for a reasonable length of time. When he has no more power, he is a
savage. When he gains a kilowatt of energy from the muscles of a horse,
he is a barbarian, but the new power cannot be directed wholly as he
wills. When he can apply it to a plow he has high barbarian culture,
and when he adds still more he begins to be civilized. Steam-power put
as much as four kilowatts to work for every human being in the first
industrialized countries, and in the mid-twentieth century there was
sixty kilowatts per person in the more advanced nations. Nowadays, of
course, a modern culture assumed five hundred as a minimum. But there
was less than half that in the colony on Lani II. And its environment
made its own demands.
"There can't be any more," said Riki, trying to control her shivering.
"We're even using the aurora and there isn't any more power. It's
running out. We'll go even before the people at home, Ken."
Herndon's features looked pinched.
"But we can't! We mustn't!" He turned to Bordman. "We do them good,
back home! There was panic. Our report about cable-grids has put heart
in people. They're setting to work magnificently! So we're some use.
They know we're worse off than they are, and as long as we hold on
they'll be encouraged. We've got to keep going somehow!"
Riki breathed deeply until her shivering stopped. Then she said:
"Haven't you noticed, Ken, that Mr. Bordman has the view-point of his
profession? His business is finding things wrong. He was deposited in
our midst to detect defects in what we did and do. He has the habit of
looking for the worst. But I think he can turn the habit to good use.
He did turn up the idea of cable-grids."
"Which," said Bordman, "turns out to be no good at all. They'd be some
good if they weren't needed, really. But the conditions that make them
necessary make them useless!"
Riki shook her head.
"They are useful!" she said. "They're keeping people at home from
despairing. Now, though, you've got to think of something else. If you
think of enough things, one will do good the way you want, more than
just making people feel better."
"What does it matter how people feel?" he demanded bitterly. "What
difference do feelings make? One can't change facts!"
Riki said firmly:
"We humans are the only creatures in the universe who don't do anything
else. Every other creature accepts facts. It lives where it is born,
and it feeds on the food that is there for it, and it dies when the
facts of nature require it to. We humans don't. Especially we women!
We won't let men do it, either. When we don't like facts--mostly about
ourselves--we change them. But important facts we disapprove of--we ask
men to change them for us. And they do!"
She faced Bordman. Rather incredibly, she grinned at him.
"Will you please change the facts that look so annoying just now,
please? Please?" Then she elaborately pantomimed an over-feminine
girl's look of wide-eyed admiration. "You're so big and strong! I just
know you can do it--for me!"
She abruptly dropped the pretense and moved toward the door. She
half-turned then, and said detachedly:
"But about half of that is true."
The door slid shut behind her. It suddenly occurred to Bordman that she
knew a Colonial Survey ship was due to stop by here to pick him up. She
believed he expected to be rescued, even though the rest of the colony
could not be, and most of it wouldn't consent to leave their kindred
when the death of mankind in this solar system took place. He said
awkwardly:
"Fifty thousand kilowatts isn't enough to land a ship."
Herndon frowned. Then he said:
"Oh. You mean the Survey ship that's to pick you up can't land? But it
can go in orbit and put down a rocket landing-boat for you."
"I wasn't thinking of that. I'd something more in mind. I--rather
like your sister. She's pretty wonderful. But there are some other
women here in the colony, too. About a dozen all told. As a matter of
self-respect I think we ought to get them away on the Survey ship. I
agree that they wouldn't consent to go. But if they had no choice--if
we could get them on board the grounded ship, and they suddenly
found themselves--well--kidnapped and outward-bound not by their own
fault.... They could be faced with the accomplished fact that they had
to go on living."
Herndon said evenly:
"That's been in the back of my mind for some time. Yes, I'm for that.
But if the Survey ship can't land--"
"I believe I can land it regardless," said Bordman. "I can find out,
anyhow. I'll need to try things. I'll need help. But I want your
promise that if I can get the ship to ground you'll conspire with her
skipper and arrange for them to go on living."
Herndon looked at him.
"Some new stuff, in a way," said Bordman uncomfortably. "I'll have to
stay aground to work it. It's also part of the bargain that I shall.
