about a certain mineral. He used the solar furnace that had made the
silicone wool to smelt it. And Dr. Chuka saw him. And after one blank
moment he bellowed laughter and went to see Ralph Redfeather. Whereupon
Amerind steel-workers sawed apart a robot hull that was no longer a fuel
tank because its fuel was gone, and they built a demountable solar
mirror some sixty feet across--which African mechanics deftly
powered--and suddenly there was a spot of incandescence even brighter
than the sun of Xosa II, down on the planet's surface. It played upon a
mineral cliff, and monstrous smells developed and even the African
mining-technicians put on goggles because of the brightness, and
presently there were threads of molten metal and slag trickling--and
separating as they trickled--hesitantly down the cliff-side.
And Dr. Chuka beamed and slapped his sweating thighs, and Bordman went
out in a caterwheel truck, wearing a heat-suit, to watch it for all of
twenty minutes. When he got back to the Project Engineer's office he
gulped iced salt water and dug out the books he'd brought down from the
ship. There was the specbook for Xosa II, and there were the other
volumes of definitions issued by the Colonial Survey. They were
definitions of the exact meanings of terms used in briefer
specifications, for items of equipment sometimes ordered by the Colony
Office.
* * * * *
When Chuka came into the office, presently, he carried the first crude
pig of Xosa II iron in his gloved hand. He gloated. Bordman was then
absent, and Ralph Redfeather worked feverishly at his desk.
"Where's Bordman?" demanded Chuka in that resonant bass voice of his.
"I'm ready to report for degree-of-completion credit that the mining
properties on Xosa II are prepared as of today to deliver pig iron,
cobalt, zirconium and beryllium in commercial quantities! We require one
day's notice to begin delivery of metal other than iron at the moment,
because we're short of equipment, but we can furnish chromium and
manganese on two days' notice--the deposits are farther away."
He dumped the pig of metal on the second desk, where Aletha sat with her
perpetual loose-leafed volumes before her. The metal smoked and began to
char the desk-top. He picked it up again and tossed it from one gloved
hand to the other.
"There y'are, Ralph!" he boasted. "You Indians go after your coups!
Match this coup for me! Without fuel and minus all equipment except of
our own making--I credit an assist on the mirror, but that's all--we're
set to load the first ship that comes in for cargo! Now what are you
going to do for the record? I think we've wiped your eye for you!"
Ralph hardly looked up. His eyes were very bright. Bordman had shown him
and he was copying feverishly the figures and formulae from a section of
the definition book of the Colonial Survey. The books started with the
specifications for antibiotic growth equipment for colonies with
problems in local bacteria. It ended with definitions of the required
strength-of-material and the designs stipulated for cages in zoos for
motile fauna, subdivided into flying, marine, and solid-ground
creatures: sub-sub-divided into carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores,
with the special specifications for enclosures to contain abyssal
creatures requiring extreme pressures, and the equipment for maintaining
a healthfully re-poisoned atmosphere for creatures from methane planets.
Redfeather had the third volume open at, "Landing Grids, Lightest
Emergency, Commerce Refuges, For Use Of." There were some dozens of
non-colonized planets along the most-traveled spaceways on which refuges
for shipwrecked spacemen were maintained. Small forces of Patrol
personnel manned them. Space lifeboats serviced them. They had the
minimum installations which could draw on their planets' ionospheres for
power, and they were not expected to handle anything bigger than a
twenty-ton lifeboat. But the specifications for the equipment of such
refuges were included in the reference volumes for Bordman's use in the
making of Colonial surveys. They were compiled for the information of
contractors who wanted to bid on Colonial Survey installations, and for
the guidance of people like Bordman who checked up on the work. So they
contained all the data for the building of a landing grid, lightest
emergency, commerce refuge for use of, in case of need. Redfeather
copied feverishly.
Chuka ceased his boasting, but still he grinned.
"I know we're stuck, Ralph," he said amiably, "but it's nice stuff to
go in the records. Too bad we don't keep coup-records like you Indians!"
