But they weren’t living any longer.  The air apparatus had been designed for a crew of five.  It would purify the air for possibly twenty or more.  But there were hundreds of men in hiding as well as in plain view in the cargo ship from Orede.  There were many, many times more than her air apparatus and reserve tanks could possibly have taken care of.  They couldn’t even have been fed during the journey from Orede to Weald.

But they hadn’t starved.  Air-scarcity killed them before the ship came out of overdrive.

A remarkable thing was that there was no written message in the ship’s log which referred to its takeoff.  There was no memorandum of the taking on of such an impossible number of passengers.

“The blueskins did it,” said the chief executive of Weald.  He was pale.  All about Calhoun men looked sick and shocked and terrified.  “It was the blueskins!  We’ll have to teach them a lesson!” Then he turned to Calhoun.  “The volunteer who went on that ship—­he’ll have to stay there, won’t he?  He can’t be brought back to Weald without bringing contagion.”

Calhoun raged at him.

* * * * *

2

There was a certain coldness in the manner of those at the Weald spaceport when the Med Ship left next morning.  Calhoun was not popular because Weald was scared.  It had been conditioned to scare easily, where blueskins might be involved.  Its children were trained to react explosively when the word blueskin was uttered in their hearing, and its adults tended to say it when anything causing uneasiness entered their minds.  So a planet-wide habit of irrational response had formed and was not seen to be irrational because almost everybody had it.

The volunteer who’d discovered the tragedy on the ship from Orede was safe, though.  He’d made a completely conscientious survey of the ship he’d volunteered to enter and examine.  For his courage, he’d have been doomed but for Calhoun.

The reaction of his fellow citizens was that by entering the ship he might have become contaminated by blueskin infectious material of the plague still existed, and if the men in the ship had caught it (but they certainly hadn’t died of it), and if there had been blueskins on Orede to communicate it (for which there was no evidence), and if blueskins were responsible for the tragedy.  Which was at the moment pure supposition.  But Weald feared he might bring death back to Weald if he were allowed to return.

Calhoun saved his life.  He ordered that the guardship admit him to its airlock, which then was to be filled with steam and chlorine.  The combination would sterilize and even partly eat away his spacesuit, after which the chlorine and steam should be bled out to space, and air from the ship let into the lock.

If he stripped off the spacesuit without touching its outer surface, and reentered the investigating ship while the suit was flung outside by a man in another spacesuit, handling it with a pole he’d fling after it, there could be no possible contamination brought back.