PLANET EXPLORER
Original title: _Colonial Survey_
Murray Leinster
_Complete and Unabridged_
AVON PUBLICATIONS, INC.
575 Madison Avenue--New York 22, N. Y.
_Planet Explorer_ (_Colonial Survey_) is based upon material
originally appearing in _Astounding Science Fiction_, copyright,
1956, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.
Copyright 1957, by Murray Leinster. Published by arrangement
with Gnome Press, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
To Austin Stanton, Esq.
Who believes that the things I write about should be accomplished right
away;
Who believes that all men are potential geniuses;
Who gives responsibility and opportunity to men while they are young;
And thereby does his bit to make actual the things I only write about.
_Murray Leinster_
WORLDS AND WORLDS
Eons from now, MAN will hurtle through the void in gravity-defying
ships across light-years of distance to far-flung planets ... and more
staggering yet, he will COLONIZE these islands in the unimaginably vast
ocean of space. There will be worlds, and worlds, such as--
LANI III--_a glacier-land warmed by man_
XOSA II--_a shining desert made green by man_
LOREN II--_an inferno of beasts, tamed by man_
THE FASCINATING, HEROIC STORY OF A TRAIL-BLAZER TO THE
UNKNOWN--outer-space service officer Bordman, who uses incredible
knowledge and skill to make the star-flung outposts of civilization
ready to receive new, vast surges of humanity!
Contents
Solar Constant
Sand Doom
Combat Team
The Swamp Was Upside Down
SOLAR CONSTANT
Bordman waked that morning when the partly-opened port of his
sleeping-cabin closed of itself and the room-warmer began to whir. He
found himself burrowed deep under his covering, and when he got his
head out of it the already-bright room was bitterly cold and his breath
made a fog about his head.
He thought uneasily _it's colder than yesterday_! But a Senior
Colonial Survey Officer is not supposed to let himself seem disturbed,
in public, and the only way to follow that rule is to follow it in
private too. So Bordman composed his features, while gloom filled him.
When one has just received senior service rating and is on one's very
first independent survey of a new colonial installation, the unexpected
can be appalling. The unexpected was definitely here, on Lani III.
He'd been a Survey Candidate on Khali II and Taret and Arepo I, all of
which were tropical, and a Junior Officer on Menes III and Thotmes--one
a semi-arid planet and the other temperate-volcanic--and he'd done an
assistant job on Saril's solitary world, which was nine-tenths water.
But this first independent survey on his own was another matter.
Everything was wholly unfamiliar. An ice-planet with a minus point one
habitability rating was upsetting in its peculiarities. He knew what
the books said about glacial-world conditions, but that was all.
The denseness of the fog his breath made seemed to grow less as the
room-warmer whirred and whirred. When by the thinness of the mist he
guessed the temperature to be not much under freezing, he climbed out
of his bunk and went to the port to look out. His cabin, of course,
was in one of the drone-hulls that had brought the colony's equipment
to Lani III. The other emptied hulls were precisely ranged in order
outside. They were connected by tubular galleries, and painstakingly
leveled. They gave an impression of impassioned tidiness among the
upheaved, ice-coated mountains all about.
He gazed down the long valley in which the colony lay. There were
monstrous slanting peaks on either side that partly framed the morning
sun. Their flanks were ice. The sky was pale, and the sun had four
sun-dogs geometrically about it. Normal post-midnight temperatures in
this valley ranged around ten below zero--and this was technically
summer. But it was colder than ten below zero now. At noon there were
normally tiny trickling rills of surface-thaw running down the sunlit
sides of the mountains, but they froze again at night. And this was a
sheltered valley, warmer than most of the planet's surface. The sun had
its sun-dogs every day, on rising. There were nights when the brighter
planets had star-pups, too.
The phone-plate lighted and dimmed and lighted and dimmed. They did
themselves well on Lani III; the parent world was in this same solar
system, making supply easy. That was rare. Bordman stood before the
plate and it cleared. Herndon's face peered unhappily out of it. He was
even younger than Bordman, and inclined to lean on the supposedly vast
experience of a Senior Officer of the Colonial Survey.
"Well?" said Bordman, feeling undignified in his sleeping garments.
"We're picking up a beam from home," said Herndon anxiously. "But we
can't make it out."
Because the third planet of the sun Lani was being colonized from
the second, inhabited world, communication with the colony's base
was possible. A tight beam could span a distance which was only
light-minutes across at conjunction, and not much over a light-hour
at opposition, as now. But the beam communication had been broken
for the past few weeks, and shouldn't be possible again for some
weeks more. The sun lay between. One wouldn't expect normal
sound-and-picture transmission until the parent planet had moved past
the scrambler-fields of Lani. But something had come through. It would
be reasonable for it to be pretty much hash when it arrived.
"They aren't sending words or pictures," said Herndon. "The beam is
wobbly and we don't know what to make of it. It's a signal, all right,
and on the regular frequency. But there are all sorts of stray noises
and still in the midst of it there's some sort of signal we can't make
out. It's like a whine, only it stutters. It's a broken-up sound of one
pitch."
