"I think," said Calhoun when he'd finished, "that by morning you'll feel better--perhaps cured of the plague and only weak from failure to force yourselves to take nourishment. If it turns out that way, I advise you all to get as far away from the city as possible for a considerable while. I think this planet is going to be repopulated. I suspect that shiploads of colonists are on the way here now--but not from Dettra, which built the city. And I definitely guess that, sick or well, you're going to be in trouble if or when you contact the new colonists." They looked tiredly at him. They were a singular lot of people. Each one seemed half-starved, yet their eyes had not the brightness of suffering. They looked weary beyond belief, and yet there was not self-neglect. They were of that singular human type which maintains human civilization against the inertia of the race--because it drives itself to get needed things done. It is not glamorous, this dogged part of mankind which keeps things going. It is sometimes absurd. For dying folk to wash themselves, when even such exertion calls for enormous resolution, is not exactly rational. To help each other try to die with dignity was much more a matter of self-respect than of intellectual decision. But as a Med Ship man, Calhoun viewed them with some warmth. They were the type that has to be called on when an emergency occurs and the wealth-gathering type tends to flee and the low-time-sense part of a population inclines to riot or loot or worse. Now they waited listlessly for their own deaths. "There's no exact precedent for what's happened here," explained Calhoun. "A thousand years or so ago there was a king of France--a country back on old Earth--who tried to wipe out a disease called leprosy by executing all the people who had it. Lepers were a nuisance. They couldn't work. They had to be fed by charity. They died in inconvenient places and only other lepers dared handle their bodies. They tended to throw normal human life out of kilter. That wasn't the case here. The man I killed wanted you dead for another reason. He wanted you dead right away." The gaunt Kim Walpole said tiredly: "He wanted to dispose of our bodies in a sanitary fashion." "Nonsense!" snapped Calhoun. "The city's infected. You lived, ate, breathed, walked in it. Nobody can dare use that city unless they know how the contagion's transmitted, and how to counteract it. Your own colonists turned back. These men wouldn't have landed if they hadn't known they were safe!" There was silence. "If the plague is an intended crime," added Calhoun, "you are the witnesses to it. You've got to be gotten rid of before colonists from somewhere other than Dettra arrive here." The dark-bearded man growled: "Monstrous! Monstrous!"