This World Is Taboo | Page 7

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.

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