plague germs!"

He grumbled to himself for minutes. The life of a Med Ship man is not
exactly a sinecure, at best. It means long periods in empty space in
overdrive, which is absolute and deadly tedium. Then two or three days
aground, checking official documents and statistics, and asking
questions to see how many of the newest medical techniques have
reached this planet or that, and the supplying of information about
such as have not arrived.

Then the lifting out to space for long periods of tedium, to repeat
the process somewhere else. Med Ships carry only one man because two
could not stand the close contact without quarreling with each other.
But Med Ships do carry _tormals_, like Murgatroyd, and a _tormal_ and
a man can get along indefinitely, like a man and a dog. It is a highly
unequal friendship, but it seems to be satisfactory to both.

Calhoun was very much annoyed with the way the Med Service had been
operated in Sector Twelve. He was one of many men at work to correct
the results of incompetence in directing Med Service in this sector.
But it is always disheartening to have to labor at making up for
somebody else's blundering, when there is so much new work that needs
to be done.

The condition shown by the landing-grid suspicions was a case in
point. Blueskins were people who inherited a splotchy skin
pigmentation from other people who'd survived a plague. Weald plainly
maintained a one-planet quarantine against them. But a quarantine is
normally an emergency measure. The Med Service should have taken over,
wiped out the need for a quarantine, and then lifted it. It hadn't