did not move in space. It floated eerily
in no orbit, going nowhere, doing nothing. And panic was the
consequence.

It seemed to Calhoun that the official handling of the matter
accounted for the terror that he could feel building up. The
unexplained bit of news was on the air all over the planet Weald.
There was nobody awake of all the world's population who did not
believe that there was a new danger in the sky. Nobody doubted that it
came from blueskins. The treatment of the news was precisely
calculated to keep alive the hatred of Weald for the inhabitants of
the world Dara.

Calhoun put Murgatroyd into the Med Ship and went back to the
spaceport office. A small spaceboat, designed to inspect the circling
grain ships from time to time, was already aloft. The landing-grid had
thrust it swiftly out most of the way. Now it droned and drove on
sturdily toward the enigmatic ship.

Calhoun took no part in the agitated conferences among the officials
and news reporters at the spaceport. But he listened to the talk about
him. As the investigating small ship drew nearer to the deathly-still
cargo vessel, the guesses about the meaning of its breakout and
following silence grew more and more wild.

But, singularly, there was no single suggestion that the mystery might
not be the work of blueskins. Blueskins were scape-goats for all the
fears and all the uneasiness a perhaps over-civilized world developed.

Presently the investigating spaceboat reached the mystery ship and
circled it, beaming queries. No answer. It reported the cargo ship
dark. No lights anywhere on or in it. There were no induction-surges
from even pulsing, idling engines. Delicately, the messenger craft
maneuvered until it touched