Moved by the plea of the Secretary-General, the assembly voted to form a 12-nation commission to study the problem. Many governments made offers of hospitality to the aliens; the United States, Canada, Australia, the Scandinavian and Low Countries, all expressed a willingness to set aside land areas for the exclusive use of the aliens. The U.S.S.R. made no offer of land, but suggested that the Blues could be completely integrated into Russian society. The choice was left to the Blues and their leader, an Elder named Trecor. The wisdom of Trecor's decision became a subject of debate for generations to come. He declined to isolate his people as a "nation," separate and apart from the human race. He declined to have them as boarders within any one sovereign state. Instead, he asked that the Blues be divided into small communities and dispersed over the world, where each could work out their individual destiny. His purpose was a noble one: he wished to make his people truly the neighbors, even the partners, of the Earthmen. And so it was. In the United States, a Blue community began a collective farming project on acreage deeded to them by the government in Kansas. Within three years, the crops of winter wheat and corn produced on the Blue farmlands were so superior in quality that they provoked the admiration, and envy, of every farmer in the district. In '77, the year of the Terrible Twisters, only the Blue farmlands were miraculously spared the destruction of their fields. The ignorant claimed that some spiritual agency had helped the Blues; the more enlightened credited the sturdiness of their crops. But both became united in a sullen resentment of the Blues, the strangers who had committed the unpardonable sin of prospering in a season of want. From these beginnings came the illicit organization of terrorists who called themselves the Dom-Dom, a name originally meaning Defenders of Mankind. Between the years 1977 and 1991, the Dom-Dom could take the blame for the violent deaths of more than a thousand Blues. * * * * * In New Zealand, another farming community of Blues fared better than their fellows in Kansas. But in the year 1982, they fell victim to the still-unnamed plague which Earthmen merely called the Blue Disease. It seemed to strike only the aliens, but it resembled typhoid in its symptoms and deadly progress. The Blues themselves became unable to cope with the disease; their pleas for outside medical help brought only a handful of Earth physicians. When one of them, a Dr. Martin Roebuck, died of a seizure that the Blues swore was unrelated to the plague, the others fled in fear of contagion. Their statement to the world press claimed that the biological differences between Earthmen and Blues were too great for Earth medicine to be of value. And so the Blues of New Zealand died. The white flash of their funeral pyres lit the night again and again.