Aletha's cousin--Project Engineer--said crisply:
"Go away! Who made your solar mirror? It was more than an assist! You
get set to cast beams for us! Girders! I'm going to get a lifeboat aloft
and away to Trent! Build a minimum size landing grid! Build a fire under
somebody so they'll send us a colony ship with supplies! If there's no
new sandstorm to bury the radiation refrigerators Bordman brought to
mind, we can keep alive with hydroponics until a ship can arrive with
something useful!"
Chuka stared.
"You don't mean we might actually live through this! Really?"
Aletha regarded the two of them with impartial irony.
"Dr. Chuka," she said gently, "you accomplished the impossible. Ralph,
here, is planning to attempt the preposterous. Does it occur to you that
Mr. Bordman is nagging himself to achieve the inconceivable? It is
inconceivable, even to him, but he's trying to do it!"
"What's he trying to do?" demanded Chuka, wary but amused.
"He's trying," said Aletha, "to prove to himself that he's the best man
on this planet. Because he's physically least capable of living here!
His vanity's hurt. Don't underestimate him!"
"He the best man here?" demanded Chuka blankly. "In his way he's all
right. The refrigeration proves that! But he can't walk out-of-doors
without a heat-suit!"
Ralph Redfeather said dryly, without ceasing his feverish work:
"Nonsense, Aletha. He has courage. I give him that. But he couldn't walk
a beam twelve hundred feet up. In his own way, yes. He's capable. But
the best man----"
"I'm sure," agreed Aletha, "that he couldn't sing as well as the worst
of your singing crew, Dr. Chuka, and any Amerind could outrun him. Even
I could! But he's got something we haven't got, just as we have
qualities he hasn't. We're secure in our competences. We know what we
can do, and that we can do it better than any--" her eyes
twinkled--"paleface. But he doubts himself. All the time and in every
way. And that's why he may be the best man on this planet! I'll bet he
does prove it!"
Redfeather said scornfully:
"You suggested radiation refrigeration! What does it prove that he
applied it?"
"That," said Aletha, "he couldn't face the disaster that was here
without trying to do something about it--even when it was impossible. He
couldn't face the deadly facts. He had to torment himself by seeing that
they wouldn't be deadly if only this one or that or the other were
twisted a little. His vanity was hurt because nature had beaten men. His
dignity was offended. And a man with easily-hurt dignity won't ever be
happy, but he can be pretty good!"
Chuka raised his ebony bulk from the chair in which he still shifted the
iron pig from gloved hand to gloved hand.
"You're kind," he said, chuckling. "Too kind! I don't want to hurt his
feelings. I wouldn't, for the world! But really ... I've never heard a
man praised for his vanity before, or admired for being touchy about his
dignity! If you're right ... why ... it's been convenient. It might even
mean hope. But ... hm-m-m---- Would you want to marry a man like that?"
"Great Manitou forbid!" said Aletha firmly. She grimaced at the bare
idea. "I'm an Amerind. I'll want my husband to be contented. I want to
be contented along with him. Mr. Bordman will never be either happy or
content. No paleface husband for me! But I don't think he's through here
yet. Sending for help won't satisfy him. It's a further hurt to his
vanity. He'll be miserable if he doesn't prove himself--to himself--a
better man than that!"
Chuka shrugged his massive shoulders. Redfeather tracked down the last
item he needed and fairly bounced to his feet.
"What tonnage of iron can you get out, Chuka?" he demanded. "What can
you do in the way of castings? What's the elastic modulus--how much
carbon in this iron? And when can you start making castings? Big ones?"
"Let's go talk to my foremen," said Chuka complacently. "We'll see how
fast my ... ah ... mineral spring is trickling metal down the
cliff-face. If you can really launch a lifeboat, we might get some help
here in a year and a half instead of five----"
* * * * *
They went out-of-doors together. There was a small sound in the next
office. Aletha was suddenly very, very still. She sat motionless for a
long half-minute. Then she turned her head.
"I owe you an apology, Mr. Bordman," she said ruefully. "It won't take
back the discourtesy, but--I'm very sorry."
Bordman came into the office from the next room. He was rather pale. He
said wryly:
"Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves, eh? Actually I was on the
way in here when I heard--references to myself it would embarrass Chuka
and your cousin to know I heard. So I stopped. Not to listen, but to
keep them from knowing I'd heard their private opinions of me. I'll be
obliged if you don't tell them. They're entitled to their opinions of
me. I've mine of them." He added grimly, "Apparently I think more highly
of them than they do of me!"