Bordman rubbed his chin. He remembered a course in information theory
just before he'd graduated from the Service Academy. Signals were made
by pulses, pitch-changes, and frequency-variations. Information was
what couldn't be predicted without information. And he remembered with
gratitude a seminar on the history of communication, just before he'd
gone out on his first field job as a Survey Candidate.
"Hm," he said with a trace of self-consciousness. "Those noises, the
stuttering ones. Would they be, on the whole, of no more than two
different durations? Like--hm.--Bzz bzz bzzzzzzz bzz?"
He felt that he lost dignity by making such ribald sounds. But
Herndon's face brightened.
"That's it!" he said relievedly. "That's it! Only they're high-pitched
like--" His voice went falsetto. "Bz bz bz bzzz bz bz."
Bordman thought, _we sound like two idiots_. He said:
"Record everything you get, and I'll try to decode it." He added,
"Before there was voice communication there were signals by light
and sound in groups of long and short units. They came in groups, to
stand for letters, and things were spelled out. Of course there were
larger groups which were words. Very crude system, but it worked when
there was a lot of interference, as in the early days. If there's
some emergency, your home world might try to get through the sun's
scrambled-field that way."
"Undoubtedly!" said Herndon, with even greater relief. "No question,
that's it!"
He regarded Bordman with respect as he clicked off. His image faded.
_He thinks I'm wonderful_, thought Bordman wrily. _Because I'm
Colonial Survey. But all I know is what's been taught me. It's bound to
show up sooner or later. Damn!_
He dressed. From time to time he looked out the port again. The
intolerable cold of Lani III had intensified, lately. There was some
idea that sunspots were the cause. He couldn't make out sunspots
with the naked eye, but the sun did look pale, with its accompanying
sun-dogs, the result of microscopic ice-crystals suspended in the air.
There was no dust on this planet, but there was plenty of ice! It was
in the air and on the ground and even under it. To be sure, the drills
for the foundation of the great landing-grid had brought up cores of
frozen humus along with frozen clay, so there must have been a time
when this world had known clouds and seas and vegetation. But it was
millions, maybe hundreds of millions of years ago. Right now, though,
it was only warm enough to have an atmosphere and very slight and
partial thawings in direct sunlight, in sheltered spots, at midday. It
couldn't support life, because life is always dependent on other life,
and there is a temperature below which a natural ecological system
can't maintain itself. And for the past few weeks, the climate had been
such that even human-supplied life looked dubious.
Bordman slipped on his Colonial Survey uniform with its palm-tree
insignia. Nothing could be much more inappropriate than palm-tree
symbols on a planet with sixty feet of permafrost. Bordman reflected,
_The construction gang calls it a blast, instead of a tree, because
we blow up when they try to dodge specifications. But specifications
have to be met! You can't bet the lives of a colony or even a ship's
crew on half-built facilities!_
He marched down the corridor from his sleeping-room, with the dignity
he tried to maintain for the sake of the Colonial Survey. It was a
pretty lonely business, being dignified all the time. If Herndon didn't
look so respectful it would have been pleasant to be more friendly. But
Herndon revered him. Even his sister Riki....
But Bordman put her firmly out of his mind. He was on Lani III, which
had very valuable mineral resources that made colonization worth while,
to check and approve the colony installations. There was the giant
landing-grid for space-ships, which took power from the ionosphere
to bring space vessels gently to the ground, and also to supply the
colony's power needs. It likewise lifted visiting space-craft the
necessary five planetary diameters out when they took off again.
There was power storage in the remote event of disaster to that giant
device. There was a food reserve and the necessary resources for its
indefinite stretching in case of need. That usually meant hydroponic
installations. All these things had had to be finished, operable, and
inspected by a duly qualified Colonial Survey officer before the colony
could be licensed for unlimited use.
It was all very normal and official, but Bordman was the newest Senior
Survey Officer on the list, and this was the first of his independent
operations. He felt inadequate at times.
He passed through the vestibule between this drone-hull and the next
and went directly to Herndon's office. Herndon, like himself, was
newly endowed with authority. He was actually a mining-and-minerals
man and a youthful prodigy in that field, but when the director of the
colony was taken ill while a supply-ship was aground, he went back
to the home planet and command devolved on Herndon. _I wonder_,
thought Bordman, _if he feels as shaky as I do._
When he entered the office, Herndon sat listening to a literal hash
of noises coming out of a speaker on his desk. The cryptic signal
had been relayed to him, and a recorder stored it as it came. There
were cacklings and squeals and moaning sounds, sputters and rumbles
and growls. But behind the facade of confusion there was a tiny,
interrupted, high-pitched noise. It was a monotone whining not to be
confused with the random sounds accompanying it. Sometimes it faded
almost to inaudibility, and sometimes it was sharp and clear. But it
was a distinctive sound in itself, and it was made up of short whines
and longer ones of two durations only.
"I've put Riki at making a transcription of what we've got," said
Herndon with relief as he saw Bordman. "She'll make short marks for
the short sounds, and long ones for the long. I've told her to try to
separate the groups. We've got a full half-hour of it, already."
Bordman made an inspired guess.
"I would expect it to be the same message repeated over and over," he
said. He added. "And I think it would be decoded by guessing at the
letters in two-letter and three-letter words, as clues to longer ones.
