Calhoun was quite right, but Weald in general considered that he’d persuaded the government to take an unreasonable risk.

There were other reasons for disapproving of him.  Calhoun had been unpleasantly frank.  The coming of the death-ship stirred to frenzy those people who believed that all blueskins should be exterminated as a pious act.  They’d appeared on every vision screen, citing not only the ship from Orede but other incidents which they interpreted as crimes against Weald.

They demanded that all Wealdian atomic reactors be modified to turn out fusion-bomb materials while a space fleet was made ready for an anti-blueskin crusade.  They confidently demanded such a rain of fusion bombs on Dara that no blueskin, no animal, no shred of vegetation, no fish in the deepest ocean, not even a living virus particle of the blueskin plague could remain alive on the blueskin world.

One of these vehement orators even asserted that Calhoun agreed that no other course was possible, speaking for the Interstellar Medical Service.  And Calhoun furiously demanded a chance to deny it by broadcast, and he made a bitter and indiscreet speech from which a planet-wide audience inferred that he thought them fools.

He did.

So he was definitely unpopular when his ship lifted from Weald.  He’d curtly given his destination as Orede, from which the death-ship had come.  The landing-grid locked on, raised the small spacecraft until Weald was a great shining ball below it, and then somehow scornfully cast him off.  The Med Ship was free, in clear space where there was not enough of a gravitational field to hinder overdrive.

He aimed for his destination, his face very grim.  He said savagely, “Get set, Murgatroyd!  Overdrive coming!”

He thumbed down the overdrive button.  The universe of stars went out, while everything living in the ship felt the customary sensations of dizziness, of nausea, and of a spiraling fall to nothingness.  Then there was silence.

The Med Ship actually moved at a rate which was a preposterous number of times the speed of light, but it felt absolutely solid, absolutely firm and fixed.  A ship in overdrive feels exactly as if it were buried deep in the core of a planet.  There is no vibration.  There is no sign of anything but solidity and, if one looks out a port, there is only utter blackness plus an absence of sound fit to make one’s eardrums crack.

But within seconds random tiny noises began.  There was a reel and there were sound-speakers to keep the ship from sounding like a grave.  The reel played and the speakers gave off minute creakings, and meaningless hums, and very tiny noises of every imaginable sort, all of which were just above the threshold of the inaudible.

Calhoun fretted.  Sector Twelve was in very bad shape.  A conscientious Med Service man would never have let the anti-blueskin obsession go unmentioned in a report on Weald.  Health is not only a physical affair.  There is mental health, also.  When mental health goes a civilization can be destroyed more surely and more terribly than by any imaginable war or plague germs.  A plague kills off those who are susceptible to it, leaving immunes to build up a world again.  But immunes are the first to be killed when a mass neurosis sweeps a population.