had not been a bad accident; the crewmen had been able to repair it, and were almost ready to leave before the Plague had killed them all. Now, no one would go near the ship, in fear of the Plague. It was a shunned and taboo place—to all except Yon the Fisher. Yon simply didn't believe the Plague stayed around places where people had died of it—and, in a manner of speaking, he was perfectly right.

There had been a period when the crew of the downed ship had needed help in repairing their vessel, the like of which had not been seen on Cardigan's Green for two centuries. The crewmen had paid off in Crystals and in small machines that did various things. After the crew had died of the Plague, Yon the Fisher had waited for fifteen days; then, in the dead of night, he had entered the ship. The hold had been almost entirely full of Crystals.

Yon the Fisher was not an uneducated man; the books which had been brought with Cardigan's ship, two hundred years before, had been carefully preserved and used in spite of the heavy death toll of the Plague. The Crystals alone meant nothing to him; what he wanted was the Morris itself. But the Crystals could be used—they represented wealth.

The Commander, the elected head of Cardigan's Green, liked jewels, and the beauty of the Crystals had caught his eyes, as they had everyone else's, and that made them valuable. If Yon played his cards right, he could become one of the wealthiest men on Cardigan's Green.

Eventually, the old Commander would die, and Yon intended to get himself elected in the Commander's place. Then he would finish repairing the spaceship.

He had dreams—big ones. He would rule Cardigan's Green. He would have a spaceship, all his own. He would have....

There would be no limit to the things he would have.

That was Yon the Fisher—intelligent, shrewd, and an excellent politician. He had a knack for making people like and respect him. He was wealthy, but he was not greedy for anything material. He wanted only one thing—power.

He, then, was a part of the second factor that entered into this phase of the history of Cardigan's Green.

The third factor was a hospital ship of the Interstellar Health Commission, the IHCS Caduceus.

The ship was en route from Praxilies to Aldebaran, but she had to go off course to avoid an ion storm. A star went supernova in the 

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