That's quicker than statistical analysis of frequency."
Herndon instantly pressed buttons under his phone-plate. He relayed the
information to his sister, as if it were gospel. _But it wasn't_,
Bordman remembered. _It's simply a trick remembered from boyhood,
when I was interested in secret languages. My interest faded when I
realized I had no secrets to record or transmit._
Herndon turned from the phone-plate.
"Riki says she's already learned to recognize some groups," he
reported, "but thanks for the advice. Now what?"
Bordman sat down. "It seems to me," he observed, "that the increased
cold out here might not be local. Sunspots--"
Herndon wordlessly handed over a sheet of paper with observation
figures on top and a graph below them which related the observations
to each other. They were the daily, at-first-routine, measurements of
the solar constant from Lani III. The graph-line almost ran off the
paper at the bottom.
"To look at this," he admitted, "you'd think the sun was going out. Of
course it can't be," he added hastily. "Not possibly. But there is an
extraordinary number of sunspots. Maybe they'll clear. But meanwhile
the amount of heat reaching us is dropping. As far as I know there's no
parallel for it. Night temperatures are thirty degrees lower than they
should be. Not only here, either, but at all the robot weather-stations
that have been spotted around the planet. They average forty below
zero minimum, instead of ten. And--there is that terrific lot of
sunspots...."
Bordman frowned. Sunspots are things about which nothing can be done.
Yet the habitability of a border-line planet, anyhow, could very well
depend on them. An infinitesimal change in sun-heat can make a serious
change in any planet's temperature. In the books, the ancient mother
planet Earth was said to have entered glacial periods through a drop
of only three degrees in the planet-wide temperature, and to have been
tropic almost to its poles from a rise of only six. It had been guessed
that those changes on the planet where humanity began had been caused
by a coincidence of sunspot maxima.
Lani III was already glacial to its equator. Sunspots could account
for worsening conditions here, perhaps. _That message from the inner
planet could be bad_, thought Bordman, _if the solar constant
drops and stays down awhile._ But aloud he said:
"There couldn't be a really significant permanent change. Not quickly,
anyhow. Lani's a sol-type star, and they aren't variables, though of
course any dynamic system like a sun will have cyclic modifications of
one sort or another. But they usually cancel out."
He sounded encouraging, even to himself.
There was a stirring behind him; Riki Herndon had come silently into
her brother's office. She looked pale. She put some papers down on the
desk.
"That's true," she said. "But while cycles sometimes cancel, sometimes
they enhance each other. They heterodyne. That's what's happening."
Bordman scrambled to his feet, flushing. Herndon said sharply:
"What? Where'd you get that stuff, Riki?"
She nodded at the sheaf of papers she'd just laid down.
"That's the news from home." She nodded again, to Bordman. "You were
right. It was the same message, repeated over and over. And I decoded
it like children decode each other's secret messages. I did that to Ken
once. He was twelve, and I decoded his diary, and I remember how angry
he was that I'd found out he didn't have any secrets."
She tried to smile. But Herndon wasn't listening. He read swiftly.
Bordman saw that the under sheets were rows of dots and dashes,
painstakingly transcribed and then decoded. There were letters under
each group of marks.
Herndon was very white when he'd finished. He handed the sheet to
Bordman. Riki's handwriting was precise and clear. Bordman read:
"FOR YOUR INFORMATION THE SOLAR CONSTANT IS DROPPING RAPIDLY DUE TO
COINCIDENCE OF CYCLIC VARIATIONS IN SUNSPOT ACTIVITY WITH PREVIOUS
UNOBSERVED LONG CYCLES APPARENTLY INCREASING THE EFFECT MAXIMUM IS
NOT YET REACHED AND IT IS EXPECTED THAT THIS PLANET WILL BECOME
UNINHABITABLE FOR A TIME ALREADY KILLING FROSTS HAVE DESTROYED CROPS
IN SUMMER HEMISPHERE IT IS IMPROBABLE THAT MORE THAN A SMALL PART OF
THE POPULATION CAN BE SHELTERED AND WARMED THROUGH DEVELOPING GLACIAL
CONDITIONS WHICH WILL REACH TO EQUATOR IN TWO HUNDRED DAYS THE COLD
CONDITIONS ARE COMPUTED TO LAST TWO THOUSAND DAYS BEFORE NORMAL SOLAR
CONSTANT RECURS THIS INFORMATION IS SENT YOU TO ADVISE IMMEDIATE
DEVELOPMENT OF HYDROPONIC FOOD SUPPLY AND OTHER PRECAUTIONS MESSAGE
ENDS FOR YOUR INFORMATION THE SOLAR CONSTANT IS DROPPING RAPIDLY DUE TO
COINCIDENCE OF CYCLIC--"
Bordman looked up. Herndon's face was ghastly, Bordman said:
"Kent IV is the nearest world your planet could hope to get help from.
A mail liner will make it in two months. Kent IV might be able to send
three ships--to get here in two months more. That's no good!"