Aletha said contritely:
"It must have sounded horrible! But they ... we ... all of us think
better of you than you do of yourself!"
Bordman shrugged.
"You in particular. 'Would you marry someone like me? Great Manitou,
no!'"
"For an excellent reason," said Aletha firmly. "When I get back from
here--_if_ I get back from here--I'm going to marry Bob Running
Antelope. He's nice. I like the idea of marrying him. I want to! But I
look forward not only to happiness but to contentment. To me that's
important. It isn't to you, or to the woman you ought to marry. And I
... well ... I simply don't envy either of you a bit!"
"I see," said Bordman with irony. He didn't. "I wish you all the
contentment you look for." Then he snapped: "But what's this business
about expecting more from me? What spectacular idea do you expect me to
pull out of somebody's hat now? Because I'm frantically vain!"
"I haven't the least idea," said Aletha calmly. "But I think you'll come
up with something we couldn't possibly imagine. And I didn't say it was
because you were vain, but because you are discontented with yourself.
It's born in you! And there you are!"
"If you mean neurotic," snapped Bordman, "you're all wrong. I'm not
neurotic! I'm not. I'm annoyed. I'll get hopelessly behind schedule
because of this mess! But that's all!"
Aletha stood up and shrugged her shoulders ruefully.
"I repeat my apology," she told him, "and leave you the office. But I
also repeat that I think you'll turn up something nobody else
expects--and I've no idea what it will be. But you'll do it now to
prove that I'm wrong about how your mind works."
She went out. Bordman clamped his jaws tightly. He felt that especially
haunting discomfort which comes of suspecting that one has been told
something about himself which may be true.
"Idiotic!" he fumed, all alone. "Me neurotic? Me wanting to prove I'm
the best man here out of vanity?" He made a scornful noise. He sat
impatiently at the desk. "Absurd!" he muttered wrathfully. "Why should I
need to prove to myself I'm capable? What would I do if I felt such a
need, anyhow?"
Scowling, he stared at the wall. It was irritating. It was a nagging
sort of question. What would he do if she were right? If he did need
constantly to prove to himself----
He stiffened, suddenly. A look of intense surprise came upon his face.
He'd thought of what a self-doubtful, discontented man would try to do,
here on Xosa II at this juncture.
The surprise was because he had also thought of how it could be done.
* * * * *
The _Warlock_ came to life. Her skipper gloomily answered the emergency
call from Xosa II. He listened. He clicked off the communicator and
hastened to an exterior port, deeply darkened against those times when
the blue-white sun of Xosa shone upon this side of the hull. He moved
the manual control to make it more transparent. He stared down at the
monstrous, tawny, mottled surface of the planet five thousand miles
away. He searched for the spot he bitterly knew was the colony's site.
He saw what he'd been told he'd see. It was an infinitely fine,
threadlike projection from the surface of the planet. It rose at a
slight angle--it leaned toward the planet's west--and it expanded and
widened and formed an extraordinary sort of mushroom-shaped object that
was completely impossible. It could not be. Humans do not create visible
objects twenty miles high, which at their tops expand like toadstools on
excessively slender stalks, and which drift westward and fray and grow
thin, and are constantly renewed.
But it was true. The skipper of the _Warlock_ gazed until he was
completely sure. It was no atomic bomb, because it continued to exist.
It faded, but was constantly replenished. There was no such thing!
He went through the ship, bellowing, and faced mutinous snarlings. But
when the _Warlock_ was around on that side of the planet again, the
members of the crew saw the strange appearance, too. They examined it
with telescopes. They grew hysterically happy. They went frantically to
work to clear away the signs of a month and a half of mutiny and
despair.
It took them three days to get the ship to tidiness again, and during
all that time the peculiar tawny jet remained. On the sixth day the jet
was fainter. On the seventh it was larger than before. It continued
larger. And telescopes at highest magnification verified what the
emergency communication had said.
Then the crew began to experience frantic impatience. It was worse,
waiting those last three or four days, than even all the hopeless time
before. But there was no reason to hate anybody, now. The skipper was
very much relieved.