And of course your sister can't know about it, or she can't be fooled
into living."
Herndon's expression changed a little.
"What'll you do? Of course it's a bargain."
"I'll need some metals we haven't smelted so far," said Bordman.
"Potassium if I can get it, sodium if I can't, and at worst I'll settle
for zinc. Cesium would be best, but we've found no traces of it."
Herndon said thoughtfully:
"No-o-o. I think I can get you sodium and potassium, from rocks. I'm
afraid no zinc. How much?"
"Grams," said Bordman. "Trivial quantities. And I'll need a miniature
landing-grid built. Very miniature."
Herndon shrugged his shoulders.
"It's over my head. But just to have work to do will be good for
everybody. We've been feeling more frustrated here than any other
humans in history. I'll go round up the men who'll do the work. You
talk to them."
The door closed behind him. Bordman got out of his cold-clothing. He
thought, _She'll rage when she finds her brother and I have deceived
her._ Then he thought of the other women. _If any of them are
married, we'll have to see if there's room for their husbands. I'll
have to dress up the idea. Make it look like reason for hope, or the
women would find out. But not many can go...._
He knew roughly how many extra passengers could be carried on a Survey
ship, even in such an emergency as this. Living-quarters were not
luxurious, at best. Everything was cramped and skimped. Survey ships
were rugged, tiny vessels which performed their duties amid tedium and
discomfort and peril for all on board. But one of them could carry away
a very few unwilling refugees to Kent IV.
He settled down at Herndon's desk to work out the thing to be done.
It was not unreasonable. Tapping the ionosphere for power was
something like pumping water out of a pipe-well in sand. If the
water-table was high, there was pressure to force the water to the
pipe, and one could pump fast. If the water-table was low, water
couldn't flow fast enough. The pump would suck dry. In the ionosphere,
the level of ionization was at once like the pressure and the size of
the sand-grains. When the level was high, the flow was vast because
the sand-grains were large and the conductivity high. But as the level
lessened, so did the size of the sand-grains. There was less to draw,
and more resistance to its flow.
However, there had been one tiny flicker of auroral light over by the
horizon. There was still power aloft. If Bordman could in a fashion
prime the pump, if he could increase the conductivity by increasing the
ions present around the place where their charges were drawn away, he
could increase the total flow. It would be like digging a brick well
where a pipe-well had been. A brick well draws water from all around
its circumference.
So Bordman computed carefully. It was ironic that he had to go to such
trouble simply because he didn't have test-rockets like the Survey uses
to get a picture of a planet's weather-pattern. They rise vertically
for fifty miles or so, trailing a thread of sodium vapor behind them.
The trail is detectable for some time, and ground instruments record
each displacement by winds blowing in different directions at different
speeds, one over the other. Such a rocket with its loading slightly
changed would do all Bordman had in mind. But he didn't have one, so
something much more elaborate was called for.
A landing-grid has to be not less than half a mile across and two
thousand feet high because its field has to reach out five planetary
diameters to handle ships that land and take off. To handle solid
objects it has to be accurate, though power can be drawn with an
improvisation. To thrust a sodium-vapor bomb anywhere from twenty to
fifty miles high, he'd need a grid only six feet wide and five high.
It could throw much higher, of course, and hold what it threw. But
doubling the size would make accuracy easier.
He tripled the dimensions. There would be a grid eighteen feet across
and fifteen high. Tuned to the casing of a small bomb, it could hold it
steady at seven hundred fifty thousand feet, far beyond necessity. He
began to make the detail drawings.
Herndon came back with half a dozen chosen colonists. They were young
men, technicians rather than scientists. Some of them were several
years younger than Bordman. There were grim and stunned expressions
on some faces, but one tried to pretend nonchalance, and two seemed
trying to suppress fury at the monstrous occurrence that would destroy
not only their own lives, but everything they remembered on the planet
which was their home. They looked almost challengingly at Bordman.
He explained. He was going to put a cloud of metallic vapor up in the
ionosphere. Sodium if he had to, potassium if he could, zinc if he
must. Those metals were readily ionized by sunlight, much more readily
than atmospheric gases. In effect, he was going to supply a certain
area of the ionosphere with material to increase the efficiency of
sunshine in providing electric power. As a side-line, there would be
increased conductivity from the normal ionosphere.