He felt sick. Human-inhabited planets are far apart. There is on an
average between four and five light-years of distance between suns,
two months' space-ship journey apart. And not all stars are Sol-type
or have inhabited planets. Colonized worlds are like isolated islands
in an unimaginably vast ocean, and the ships that ply between them
at thirty light-speeds seem merely to creep. In ancient days on the
mother-planet Earth, men sailed for months between ports, in their
clumsy sailing-ships. There was no way to send messages faster than
they could travel. Nowadays there was little improvement. News of
the Lani disaster could not be transmitted. It had to be carried, as
between stars, and carriage was slow and response to news of disaster
was no faster.
The inner planet, Lani II, had twenty million inhabitants, as against
the three hundred people in the colony on Lani III. The outer planet
was already frozen, but there would be glaciation on the inner world in
two hundred days. Glaciation and human life are practically exclusive.
Human beings can survive only so long as food and power hold out,
and shelter against really bitter cold cannot be quickly improvised
for twenty million people. And, of course, there could be no help on
any adequate scale. News of the need for it would travel too slowly.
It would take five Earth-years to get a thousand ships to Lani II,
and a thousand ships could not rescue more than one per cent of the
population. But in five years there would not be nearly so many people
left alive.
"Our people," said Riki in a thin voice, "all of them.... Mother and
father and the others. All our friends. Home is going to be like that!"
She jerked her head toward a port which let in the frigid
colony-world's white daylight.
Bordman was aware of an extreme unhappiness on her account. For
himself, of course, the tragedy was less. He had no family, and very
few friends. But he could see something that had not occurred to them
as yet.
"Of course," he said, "it's not only their trouble. If the solar
constant is really dropping like that, things out here will be pretty
bad, too. A lot worse than they are now. We'll have to get to work to
save ourselves!"
Riki did not look at him. Bordman bit his lips. It was plain that their
own fate did not concern them immediately. When one's home world is
doomed, one's personal safety seems a trivial matter.
There was silence save for the cackling, confused noises that came out
of the speaker on Herndon's desk.
"We," said Bordman, "are right now in the conditions they'll face a
good long time from now."
Herndon said dully:
"We couldn't live here without supplies from home. Or even without
the equipment we brought. But they can't get supplies from anywhere,
and they can't make such equipment for everybody! They'll die!" He
swallowed. "They--they know it, too. So they warn us to try to save
ourselves because they can't help us any more."
There are many reasons why a man can feel shame that he belongs to a
race which can do the things that some men do. But sometimes there are
reasons to be proud, as well. The home world of this colony was doomed,
but it sent a warning to the tiny colony so that they could try to save
themselves.
"I wish we were there to--share what they have to face," said Riki. Her
voice sounded as if her throat hurt. "I don't want to keep on living if
everybody who ever cared about us is going to die!"
Bordman felt lonely. He could understand that nobody would want to
live as the only human alive. Nobody would want to live as a member
of the only group of people left alive. And everybody thinks of his
home planet as all the world there is. _I don't think that way_,
thought Bordman. _But maybe it's the way I'd feel about living if
Riki were to die._ It would be natural to want to share any danger
or any disaster she faced.
"L-look!" he said, stammering a little. "You don't see! It isn't a case
of your living while they die! If your home world becomes like this,
what will this be like? We're farther from the sun, colder to start
with. Do you think we'll live through anything they can't take? Food
supplies or no, equipment or no, do you think we've got a chance? Use
your brains!"
Herndon and Riki stared at him. And then some of the strained look left
Riki's face and body. Herndon blinked, and said slowly:
"Why, that's so! We were thought to be taking a terrific risk when we
came here. But it'll be as much worse here. Of course! We are in the
same fix they're in!"
He straightened a little. Color actually came back into his face. Riki
managed to smile. And then Herndon said almost naturally:
"That makes things look more sensible. We've got to fight for our lives
too! And we've very little chance of saving them. What do we do about
it, Bordman?"
The sun was half-way toward mid-sky, still attended by its sun-dogs,
though they were fainter than at the horizon. The sky was darker. The
icy mountain peaks reached skyward, serene and utterly aloof from the
affairs of men. The city was a fleet of metal hulks, neatly arranged
on the valley floor, emptied of the material they had brought for the
building of the colony. Not far away, the landing-grid stood. It was a
gigantic skeleton of steel, rising from legs of unequal length bedded
in the hillsides and reaching two thousand feet toward the stars.
Human figures, muffled almost past recognition, moved about a catwalk
three-quarters of the way up. There was a tiny glittering below where
they moved. The men were using sonic ice-breakers to shatter the frost
which formed on the framework at night. Falling shards of crystal
made a liquid-like flashing. The landing-grid needed to be cleared
every ten days or so. Left uncleared, it would acquire an increasingly
thick coating of ice, and in time it could collapse. But long before
that time it would have ceased to operate, and without its operation
there could be no space-travel. Rockets for lifting space-ships were
impossibly heavy, for practical use. But the landing-grids could lift
them out to the unstressed space where Lawlor drives could work, and
draw them to ground with cargoes they couldn't possibly have carried if
they'd needed rockets.
Bordman reached the base of the grid on foot. He was dwarfed by the
ground-level upright beams. He went through the cold-lock to the small
control house at the grid's base.
He nodded to the man on standby as he got out of his muffling garments.
"Everything all right?" he asked.
