He worked at increasing his store of it. He'd snipped samples of
pigmented skin from dead patients in the hospitals, and examined the
pigmented areas, and very, very painstakingly verified a theory. It
took an electron microscope to do it, but he found a virus in the blue
patches which matched the type discovered on Tralee.

The Tralee viruses had effects which were passed on from mother to
child, and heredity had been charged with the observed results of
quasi-living viral particles. And then Calhoun very, very carefully
introduced into a virus culture the material he had been growing in a
plastic cube. He watched what happened.

He was satisfied, so much so that immediately afterward he yawned and
yawned and barely managed to stagger off to bed. The watching guard in
the Med Ship watched him in amazement.

That night the ship from Orede came in, packed with frozen bloody
carcasses of cattle. Calhoun knew nothing of it. But next morning
Maril came back. There were shadows under her eyes and her expression
was of someone who has lost everything that had meaning in her life.

"I'm all right," she insisted, when Calhoun commented. "I've been
visiting my family. I've seen Korvan. I'm quite all right."

"You haven't eaten any better than I have," Calhoun observed.

"I couldn't!" admitted Maril. "My sisters, my little sisters so
thin.... There's rationing for everybody and it's all efficiently
arranged. They even had rations for me. But I couldn't eat! I gave
most of my food to my sisters and they--they squabbled over it!"