This World Is Taboo | Page 6

comes in, and can frame orders
on the latest information."
He took Calhoun by the arm. Calhoun said sharply, "Murgatroyd!"
During the banquet, Murgatroyd had been visiting with the wives of the
higher-up officials. They had enough of their husbands normally,
without listening to their official speeches. Murgatroyd was brought,
his small paunch distended with cakes and coffee and such delicacies as
he'd been plied with. He was half comatose from overfeeding and
overpetting, but he was glad to see Calhoun.
Calhoun held the little creature in his arms as the official groundcar
raced through traffic with screaming sirens claiming the right of way. It
reached the spaceport, where enormous metal girders formed a monster
frame of metal lace against a star-filled sky. The chief executive strode
magnificently into the spaceport offices. There was no news; the
situation remained unchanged.
A ship from Orede had come out of overdrive and lay dead in
emptiness. It did not answer calls. It did not move in space. It floated
eerily in no orbit, going nowhere, doing nothing. And panic was the
consequence.
It seemed to Calhoun that the official handling of the matter accounted
for the terror that he could feel building up. The unexplained bit of
news was on the air all over the planet Weald. There was nobody
awake of all the world's population who did not believe that there was a
new danger in the sky. Nobody doubted that it came from blueskins.

The treatment of the news was precisely calculated to keep alive the
hatred of Weald for the inhabitants of the world Dara.
Calhoun put Murgatroyd into the Med Ship and went back to the
spaceport office. A small spaceboat, designed to inspect the circling
grain ships from time to time, was already aloft. The landing-grid had
thrust it swiftly out most of the way. Now it droned and drove on
sturdily toward the enigmatic ship.
Calhoun took no part in the agitated conferences among the officials
and news reporters at the spaceport. But he listened to the talk about
him. As the investigating small ship drew nearer to the deathly-still
cargo vessel, the guesses about the meaning of its breakout and
following silence grew more and more wild.
But, singularly, there was no single suggestion that the mystery might
not be the work of blueskins. Blueskins were scape-goats for all the
fears and all the uneasiness a perhaps over-civilized world developed.
Presently the investigating spaceboat reached the mystery ship and
circled it, beaming queries. No answer. It reported the cargo ship dark.
No lights anywhere on or in it. There were no induction-surges from
even pulsing, idling engines. Delicately, the messenger craft
maneuvered until it touched the silent vessel. It reported that
microphones detected no motion whatever inside.
"Let a volunteer go aboard," commanded the chief executive. "Let him
report what he finds."
A pause. Then the solemn announcement of an intrepid volunteer's
name, from far, far away. Calhoun listened, frowning darkly. This
pompous heroism wouldn't be noticed in the Med Service. It would be
routine behavior.
Suspenseful, second-by-second reports. The volunteer had rocketed
himself across the emptiness between the two again separated ships. He
had opened the airlock from outside. He'd gone in. He'd closed the
outer airlock door. He'd opened the inner. He reported--

The relayed report was almost incoherent, what with horror and
incredulity and the feeling of doom that came upon the volunteer. The
ship was a bulk-cargo ore-carrier, designed to run between Orede and
Weald with cargos of heavy-metal ores and a crew of no more than five
men. There was no cargo in her holds now, though.
Instead, there were men. They packed the ship. They filled the
corridors. They had crawled into every space where a man could find
room to push himself. There were hundreds of them. It was insanity.
And it had been greater insanity still for the ship to have taken off with
so preposterous a load of living creatures.
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