The standby operator shrugged. Bordman was Colonial Survey. It was his
function to find fault, to expose inadequacies in the construction and
operation of colony facilities. _It's natural for me to be disliked
by men whose work I inspect_, thought Bordman. _If I approve it
doesn't mean anything, and if I protest, it's bad._
"I think," he said, "that there ought to be a change in maximum
no-drain voltage. I'd like to check it."
The operator shrugged again. He pressed buttons under a phone-plate.
"Shift to reserve power," he commanded, when a face appeared in the
plate. "Gotta check no-drain juice."
"What for?" demanded the face in the plate.
"You-know-who's got ideas," said the grid operator scornfully. "Maybe
we've been skimping something. Maybe there's some new specification we
didn't know about. Maybe anything! But shift to reserve power."
The face in the screen grumbled. Bordman swallowed. It was not a
Survey officer's privilege to maintain discipline. And anyhow, there
was no particular virtue in discipline here and now. He watched the
current-demand dial. It stood a little above normal day-drain, which
was understandable. The outside temperature was down. There was more
power needed to keep the dwellings warm, and there was always a lot of
power needed in the mine the colony had been formed to exploit. The
mine had to be warmed for the men who worked to develop it.
The current-demand needle dropped abruptly, hung steady, and dropped
again and again as additional parts of the colony's power uses were
switched to reserve. The needle hit bottom. It stayed there.
Bordman had to walk around the standby man to get at the voltmeter.
It was built around standard, old-fashioned vacuum-tubes, and tested
it. He pushed in the contact plugs, read the no-drain voltage, licked
his lips, and made a note. He reversed the leads, so it would read
backward. He took another reading. He drew in his breath very quietly.
"Now I want the power turned on in sections," he told the operator.
"The mine first, maybe. It doesn't matter. But I want to get voltage
readings at different power take-offs."
The operator looked pained. He spoke with unnecessary elaboration to
the face in the phone-plate, and grudgingly went through the process
by which Bordman measured the successive drops in voltage with power
drawn from the ionosphere. The current available from a layer of
ionized gas is, in effect, the current-flow through a conductor with
marked resistance. It is possible to infer a gas's ionization from the
current it yields.
The cold-lock door opened. Riki Herndon came in, panting a little.
"There's another message from home," she said sharply. Her voice
seemed strained. "They picked up our answering-beam and are giving the
information you asked for."
"I'll be along," said Bordman. "I just got some information here."
He got into his cold-garments again, and followed her out of the
control-hut.
"The figures from home aren't good," said Riki, when mountains visibly
rose on every hand around them. "Ken says they're much worse than he
thought. The rate of decline in the solar constant's worse than we
figured or could believe."
"I see," said Bordman, inadequately.
"It's absurd!" said Riki angrily. "There've been sunspots and sunspot
cycles all along--I learned about them in school. I learned about a
four-year and a seven-year cycle, and that there were others. They
should have known, they should have calculated in advance! Now they
talk about sixty-year cycles coming in with a hundred-and-thirty-year
cycle to pile up with all the others.... What's the use of scientists
if they don't do their work right and twenty million people die of it?"
Bordman did not consider himself a scientist, but he winced. Riki raged
as they moved over the slippery ice. Her breath was an intermittent
cloud about her shoulders, and there was white frost on the front of
her cold-garments. Even so quickly the moisture of her breath congealed.
He held out his hand quickly as she slipped, once.
"But they'll beat it!" said Riki in a sort of angry pride. "They're
starting to build more landing-grids, back home. Hundreds of them!
Not for ships to land by, but to draw power from the ionosphere! They
figure that one ship-size grid can keep nearly three square miles of
ground warm enough to live on. They'll roof over the streets of cities
and pile snow on top for insulation. Then they'll plant food-crops
in the streets and gardens, and do what hydroponic growing they can.
They're afraid they can't do it fast enough to save everybody, but
they'll try!"
Bordman clenched his hands inside their bulky mittens.
"Well?" demanded Riki, "Won't that do the trick?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I just took readings on the grid, here. The voltage and the
conductivity of the layer we draw power from, both depend on
ionization. When the intensity of sunlight drops, the voltage drops and
the conductivity drops too. It's harder for less power to flow to the
area the grid can tap--and the voltage pressure is lower to drive it."
"Don't say any more!" cried Riki. "Not another word!"
Bordman was silent. They went down the last small slope, and passed
the opening of the mine, a great drift which bored straight into
the mountain. Looking into it, they saw the twin rows of brilliant
roof-lights going toward the heart of the stony monster.
They had almost reached the village when Riki said in a stifled voice:
"How bad is it?"
"Very," admitted Bordman. "We have here the conditions the home planet
will have in two hundred days. Originally we could draw less than a
fifth the power they count on from a grid on Lani II."
Riki ground her teeth.
"Go on!" she said.
"Ionization here is down ten per cent," said Bordman. "That means the
voltage is down, somewhat more. A great deal more. And the resistance
of the layer is greater. Very much greater. When they need power most,
on the home planet, they won't draw more from a grid than we do now. It
won't be enough."
They reached the village. There were steps to the cold-lock of
Herndon's office-hull. They were ice-free, because like the village
walk-ways they were warmed to keep frost from depositing on them.
Bordman made a mental note.