* * * * *
There was eighteen hundred feet of steel grid overhead. It made a
crisscross, ring-shaped wall more than a quarter-mile high and almost to
the top of the surrounding mountains. But the valley was not exactly a
normal one. It was a crater, now: a steeply sloping, conical pit whose
walls descended smoothly to the outer girders of the red-painted,
glistening steel structure. More girders for the completion of the grid
projected from the sand just outside its half-mile circle. And in the
landing grid there was now a smaller, elaborate, truss-braced object. It
rested on the rocky ground, and it was not painted, and it was quite
small. A hundred feet high, perhaps, and no more than three hundred
across. But it was visibly a miniature of the great, now-uncovered,
re-painted landing grid which was qualified to handle interstellar cargo
ships and all the proper space-traffic of a minerals-colony planet.
A caterwheel truck came lurching and rolling and rumbling down the side
of the pit. It had a sunshade and ground-reflector wings, and Bordman
rode tiredly on a hobbyhorse saddle in its back cargo section. He wore a
heat-suit.
The truck reached the pit's bottom. There was a tool shed there. The
caterwheel-truck bumped up to it and stopped. Bordman got out, visibly
cramped by the jolting, rocking, exhausting-to-unaccustomed-muscles
ride.
"Do you want to go in the shed and cool off?" asked Chuka brightly.
"I'm all right," said Bordman curtly. "I'm quite comfortable, so long as
you feed me that expanded air." It was plain that he resented needing
even a special air supply. "What's all this about? Bringing the
_Warlock_ in? Why the insistence on my being here?"
"Ralph has a problem," said Chuka blandly. "He's up there. See? He needs
you. There's a hoist. You've got to check degree-of-completion anyhow.
You might take a look around while you're up there. But he's anxious for
you to see something. There where you see the little knot of people. The
platform."
Bordman grimaced. When one was well started on a survey, one got used to
heights and depths and all sorts of environments. But he hadn't been up
on steel-work in a good many months. Not since a survey on Kalka IV
nearly a year ago. He would be dizzy at first.
He accompanied Chuka to the spot where a steel cable dangled from an
almost invisibly thin beam high above. There was a strictly improvised
cage to ascend in--planks and a handrail forming an insecure platform
that might hold four people. He got into it, and Dr. Chuka got in beside
him. Chuka waved his hand. The cage started up.
Bordman winced as the ground dropped away below. It was ghastly to be
dangling in emptiness like this. He wanted to close his eyes. The cage
went up and up and up. It took many long minutes to reach the top.
There was a platform there. Newly-made. The sunlight was blindingly
bright. The landscape was an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his
goggles to maximum darkness and stepped gingerly from the swaying cage
to the hardly more solid-seeming area. Here he was in mid-air on a
platform barely ten feet square. It was rather more than twice the
height of a metropolitan skyscraper from the ground. There were actual
mountain-crests only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman was
acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but----
* * * * *
"Well?" he asked fretfully. "Chuka said you needed me here. What's the
matter?"
Ralph Redfeather nodded very formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of
Chuka's foremen--one did not look happy--and four of the Amerind
steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman.
"I wanted you to see," said Aletha's cousin, "before we threw on the
current. It doesn't look like that little grid could handle the sand it
took care of. But Lewanika wants to report."
A dark man who worked under Chuka--and looked as if he belonged on solid
ground--said carefully:
"We cast the beams for the small landing grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted
the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into molds as it flowed down."
He stopped. One of the Indians said:
"We made the girders into the small landing grid. It bothered us because
we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn't
understand why you ordered it there. But we built it."
The second dark man said with a trace of swagger:
"We made the coils, Mr. Bordman. We made the small grid so it would work
the same as the big one when it was finished. And then we made the big
grid work, finished or not!"
Bordman said impatiently:
"All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?"
"Just so," said Aletha, smiling. "Be patient, Mr. Bordman!"
Her cousin said conversationally:
"We built the small grid on the top of the sand. And it tapped the
ionosphere for power. No lack of power then! And we'd set it to heave up
sand instead of ships. Not to heave it out into space, but to give it up
to mile a second vertical velocity. Then we turned it on."
