hesitated. "You brought some food from the first Weald ship. Do you
want to--"

He shook his head.

"I'm squeamish," he admitted. "The trouble on Dara is Med Service
fault. Before my time, but still ... I'll stick to rations until
everybody eats."

He watched her unobtrusively as the day went on. Presently he
considered that she was slightly flushed. Shortly after the evening
meal of singularly unappetizing Darian rations, she drank thirstily.
He did not comment. He brought out cards and showed her a complicated
game of solitaire in which mental arithmetic and expert use of
probability increased one's chance of winning.

By midnight she'd learned the game and played it absorbedly. Calhoun
was able to scrutinize her without appearing to do so, and he was
satisfied again. When he mentioned that the Med Ship should arrive off
Dara in eight hours more, she put the cards away and went into the
other cabin.

Calhoun wrote up the log. He added the notes that Maril had made for
him, of Murgatroyd's pulse and blood pressure after the injection of
the same culture that produced fever and thirstiness in himself and
later, without contact with him or the culture, in Maril. He put a
professional comment at the end:

_The culture seems to have retained its normal characteristics
during long storage in the spore state. It received and reproduced