"Something like this was done centuries ago, back on Earth," he
explained. "They used rockets, and made sodium-vapor clouds as much
as twenty and thirty miles long. Even nowadays the Survey uses test
rockets with trails of sodium vapor. It will work to some degree. We'll
find out how much."
He felt Herndon's eyes upon him. They were almost dazedly respectful.
But one of the technicians said:
"How long will those clouds last?"
"That high, three or four days," Bordman told him. "They won't help
much at night, but they should step up power-intake while the sun
shines on them."
A man in the back said, "Hup!" The significance was, "Let's go!"
Somebody else said feverishly, "What do we do? Got working drawings?
Who makes the bombs? Who does what? Let's get at this!"
Then there was confusion, and Herndon vanished. Bordman suspected
he'd gone to have Riki put this theory into dot-and-dash code for
beam-transmission back to Lani II. But there was no time to stop him.
These men wanted precise information and it was half an hour before the
last of them had gone out with free-hand sketches, and had come back
for further explanation of a doubtful point, and other men had come in
to demand a share in the job.
When he was alone again, Bordman thought, _Maybe it's worth doing
because it'll get Riki on the Survey ship. But they think it means
saving the people back home!_
Which it didn't. Taking energy out of sunlight is taking energy out
of sunlight, no matter how you do it. Take it out as electric power,
and there's less heat left. Warm one place with electric power, and
everywhere else is a little colder. There's an equation. On this
colony-world it wouldn't matter, but on the home world it would.
The more there was trickery to gather heat, the more heat would be
needed.... Again it might postpone the death of twenty million people,
but it would never, never prevent it....
The door slid aside and Riki came in. She stammered a little.
"I just coded what Ken told me to send back home. It will--it will do
everything! It's wonderful! I wanted to tell you!"
"Consider," Bordman said, in a desperate attempt to take it lightly,
"that I've taken a bow."
He tried to smile. It was not a success. And Riki suddenly drew a deep
breath and looked at him in a new fashion.
"Ken's right," she said softly. "He says you can't get conceited.
You're not satisfied with yourself even now, are you?" She smiled. "But
what I like is that you aren't really smart. A woman can make you do
things. I have!"
He looked at her uneasily. She grinned.
"I, even I, can at least pretend to myself that I helped bring this
about! If I hadn't said please change the facts that are so annoying,
and if I hadn't said you were big and strong and clever.... I'm going
to tell myself for the rest of my life that I helped make you do it!"
Bordman swallowed.
"I'm afraid," he said, "that it won't work again."
She cocked her head on one side.
"No?"
He stared at her apprehensively. And then with a bewildering change of
emotional reaction, he saw that her eyes were filled with tears. She
stamped her foot.
"You're horrible!" she cried. "Here I came in, and--and if you think
you can get me kidnaped to safety without even telling me that
you 'rather like' me, as you told my brother, or that I'm 'pretty
wonderful--'"
He was stunned, that she knew. She stamped her foot again.
"For Heaven's sake!" she wailed. "Do I have to _ask_ you to kiss
me?"
During the last night of preparation, Bordman sat by a thermometer
registering the outside temperature. He hovered over it as one might
over a sick child. He watched it and sweated, though the inside
temperature of the drone-hull was lowered to save power. There was
nothing he could actually do. At midnight the thermometer said it was
seventy degrees below zero Fahrenheit. At half-way to dawn it was
eighty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The hour before dawn it was
eighty-five degrees below zero. Then he sweated profusely. The meaning
of the slowed descent was that carbon dioxide was being frozen out of
the upper layers of the atmosphere. The frozen particles were drifting
slowly downward, and as they reached lower and faintly warmer levels
they returned to the state of gas. But there was a level, above the
CO_{2}, where the temperature was plummeting.
The height to which carbon dioxide existed was dropping. Slowly, but
inexorably. And above the carbon-dioxide level there was no bottom
limit to the temperature. The greenhouse effect was due to CO_{2}.
Where it wasn't, the cold of space moved down. If at ground-level the
thermometer read ever-so-slightly less than one hundred nine below
zero, then everything was finished. Without the greenhouse effect, the
night-side of the planet would lose its remaining heat with a rush.