In the cold-lock, the warm air pouring in was almost stifling. Riki
said defiantly:
"You might as well tell me now!"
"We usually can draw one-fifth as much power, here, as the same sized
grid would yield on your home world," he said. "We are drawing--call it
sixty per cent of normal. A shade over one-tenth of what they expect to
draw when the real cold hits them. Their estimates are nine times too
high. One grid won't warm three square miles of city. About a third of
one is closer. But--"
"That won't be the worst," said Riki in a choked voice. "Is that right?
How much good will a grid do?"
Bordman did not answer.
The inner cold-lock door opened. Herndon sat at his desk, even paler
than before, listening to the hash of noises that came out of the
speaker. He tapped on the desk-top, quite unconscious of the action. He
looked almost desperately at Bordman.
"Did she tell you?" he asked in a numb voice. "They hope to save maybe
half the population. All the children anyhow...."
"They won't," said Riki bitterly.
"Better go transcribe the new stuff that's come in," said her brother.
"We might as well know what it says."
Riki went out of the office. Bordman shed his cold-garments. He said:
"The rest of the colony doesn't know what's up yet. The operator at the
grid didn't certainly. But they have to know."
"We'll post the messages on the bulletin board," said Herndon. "I wish
I could keep it from them. It's not fun to live with. I--might as well
not tell them just yet."
"To the contrary," insisted Bordman. "They've got to know right away!
You're going to issue orders and they'll need to understand how urgent
they are."
Herndon looked hopeless.
"What's the good of doing anything?" When Bordman frowned, he added:
"Seriously, is there any use? You're all right. A Survey Ship's due
to take you away. It's not coming because they know there's something
wrong, but because your job should be finished about now. But it can't
do any good! It would be insane for it to land at home. It couldn't
carry away more than a few dozen refugees, and there are twenty million
people who're going to die. It might offer to take some of us, but I
don't think many of us would go. I wouldn't. I don't think Riki would."
"I don't see--"
"What we've got right here," said Herndon, "is what they're going to
have back home. And worse. But there's no chance for us to keep alive
here! You are the one who pointed it out. I've been figuring, and the
way the solar-constant curve is going--I plotted it from the figures
they gave us--it couldn't possibly level out until the oxygen, anyhow,
is frozen out of the atmosphere here. We aren't equipped to stand
anything like that, and we can't get equipped. There isn't equipment
to let us stand it indefinitely! Anyhow, the maximum cold conditions
will last two thousand days back home--six Earth-years. And there'll be
storage of cold in frozen oceans and piled-up glaciers. It'll be twenty
years before home will be back to normal in temperature, and the same
here. Is there any point in trying to live--just barely to survive--for
twenty years before there'll be a habitable planet to go back to?"
Bordman said irritably:
"Don't be a fool! Doesn't it occur to you that this planet is a perfect
experiment station, two hundred days ahead of the home world, where
ways to beat the whole business can be tried? If we can beat it here,
they can beat it there!"
Herndon said:
"Can you name one thing to try here?"
"Yes," snapped Bordman. "I want the walk-heaters and the step-heaters
outside turned off. They use power to keep walk-ways clear of frost and
door-steps not slippery. I want to save that heat!"
Herndon said, "And when you've saved it, what will you do with it?"
"Put it underground to be used as needed!" Bordman said. "Store it in
the mine! I want to put every heating-device we can contrive to work
in the mine, to heat the rock. I want to draw every watt the grid will
yield and warm up the inside of the mountain while we can draw power to
do it with. I want the deepest part of the mine too hot to enter! We'll
lose a lot of heat, of course. It's not like storing electric power.
But we can store heat now, and the more we store the more will be left
when we need it!"
Herndon thought. Presently he stirred slightly.
"Do you know, that is an idea...." He looked up. "Back home there was
a shale-oil deposit up near the ice-caps. It wasn't economical to mine
it. So they put heaters down in bore-holes and heated up the whole
shale deposit. Drill-holes let out the hot oil vapors to be condensed.
They got out every bit of oil without disturbing the shale. And then
the shale stayed warm for years! Farmers bulldozed soil over it and
raised crops with glaciers all around them. That could be done again.
They could be storing up heat back home!"
Then he drooped.
"But they can't spare power to warm up the ground under cities. They
need all the power they've got to build roofs.... And it takes time to
build grids."
Bordman snapped:
"Yes, if they're building regulation ones. By the time they were
finished they'd be useless. The ionization here is dropping already.
But they don't need to build grids that will be useless later. They
can weave cables together on the ground and hang them in the air by
helicopters. They wouldn't hold up a landing ship for an instant, but
they'll draw power right away. They'll even power the helis that hold
them up! Of course, they'll have defects; they'll have to come down in
high winds, for example. They won't be too dependable. But they can put
heat in the ground to come out under roofs, to grow food by, to save
lives by. What's the matter with them?"
Herndon stirred again. His eyes ceased to be dull and lifeless.
"I'll give the orders for turning off the sidewalks. And I'll send what
you just said back home. They should like it."
He looked respectfully at Bordman.
"I guess you know what I'm thinking right now," he said.
Bordman flushed. He felt that Herndon was unduly impressed. Herndon
didn't see that the device wouldn't solve anything. It would merely
postpone the effects of a disaster. It could not possibly prevent them.
