enough food to make them well. Doctors and nurses denied themselves
food to spare it for their patients. And most of that self-denial was
doubtless voluntary, but it would not be discreet for anybody on Dara
to look conspicuously better fed than his fellows.

Calhoun brought out hormones and enzymes and medicaments from the Med
Ship while the guard in the ship looked on. He demonstrated the
processes of synthesis and auto-catalysis that enabled such small
samples to be multiplied indefinitely. He was annoyed by a clamorous
appetite. There were some doctors who ignored the irony of medical
techniques being taught to cure nonnutritional disease, when everybody
was half-fed, or less. They approved of Calhoun. They even approved of
Murgatroyd when Calhoun explained his function.

He was, of course, a Med Service _tormal_, and _tormals_ were
creatures of talent. They'd originally been found on a planet in the
Deneb area, and they were engaging and friendly small animals. But the
remarkable fact about them was that they couldn't contract any
disease. Not any.

They had a built-in, explosive reaction to bacterial and viral toxins,
and there hadn't yet been any pathogenic organism discovered to which
a _tormal_ could not more or less immediately develop antibody
resistance. So that in interstellar medicine _tormals_ were priceless.

Let Murgatroyd be infected with however localized, however specialized
an inimical organism, and presently some highly valuable defensive
substance could be isolated from his blood and he'd remain in his
usual exuberant good health.