Even the day side, once cold enough, would lose heat to emptiness as
fast as it came from the sun. Minus one hundred nine point three was
the critical reading. If it went down to that it would plunge to a
hundred and fifty or two hundred degrees below zero, or more. And it
would never come up again.
There would be rain at nightfall, a rain of oxygen frozen to a liquid
and splashing on the ground. Human life would be impossible, in any
shelter and under any conditions. Even space-suits would not protect
against an atmosphere sucking heat from it at that rate. A space-suit
can be heated against the loss of temperature due to radiation in a
vacuum. It could not be heated against nitrogen which would chill it
irresistibly by contact.
But, as Bordman sweated over it, the thermometer steadied at minus
eighty-five degrees. When the dawn came, it rose to seventy. By
mid-morning, the temperature in bright sunshine was no lower than
sixty-five degrees below zero.
But there was no bounce left in Bordman when Herndon came for him.
"Your phone-plate's been flashing," said Herndon, "and you didn't
answer. Must have had your back to it. Riki's over in the mine,
watching them get things ready. She was worried that she couldn't call
you. Asked me to find out what was the trouble."
"Has she got something to heat the air she breathes?" asked Bordman.
"Naturally," said Herndon. He added curiously, "What's the matter?"
"We almost took our licking," Bordman told him. "I'm afraid for
tonight, and tomorrow night too. If the CO_{2} freezes--"
"We'll have power!" Herndon insisted. "We'll build ice-tunnels and
ice-domes. We'll build a city under ice, if we have to. But we'll have
power!"
"I doubt it very much," said Bordman. "I wish you hadn't told Riki of
the bargain to get her away from here when the Survey ship comes!"
Herndon grinned.
"Is the little grid ready?" asked Bordman.
"Everything's set," said Herndon. "It's in the mine-tunnel with radiant
heaters playing on it. The bombs are ready. We made enough to last for
months, while we were at it. No use taking chances!"
Bordman looked at him queerly. Then he said:
"We might as well go out and try the thing, then."
He put on the cold-garments as they were now modified for the increased
frigidity. Nobody could breathe air at minus sixty-five degrees without
getting his lungs frost-bitten. So there was now a plastic mask to
cover one's face, and the air one breathed outdoors was heated as it
came through a wire-gauze snout. But still it was not wise to stay out
of shelter for too long a time.
Bordman and Herndon went out-of-doors. They stepped out of the
cold-lock and gazed about them. The sun seemed markedly paler and now
it had lost its sun-dogs again. Ice-crystals no longer floated in the
almost congealed air. The sky was dark. It was almost purple, and it
seemed to Bordman that he could detect faint flecks of light in it.
They would be stars, shining in the daytime.
There seemed no one about at all, only the white coldness of the
mountains. But there was a movement at the mine-drift, and something
came out of it. Four men appeared, muffled up like Bordman himself.
They rolled the eighteen-foot grid out of the mine-mouth, moving it on
those inflated bags which are so much better than rollers for rough
terrain. They looked absurdly like bears with steaming noses in their
masks and clothing. They had some sort of powered pusher with them and
they got the metal cage to the very top of a rounded stone upcrop which
rose in the center of the valley.
"We picked that spot," said Herndon's muffled voice through the chill,
"because by shifting the grid's position it can be aimed, and be on a
solid base. Right?"
"Quite all right," said Bordman. "We'll go work it."
The two men walked across the valley, in which nothing moved except
the padded figures of the four technicians. Their wire-gauze
breathing-masks seemed to emit smoke. They waved to Bordman in greeting.
_I'm popular again_, he thought drearily, _but it doesn't
matter. Getting the Survey ship to ground won't help now, since Riki's
forewarned. And this trick won't solve anything permanently on the home
planet. It'll just postpone things._
Even when Riki, muffled like the rest, waved to him from the mouth of
the tunnel, his spirits did not lift. The thing he wanted was to look
forward to years and years of being with Riki. He wanted, in fact, to
look forward to forever. And there might not be a tomorrow.
"I had the control-board rolled out here," she called through her mask.
