isms and a standard
vegetation added to the practicality of human settlements on otherwise
alien worlds. But sometimes the results were strange.

They weren't often so strange, however, as to cause some hundreds of
men to pack themselves frantically aboard a cargo ship which couldn't
possibly sustain them, so that every man must die while the ship was
in overdrive.

Still, by the time Calhoun turned in on a spare pneumatic mattress, he
had calculated that as few as a dozen head of cattle, turned loose on
a suitable planet, would have increased to herds of thousands or tens
or even hundreds of thousands in much less time than had probably
elapsed.

The Med Ship drove on in seemingly absolute solidity, with no sound
from without, with no sight to be seen outside, with no evidence at
all that it was not buried in the heart of a planet instead of
flashing through emptiness at a speed so great as to have no meaning.

Next ship-day the girl looked oddly at Calhoun when she appeared in
the control room. Murgatroyd regarded her with great interest. Calhoun
nodded politely and went back to what he'd been doing before she
appeared.

"Shall I have breakfast?" she asked uncertainly.

"Murgatroyd and I have," he told her. "Why not?"

Silently, she operated the food-readier. She ate. Calhoun gave a very
good portrayal of a man who will respond politely when spoken to, but
who was busy with activities remote from stowaways.

About noon, ship-time, she asked, "When will we get to Orede?"

Calhoun told her absently, as if he were thinking of something else.

"What--what do you think happened there? I mean, to make that tragedy
in the ship."

"I don't know," said Calhoun. "But I disagree with the authorities on
Weald. I don't think it was a planned atrocity of the blueskins."

"Wh-what are blueskins?" asked the girl.

Calhoun turned around and looked at her directly.

"When lying," he said mildly, "you tell as much by what you pretend
isn't, as by what you pretend is. You know what blueskins are!"

"But what do you think they are?" she asked.

"There used to be a human disease called smallpox," said Calhoun.
"When people recovered from it, they were usually marked. Their skin
had little scar pits here and there. At one time, back on Earth, it
was expected that everybody would catch smallpox sooner or later, and
a large percentage would die of it.

"And it was so much a matter of course that if they printed a picture