This World Is Taboo | Page 4

to make them well when they got sick.
And in two days, or three, Calhoun would be escorted back to the
landing-grid, and lifted out to space, and he'd spend long empty days in
overdrive and land somewhere else to do the whole thing all over again.
It all happened exactly as he expected, with one exception. Every
human being he met on Weald wanted to talk about blueskins.
Blueskins and the idea of blueskins obsessed everyone. Calhoun
listened without asking questions until he had the picture of what
blueskins meant to the people who talked of them. Then he knew there
would be no use asking questions at random.
Nobody mentioned ever having seen a blueskin. Nobody mentioned a
specific event in which a blueskin had at any named time taken part.
But everybody was afraid of blueskins. It was a patterned, an inculcated,
a stage-directed fixed idea. And it found expression in shocked
references to the vileness, the depravity, the monstrousness of the
blueskin inhabitants of Dara, from whom Weald must at all costs be
protected.
It did not make sense. So Calhoun listened politely until he found an
undistinguished medical man who wanted some special information
about gene selection as practised halfway across the galaxy. He invited
that man to the Med Ship, where he supplied the information not
hitherto available. He saw his guest's eyes shine a little with that joyous
awe a man feels when he finds out something he has wanted long and
badly to know.
"Now," said Calhoun, "tell me something? Why does everybody on this
planet hate the inhabitants of Dara? It's light-years away. Nobody
claims to have suffered in person from them. Why make a point of
hating them?"
The Wealdian doctor grimaced.
"They've blue patches on their skins. They're different from us. So they

can be pictured as a danger and our political parties can make an
election issue out of competing for the privilege of defending us from
them. They had a plague on Dara, once. They're accused of still having
it ready for export."
"Hm," said Calhoun. "The story is that they want to spread contagion
here, eh? Doesn't anybody"--his tone was sardonic--"doesn't anybody
urge that they be massacred as an act of piety?"
"Yes-s-s-s," admitted the doctor reluctantly. "It's mentioned in political
speeches."
"But how's it rationalized?" demanded Calhoun. "What's the argument
to make pigment-patches involve moral and physical degradation, as
I'm assured is the case?"
"In the public schools," said the doctor, "the children are taught that
blueskins are now carriers of the disease they survived--three
generations ago! That they hate everybody who isn't a blueskin. That
they are constantly scheming to introduce their plague here so most of
us will die and the rest will become blueskins. That's beyond
rationalizing. It can't be true, but it's not safe to doubt it."
"Bad business," said Calhoun coldly. "That sort of thing usually costs
lives in the end. It could lead to massacre!"
"Perhaps it has, in a way," said the doctor unhappily. "One doesn't like
to think about it." He paused. "Twenty years ago there was a famine on
Dara. There were crop failures. The situation must have been very bad:
They built a spaceship.
"They've no use for such things normally, because no nearby planet
will deal with them or let them land. But they built a spaceship and
came here. They went in orbit around Weald. They asked to trade for
shiploads of food. They offered any price in heavy metals--gold,
platinum, irridium, and so on. They talked from orbit by vision
communicators. They could be seen to be blueskins. You can guess
what happened!"

"Tell me," said Calhoun.
"We armed ships in a hurry," admitted the doctor. "We chased their
spaceship back to Dara. We hung in space off the planet. We told them
we'd blast their world from pole to pole if they ever dared take to space
again. We made them destroy their one ship, and we watched on
visionscreens as it was done."
"But you gave them food?"
"No," said the doctor ashamedly. "They were blueskins."
"How bad was the famine?"
"Who knows? Any number may have starved! And we kept a squadron
of armed ships in their skies for years--to keep them from spreading the
plague, we said. And some of us believed it!"
The doctor's tone was purest irony.
"Lately," he said, "there's been a move for economy in our government.
Simultaneously, we began to have a series of overabundant crops. The
government had to buy the excess grain to keep the price up. Retired
patrol ships, built to watch over Dara, were available for storage space.
We filled them up with grain and sent them out into orbit. They're there
now, hundreds of thousands or millions of tons of