"And we rode it down, that little grid," said one of the remaining
Indians, grinning. "What a party! Manitou!"
Redfeather frowned at him and took up the narrative.
"It hurled the sand up from its center. As you said it would, the sand
swept air with it. It made a whirlwind, bringing more sand from outside
the grid into its field. It was a whirlwind with fifteen megakilowatts
of power to drive it. Some of the sand went twenty miles high. Then it
made a mushroom-head and the winds up yonder blew it to the west. It
came down a long way off, Mr. Bordman. We've made a new dune-area ten
miles downwind. And the little grid sank as the sand went away from
around it. We had to stop it three times, because it leaned. We had to
dig under parts of it to get it straight up again. But it went down into
the valley."
Bordman turned up the power to his heat-suit motors. He felt
uncomfortably warm.
"In six days," said Ralph, almost ceremonially, "it had uncovered half
the original grid we'd built. Then we were able to modify that to heave
sand and to let it tap the ionosphere. We were able to use a good many
times the power the little grid could apply to sand-lifting! In two days
more the landing grid was clear. The valley bottom was clean. We shifted
some hundreds of millions of tons of sand by landing grid, and now it is
possible to land the _Warlock_, and receive her supplies, and the
solar-power furnace is already turning out pigs for her loading. We
wanted you to see what we have done. The colony is no longer in danger,
and we shall have the grid completely finished for your inspection
before the ship is ready to return."
Bordman said uncomfortably:
"That's very good. It's excellent. I'll put it in my survey report."
"But," said Ralph, more ceremonially still, "we have the right to count
coup for the members of our tribe and clan. Now----"
Then there was confusion. Aletha's cousin was saying syllables that did
not mean anything at all. The other Indians joined in at intervals,
speaking gibberish. Aletha's eyes were shining and she looked incredibly
pleased and satisfied.
"But what ... what's this?" demanded Bordman when they stopped.
Aletha spoke proudly.
"Ralph just formally adopted you into the tribe, Mr. Bordman--and into
his clan and mine! He gave you a name I'll have to write down for you,
but it means, 'Man-who-believes-not-his-own-wisdom.' And now----"
Ralph Redfeather--licensed interstellar engineer, graduate of the
stiffest technical university in this quarter of the galaxy, wearer of
three eagle-pinion feathers and clad in a pair of insulated sandals and
a breechcloth--whipped out a small paint-pot and a brush from somewhere
and began carefully to paint on a section of girder ready for the next
tier of steel. He painted a feather on the metal.
"It's a coup," he told Bordman over his shoulder. "Your coup. Placed
where it was earned--up here. Aletha is authorized to certify it. And
the head of the clan will add an eagle-feather to the headdress he wears
in council in the Big Tepee on Algonka, and--your clan-brothers will be
proud!"
Then he straightened up and held out his hand.
Chuka said benignly:
"Being civilized men, Mr. Bordman, we Africans do not go in for
uncivilized feathers. But we ... ah ... rather approve of you, too. And
we plan a corroboree at the colony after the _Warlock_ is down, when
there will be some excellently practiced singing. There is ... ah ... a
song, a sort of choral calypso, about this ... ah ... adventure you have
brought to so satisfying a conclusion. It is quite a good calypso. It's
likely to be popular on a good many planets."
Bordman swallowed. He was acutely uncomfortable. He felt that he ought
to say something, and he did not know what.
But just then there was a deep-toned humming in the air. It was a
vibrant tone, instinct with limitless power. It was the
eighteen-hundred-foot landing grid, giving off that profoundly bass and
vibrant, note it uttered while operating. Bordman looked up.
The _Warlock_ was coming down.
[Illustration]
THE END
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Notes & Errata |
| |
| This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction |
| December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any |
| evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was |
| renewed. |
| |
| Illustrations have been moved to their appropriate places in |
| the text. |
| |
| The following typographical errors have been corrected. |
| |
| |Error |Correction | |
| | | | |
| |dessicated |desiccated | |
| |Anglo-Anglo-Saxon--girls |Anglo-Saxon girls | |
| |carrousel |carousel | |
| |dessication |desiccation | |
| |derelect |derelict | |
| |sand-swept |sand swept | |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+