starvation, at least!"

Calhoun looked at her, more exasperated than before.

"It is a crop failure again?" he demanded. When she nodded he said
bitterly, "Famine conditions already?" When she nodded again he said
drearily, "And of course famine is the great-grandfather of health
problems! And that's right in my lap with all the rest!"

He stood up. Then he sat down again.

"I'm tired!" he said flatly. "I'd like to get some sleep. Would you
mind taking a book or something and going into the other cabin?
Murgatroyd and I would like a little relaxation from reality. With
luck, if I go to sleep, I may only have a nightmare. It'll be a
terrific improvement on what I'm in now!"

Alone in the control compartment, he tried to relax, but it was not
possible. He flung himself into a comfortable chair and brooded. There
is brooding and brooding. It can be a form of wallowing in self-pity,
engaged in for emotional satisfaction. But it can be, also, a way of
bringing out unfavorable factors in a situation. A man in optimistic
mood can ignore them. But no awkward situation is likely to be
remedied while any of its elements are neglected.

Calhoun dourly considered the situation of the people of the planet
Dara, which it was his job as a Med Service man to remedy or at least
improve. Those people were marked by patches of blue pigment as an
inherited consequence of a plague of three generations past. Because
of the marking, which it was easy to believe a sign of continuing
infection, they were hated and dreaded by their neighbors. Dara was a
planet of pariahs--excluded from the human race by those who feared
them.

And now there was famine on Dara for the second time, and they were of
no mind to starve quietly. There was food on the planet Orede,
monstrous herds of cattle without owners. It was natural enough for
Darians to build a ship or ships and try to bring food back to its
starving people. But that desperately necessary enterprise had now
roused Weald to a frenzy of apprehension.

Weald was, if possible, more hysterically afraid of blueskins than
ever before, and even more implacably the enemy of the starving
planet's population. Weald itself prospered. Ironically, it had such
an excess of foodstuffs that it stored them in unneeded spaceships in
orbits about itself.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of grain circled Weald in sealed-tight
hulks, while the people of Dara starved and only dared try to
steal--if it could