"It ought to be done," he said. "There'll be other things to be done,
too."
"Then when you tell them to me," said Herndon, "they'll get done! I'll
have Riki put this into that pulse-code you explained to us and she'll
get it off right away."
He stood up.
"I didn't explain the code to her!" insisted Bordman. "She was already
translating it when you gave her my suggestion!"
"All right," said Herndon. "I'll get this sent back at once!"
He hurried out of the office. _This_, thought Bordman irritably,
_is how reputations are made, I suppose. I'm getting one._ But
his own reaction was extremely inappropriate. If the people of Lani II
did suspend helicopter-supported grids of wire in the atmosphere, they
could warm masses of underground rock and stone and earth. They could
establish what were practically reservoirs of life-giving heat under
their cities. They could contrive that the warmth from below would
rise only as it was needed. _But_--
Two hundred days to conditions corresponding to the colony-planet.
Then two thousand days of minimum-heat conditions. Then very, very
slow return to normal temperature, long after the sun was back to its
previous brilliance. They couldn't store enough heat for so long. It
couldn't be done. It was ironic that in the freezing of ice and the
making of glaciers the planet itself could store cold.
Also, there would be monstrous storms and blizzards on Lani II as cold
conditions got worse. The wire-grids could be held aloft for shorter
and shorter periods, and each time they would pull down less power than
before. Their effectiveness would diminish even faster than the need
for effectiveness increased.
Bordman felt even deeper depression as he worked out the facts. His
proposal was essentially futile. It would be encouraging, and to a
very slight degree and for a certain short time it would palliate the
situation on the inner planet. But in the long run its effect would be
zero.
He was embarrassed, too, that Herndon was so admiring. Herndon would
tell Riki that he was marvelous. She might--though cagily--be inclined
to agree. But he wasn't marvelous. This trick of a flier-supported
grid was not new. It had been used on Saril to supply power for giant
peristaltic pumps emptying a polder that had been formed inside a ring
of indifferently upraised islands.
_All I know_, thought Bordman bitterly, _is what somebody's
showed me or I've read in books. And nobody's showed or written how
to handle a thing like this!_
He went to Herndon's desk. Herndon had made a new graph of the
solar-constant observations forwarded from home. It was a strictly
typical curve of the results of coinciding cyclic change. It was the
curve of a series of frequencies at the moment when they were all
precisely in phase. From this much one could extrapolate and compute.
Bordman took a pencil, frowning. His fingers clumsily formed equations
and solved them. The result was just about as bad as it could be. The
change in brightness of the sun Lani would not be enough to be observed
on Kent IV, the nearest other inhabited world, when the light reached
there four years from now. Lani would never be classed as a variable
star, because the total change in light and heat would be relatively
minute. The formula for computing planetary temperatures is not simple.
Among its factors are squares and cubes of the variables. Worse, the
heat radiated from a sun's photosphere varies not as the square or
cube, but as the fourth power of its absolute temperature.
Bordman's computations were not pure theory. The data came from Sol
itself, where alone in the galaxy there had been daily solar-constant
measurements for three hundred years. The rest of his deductions were
based ultimately on Earth observations, too. Most scientific data had
to refer back to Earth to get an adequate continuity. And there could
be no possible doubt about the sunspot data, because Sol and Lani were
of the same type and nearly equal size.
Using the figures on the present situation, Bordman reluctantly arrived
at the fact that here, on this already-frozen world, the temperature
would drop gradually until CO_{2} froze out of the atmosphere. When
that happened, the temperature would plummet until there was no really
significant difference between it and that of empty space. It is carbon
dioxide which is responsible for the greenhouse effect, by which a
planet is in thermal equilibrium only at a temperature above its
surroundings, as a greenhouse in sunlight is warmer than the outside
air.
The greenhouse effect would vanish soon on the colony-world. When it
vanished on the mother planet....
Bordman found himself thinking, _if Riki won't leave when the Survey
ship comes, I'll resign from the Service. I'll have to if I'm to stay.
And I won't go unless she does._
* * * * *
"If you want to come, it's all right," said Bordman ungraciously.
He waited while Riki slipped into the bulky cold-garments that were
needed out-of-doors in the daytime, and were doubly necessary at night.
There were heavy boots with inches-thick insulating soles, made in
one piece with the many-layered trousers. There was an air-puffed,
insulated over-tunic with its hood and mittens which were a part of the
sleeves.
"Nobody goes outside at night," she said when they stood together in
the cold-lock.
"I do," he told her. "I want to find out something."
The outer door opened and he stepped out. He held his arm for her,
because the steps and walk-way were no longer heated. Now they were
covered with a filmy layer of something which was not frost, but a
faint bloom of powder--microscopic snow-crystals frozen out of the air
by the unbearable chill of night.
There was no moon, of course, yet the ice-clad mountains glowed
faintly. The drone-hulls arranged in such an orderly fashion were dark
against the frosted ground. There was silence, stillness, the feeling
of ancient quietude. No wind stirred anywhere. Nothing moved, nothing
lived. The soundlessness was enough to crack the ear-drums.
