Then he said, “My radar says you’ve four ships converging on me to blast me out of space.  I sign off.”

The Med Ship disappeared from normal space, and entered that improbably stressed area of extension which it formed about itself and in which physical constants were wildly strange.  For one thing, the speed of light in overdrive-stressed space had not been measured yet.  It was too high.  For another, a ship could travel very many times 186,000 miles per second in overdrive.

The Med Ship did just that.  There was nobody but Calhoun and Murgatroyd on board.  There was companionable silence, with only the small threshold-of-perception sounds which one did not often notice.

Calhoun luxuriated in regained privacy.  For seven days he’d had twenty-four other human beings crowded into the two cabins of the ship, with never so much as one yard of space between himself and someone else.  One need not be snobbish to wish to be alone sometimes!

Murgatroyd licked his whiskers thoughtfully.

“I hope,” said Calhoun, “that things work out right.  But they may remember on Dara that I’m responsible for some ten million bushels of grain reaching them.  Maybe, just possibly, they’ll listen to me and act sensibly.  After all, there’s only one way to break a famine.  Not with ten million bushels for a whole planet!  And certainly not with bombs!”

Driving direct, without pausing for practising, the Med Ship could arrive at Dara in a little more than five days.  Calhoun looked forward to relaxation.  As a beginning he made ready to give himself an adequate meal for the first time since first landing on Dara.  Then, presently, he sat down to a double meal of Darian famine-rations, which were far from appetizing.  But there wasn’t anything else on board.

He had some pleasure later, though, envisioning what went on in the normal, non-overdrive universe.  Suns flared, and comets hurtled on their way, and clouds formed and dropped down rain, and all sorts of celestial and meteorological phenomena took place.  On Weald, obviously, there would be purest panic.

The vanishing of the grain fleet wouldn’t be charged against twenty-four men.  A Darian fleet would be suspected, and with the suspicion would come terror, and with terror a governmental crisis.  Then there’d be a frantic seizure of any craft that could take to space, and the agitated improvisation of a space fleet.

But besides that, biological-warfare technicians would examine Calhoun’s instructions for equipment by which armed men could be landed on a plague-stricken planet and then safely taken off again.  Military and governmental officials would come to the eminently sane conclusion that while Calhoun could not well take active measures against blueskins, as a sane and proper citizen of the galaxy he would be on the side of law and order and propriety and justice—­in short, of Weald.  So they ordered sample anticontagion suits made according to Calhoun’s directions, and they had them tested.  They worked admirably.