"Coffee?" he asked.
Murgatroyd popped his head out of his miniature sleeping cabin.
"_Chee?_" he asked interestedly.
"Go back to sleep!" snapped Calhoun.
He began to pace back and forth.
"I need to know something about the pigment patches," he said jerkily.
"Maybe it sounds crazy to think of such things now--first things
first, you know. But this is a first thing! So long as Darians don't
look like the people of other worlds, they'll be believed to be
different. If they look repulsive, they'll be believed to be evil.
"Tell me about those patches. They're different sizes and different
shapes and they appear in different places. You've none on your face
or hands, anyhow."
"I haven't any at all," said the girl reservedly.
"I thought--"
"Not everybody," she said defensively. "Nearly, yes. But not all. Some
people don't have them. Some people are born with bluish splotches on
their skin, but they fade out while they're children. When they grow
up they're just like the people of Weald or any other world. And their
children never have them."
Calhoun stared.
"You couldn't possibly be proved to be a Darian, then?"
She shook her head. Calhoun remembered, and started the coffee.
"When you left Dara," he said, "you were carried a long, long way, to
some planet where they'd practically never heard of Dara, and where
the name meant nothing. You could have settled there, or anywhere else
and forgotten about Dara. But you didn't. Why not, since you're not a
blueskin?"
"But I am!" she said fiercely. "My parents, my brothers and sisters,
and Korvan--"
Then she bit her lip. Calhoun took note but did not comment on the
name she'd mentioned.
"Then your parents had the splotches fade, so you never had them," he
said absorbedly. "Something like that happened on Tralee, once!
There's a virus, a whole group of virus particles! Normally we humans
are immune to them. One has to be in terrifically bad physical
condition for them to take hold and produce whatever effects they do.
But once they're established they're passed on from mother to child.
And when they die out it's during childhood, too!"
He poured coffee for the two of them. Murgatroyd swung down to the
floor and said, impatiently, "_Chee! Chee! Chee!_"
Calhoun absently filled Murgatroyd's tiny cup and handed it to him.
"But this is marvellous!" he said exuberantly. "The blue patches
appeared after the plague, didn't they? After people recovered--when
they recovered?"
Maril stared at him. His mind was filled with strictly professional
considerations. He was not talking to her as a person. She was purely
a source of information.
"So I'm told," said Maril reservedly. "Are there any more humiliating
questions you want to ask?"
He gaped at her. Then he said ruefully, "I'm stupid, Maril, but you're
touchy. There's nothing personal--"
"There is to me!" she said fiercely. "I was born among blueskins, and
they're of my blood, and they're hated and I'd have been killed on
Weald if I'd been known as ... what I am! And there's Korvan, who
arranged for me to be sent away as a spy and advised me to do just
what you said: abandon my home world and everybody I care about!
Including him! It's personal to me!"
Calhoun wrinkled his forehead helplessly.
"I'm sorry," he repeated. "Drink your coffee!"
"I don't want it," she said bitterly. "I'd like to die!"
"If you stay around where I am," Calhoun told her, "you may get your
wish. All right, there'll be no more questions."
She turned and moved toward the door to the cabin. Calhoun looked
after her.
"Maril."
"What?"
"Why were you crying?"
"You wouldn't understand," she said evenly.
Calhoun shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He was a
professional man. In his profession he was not incompetent. But there
is no profession in which a really competent man tries to understand
women. Calhoun, annoyed, had to let fate or chance or disaster take
care of Maril's personal problems. He had larger matters to cope with.
But he had something to work on, now. He hunted busily in the
reference tapes. He came up with an explicit collection of information
on exactly the subject he needed. He left the control room to go down
into the storage areas of the Med Ship's hull. He found an ultra
frigid storage box, whose contents were kept at the temperature of
liquid air.
He donned thick gloves, used a special set of tongs, and extracted a
tiny block of plastic in which a sealed-tight phial of glass was
embedded. It frosted instantly he took it out, and when the storage
box was closed again the block was covered with a thick and opaque
coating of frozen moisture.
He went back to the control room and pulled down the panel which made
available a small-scale but surprisingly adequate biological
laboratory. He set the plastic block in a container which would raise
it very, very gradually to a specific temperature and hold it there.
It was, obviously, a living culture from which any imaginable quantity
of the same culture could be bred. Calhoun set the apparatus with
great exactitude.
"This," he told Murgatroyd, "may be a good day's work. Now I think I
can rest."
Then, for a long while, there was no sound or movement in the Med
Ship. The girl may have slept, or maybe not. Calhoun lay relaxed in a
chair which at the touch of a button became the most comfortable of
sleeping places. Murgatroyd remained in his cubbyhole, his tail curled
over his nose.
There were comforting, unheard, easily dismissable murmurings now and
again. They kept the feeling of life alive in the ship. But for such
infinitesimal stirrings of sound, carefully recorded for this exact
purpose, the feel of the ship would have been that of a tomb.
But it was quite otherwise when another ship-day began with the taped
sounds of morning activities as faint as echoes but nevertheless
establishing an atmosphere of their own.
Calhoun examined the plastic block and its contents. He read the
instruments which had cared for it while he slept. He put the
block--no longer frosted--in the culture microscope and saw its
enclosed, infinitesimal particles of life in the process of
multiplying on the food that had been frozen with them when they were
reduced to the spore condition. He beamed. He replaced the block in
the incubation oven and faced the day cheerfully.
Maril greeted him with great reserve. They breakfasted, with
Murgatroyd eating from his own platter on the floor, a tiny cup of
coffee alongside.
"I've been thinking," said Maril evenly. "I think I can get you a
hearing for whatever ideas you may have to help Dara."
"Kind of you," murmured Calhoun.
In theory, a Med Service man had all the authority needed for this or
any other emergency. The power to declare a planet in quarantine, so
cutting it off from all interstellar commerce, should be enough to
force cooperation from any world's government. But in practice Calhoun
had exactly as much power as he could exercise.
And Weald could not think straight where blueskins were concerned, and
certainly the authorities on Dara could not be expected to be
levelheaded. They had a history of isolation and outlawry, and long
experience of being regarded as less than human. In cold fact, Calhoun
had no power at all.
"May I ask whose influence you'll exert?" asked Calhoun.
"There's a man," said Maril reservedly, "who thinks a great deal of
me. I don't know his present official position, but he was certain to
become prominent. I'll tell him how you've acted up to now, and your
attitude, and of course that you're Med Service. He'll be glad to help
you, I'm sure."
"Splendid!" said Calhoun, nodding. "That will be Korvan."