Bordman threw back his head and gazed at the sky for a very long time.
Nothing. He looked down at Riki.
"Look at the sky," he commanded.
She raised her eyes. She had been watching him. But as she gazed
upward she almost cried out. The sky was filled with stars in
innumerable variety. But the brighter ones were as stars had never
been seen before. Just as the sun in daylight had been accompanied
by its sun-dogs--pale phantoms of itself ranged about it--so the
brighter distant suns now shone from the center of rings of their own
images. They no longer had the look of random placing. Those which
were most distinct were patterns in themselves, and one's eyes strove
instinctively to grasp the greater pattern in which such seeming
artifacts must belong.
"Oh--beautiful!" cried Riki softly.
"Look!" he insisted. "Keep looking!"
She continued to gaze, moving her eyes about hopefully. It was such a
sight as no one could have imagined. Every tint and every color, every
possible degree of brightness appeared. And there were groups of stars
of the same brilliance which almost made triangles, but not quite.
There were rose-tinted stars which almost formed an arc, but did not.
And there were arrays which were almost lines and nearly formed squares
and polygons, but never actually achieved them.
"It's beautiful," said Riki. "But what must I look for?"
"Look for what isn't there," he ordered.
She looked, and the stars were unwinking, but that was not
extraordinary. They filled all the firmament, without the least space
in which some tiny sparkle of light was not to be found. But that was
not remarkable, either. Then there was a vague flickering grayish glow
somewhere, indefinite. It vanished. Then she realized.
"There's no aurora!" she exclaimed.
"That's it," said Bordman. "There've always been auroras here. But
no longer. We may be responsible. I wish I thought it wise to turn
everything back to reservoir power for a while. We could find out. But
we can't afford it."
"I looked at it when we first landed," admitted Riki. "It was
unbelievable. But it was terribly cold, out of shelter. And it happened
every night, so I said to myself I'd look tomorrow, and then tomorrow
again. So it got so I never looked at all."
Bordman kept his eyes where that faint gray flickering had been. And,
once one realized, it was astonishing that the former nightly play of
ghostly colors should be absent.
"The aurora," he said, "happens in the very upper limits of the air,
fifty--seventy--ninety miles up, when God-knows-what emitted particles
from the sun come streaking in, drawn by the planet's magnetic field.
The aurora's a phenomenon of ions. We tap the ionosphere a long way
down from where it plays, but I'm wondering if we stopped it."
"We?" said Riki, shocked. "We humans?"
"We tap the ions of their charges," he said somberly, "that the
sunlight made by day. We're pulling in all the power we can. I wonder
if we've drained the aurora of its energy, too."
Riki was silent. Bordman gazed, still searching. But he shook his head.
"It could be," he said in a carefully detached voice. "We didn't draw
much power by comparison with the amount that came. But the ionization
is an ultra-violet effect. Atmospheric gases don't ionize too easily.
After all, if the solar constant dropped a very little, it might mean a
terrific drop in the ultra-violet part of the spectrum--and that's what
makes ions of oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and such. The ion-drop
could easily be fifty times as great as the drop in the solar constant.
And we're drawing power from the little that's left."
Riki stood very still. The cold was horrible. Had there been a wind, it
could not have been endured for an instant. But the air was motionless.
Yet its coldness was so great that the inside of one's nostrils ached,
and the inside of one's chest was aware of chill. Even through the
cold-garments there was the feeling as of ice without.
"I'm beginning," said Bordman, "to suspect that I'm a fool. Or maybe
I'm an optimist. It might be the same thing. I could have guessed that
the power we could draw would drop faster than our need for power
increased. If we've drained the aurora of its light, we're scraping
the bottom of the barrel. And it's a shallower barrel than one would
suspect."
There was stillness again. Riki stood mousy-quiet. _When she realizes
what this means_, thought Bordman grimly, _she won't admire me so
much. Her brother's built me up. But I've been a fool, figuring out
excuses to hope. She'll see it._
"I think," said Riki, "that you're telling me that after all we can't
store up heat to live on, down in the mine."
"We can't," agreed Bordman. "Not much, nor long. Not enough to matter."
"So we won't live as long as Ken expects?"
"Not nearly as long," said Bordman. "He's hoping we can find out things
to be useful back on Lani II. But we'll lose the power we can get from
our grid long before even their new grids are useless. We'll have to
start using our reserve power a lot sooner. It'll be gone--and us with
it--before they're really in straits for living-heat."
Riki's teeth began to chatter.
"This sounds like I'm scared," she said angrily, "but I'm not! I'm just
freezing. If you want to know, I'd a lot rather have it the way you
say. I won't have to grieve over anybody, and they'll be too busy to
grieve for me.... Let's go inside while it's still warm."
He helped her back into the cold-lock, and the outer door closed. She
was shivering uncontrollably when the warmth came pouring in.
They went into Herndon's office. He came in as Riki was peeling off the
top part of her cold-garments. She still shivered. He glanced at her
and said to Bordman:
"There's been a call from the grid-control shack. It looks like there's
something wrong, but they can't find anything. The grid is set for
maximum power-collection, but it's bringing in only fifty thousand
kilowatts!"
"We're on our way back to savagery," said Bordman, with an attempt at
irony.