of them died.

It was over a hundred years before the people of Cardigan's Green received another visit from the Plague, and this time less than twenty per cent died.

But, even so, they had a terrible, deep-seated fear of the Plague. Even another century couldn't completely wipe it out.

And that was more or less the way things stood when Leland Hale snapped his ship out of infraspace near the bright G-2 sun that was Cardigan's Green's primary.

Leland Hale looked at the planet that loomed large in his visiscreen and his eyes narrowed automatically, as they always did when he was in deep thought. The planet wasn't registered in the Navigator's Manual or on the stellographic charts. The sun itself had a number, but the planet wasn't mentioned.

Hale was a big man; his shoulders were much wider than they had any right to be, his arms were thick and cabled with muscle, and his chest was broad and deep. Most men who stand six-feet-six look lean and lanky, but Hale actually looked broad and somewhat squat. At one standard gee of acceleration—1000 cm/sec2—he topped three hundred pounds. There was just enough fat on his body to smooth the outlines a little; his bones were big, as they had to be to anchor tendons solidly; and he had the normal complement of glands and nerves to keep the body functioning well. All the rest of him seemed to be muscle—pounds and pounds of hard, powerful muscle.

His head was large in proportion; a size 8 hat would have suited him perfectly—if he'd ever troubled to buy a hat. His face was regular enough to be considered handsome, and too blocky and hard to be considered pretty. His dark hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin marked him as most likely being of late-migration Earth stock.

He looked from the visiscreen to the detector plate. There wasn't a trace on it. There hadn't been for days. The skewed, almost random orbit he had taken from Bargell IV had lifted him well above the galactic plane, and he was a long way, now, from where he had started.

If the yellow light from Bargell's Sun could have penetrated the heavy clouds of dust and gas that congregated at the galactic center, it would have taken it more than seventy thousand years to reach Cardigan's Green.

No trace on the detector. Good. There was one advantage in stealing a fully equipped Interstellar Police ship; if his pursuers couldn't be detected 

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