with those astrogational chores which began with
orienting oneself to galactic directions after leaving a planet which
rotates at its own individual speed. Then one computes the overdrive
course to another planet, from the respecting coordinates of the world
one is leaving and the one one aims for.

Then, in this case at any rate, there was the very finicky task of
picking out a fourth-magnitude star of whose planets one was his
destination. He aimed for it with ultra-fine precision.

"Overdrive coming," he said presently. "Hold on!"

Space reeled. There was nausea and giddiness and a horrible sensation
of falling in a wildly unlikely spiral. Then stillness, and solidity,
and the blackness outside the Med Ship. The little craft was in
overdrive again.

After a long while, the girl Maril said uneasily, "I don't know what
you plan now--"

"I'm going to Dara," said Calhoun. "On Orede I tried to get the
blueskins there to get going, fast. Maybe I succeeded. I don't know.
But this thing's been mishandled! Even if there's a famine people
shouldn't do things out of desperation! Being desperate jogs the brain
off-center. One doesn't think straight!"

"I know now that I was ... very foolish."

"Forget it," commanded Calhoun. "I wasn't talking about you. Here I
run into a situation that the Med Service should have caught and
cleaned up generations ago! But it's not only a Med Service
obligation; it's a current mess! Before I could begin to get at the
basic problem, those idiots on Orede--It'd happened before I reached
Weald! An emotional explosion triggered by a ship full of dead men
that nobody intended to kill."

Maril shook her head.

"Those Darian characters," said Calhoun, annoyed, "shouldn't have gone
to Orede in the first place. If they went there, they should at least
have stayed on a continent where there were no people from Weald
digging a mine and hunting cattle for sport on their off days! They
could be spotted! I believe they were.

"And again, if it had been a long way from the mine installation, they
could probably have wiped out the people who sighted them before they
could get back with the news! But it looks like miners saw men
hunting, and got close enough to see they were blueskins, and then got
back to the mine with the news!"

She waited for him to explain.

"I know I'm guessing, but it fits!" he said distastefully. "So
something had to be done. Either the mining settlement had to be wiped
o