"It's cold, but you can watch!"
It wouldn't be much to watch. If everything went all right, some
dial-needles would kick over violently and their readings would go up
and up. But they wouldn't be readings of temperature. Presently the
big grid would report increased power from the sky. But tonight the
temperature would drop a little farther. Tomorrow night it would drop
further still. When it reached one hundred nine point three degrees
below zero at ground-level, that would be the finish.
Another of the figures that looked like a bear now went out of
the mine-mouth, trudging toward the grid. It carried a muffled,
well-wrapped object in its arms. It stopped and crept between the
spokes of the grid, and put the object on the stone. Bordman traced
cables with his eyes, from the grid to the control-board, and from the
board back to the reserve-power storage cells, deep in the mountain.
"The grid's tuned to the bomb," said Riki, close beside him. "I checked
that myself!"
The bear-like figure out in the valley jerked at the bomb. There was a
small rising cloud of grayish vapor. It continued. The figure climbed
hastily out of the grid. When the man was clear, Bordman threw a switch.
There was a thin whining sound, and the wrapped, smoking object leaped
upward. It seemed to fall toward the sky. There was no more of drama
than that. An object the size of a basketball fell upward, swiftly,
until it disappeared.
Bordman sat quite still, watching the control-board dials. Presently he
corrected this, and shifted that. He did not want the bomb to have too
high an upward velocity. At a hundred thousand feet it would find very
little air to stop the rise of the vapor it was to release.
The field-focus dial reached its indication of one hundred thousand
feet. Bordman reversed the lift-switch. He counted, and then switched
the power off. The small, thin whine ended.
He threw the power-intake switch. The power-yield needle stirred. The
minute grid was drawing power like its vaster counterpart, but its
field was infinitesimal by comparison. It drew power as a soda-straw
might draw water from wet sand.
Then the intake-needle kicked. It swung sharply, and wavered, and then
began a steady, even, climbing movement across the markings on the
dial-face. Riki was not watching that.
"They see something!" she panted. "Look at them!"
The four men who had trundled the smaller grid to its place, now stared
upward. They flung out their arms. One of them jumped up and down. They
leaped. They practically danced.
"Let's go see," said Bordman.
He went out of the tunnel with Riki. They gazed upward. And directly
overhead, where the sky was darkest blue and where it had seemed that
stars shone through the daylight, there was a minute cloud. But it
grew. Its edges were yellow, saffron-yellow. It expanded and spread.
Presently it began to thin. As it thinned, it began to shine. It was
luminous. And the luminosity had a strange, familiar quality.
Somebody came panting down the tunnel, from inside the mountain.
"The grid--" he panted. "The big grid! It's pumping power! Big power!
BIG power!"
But Bordman was looking at the sky, as if he did not quite believe his
eyes. The cloud now expanded very slowly, but still it grew. And it
was not regular in shape. The bomb had not shattered quite evenly, and
the vapor had poured out more on one side than the other. There was a
narrow, arching arm of brightness....
"It looks," said Riki breathlessly, "like a comet!"
And then Bordman froze in every muscle. He stared at the cloud he had
made aloft, and his hands clenched in their mittens, and he swallowed
behind his cold-mask.
"Th-that's it," he said in a hushed voice. "It's--_very_ much like
a comet. I'm glad you said that! We can make something even more like a
comet. We can use all the bombs we've made, right away, to make it. And
we've got to hurry so it won't get any colder tonight!"
Which, of course, sounded like insanity. Riki looked apprehensively at
him. But Bordman had just thought of something. And nobody had taught
it to him and he hadn't gotten it out of books. But he'd seen a comet.
The new idea was so promising that he regarded it with anguished unease
for fear it would not hold up. It was an idea that really ought to
change the facts resulting naturally from a lowered solar constant in a
sol-type star.
* * * * *
Half the colony set to work to make more bombs when the effect of
the first bomb showed up. The men were not very efficient, at first,
because they tended to want to stop work and dance from time to
time. But they worked with an impassioned enthusiasm. They made more
bomb-casings, and they prepared more sodium and potassium metal and
more fuses, and more insulation to wrap around the bombs to protect
them from the cold of airless space.