lift and hold a bomb steady in its field-focus at seven hundred and
fifty thousand feet. But if a bomb was accelerated all the way out to
that point, and the field was then snapped off.... Why, it wasn't held
anywhere! It kept on going with its attained velocity. And it burst
when its fuse decided that it should, whereupon immediately a mass of
sodium and potassium vapor, mixed with the fumes of high explosive,
flung itself madly in all directions, out between the stars. Absolute
vacuum tore the compressed gasified metals apart. The separate atoms,
white-hot from the explosion, went swirling through sunlit space. The
sunlight was dimmed a trifle, to be sure. But individual atoms of the
lighter alkaline-earth metals have marked photoelectric properties. In
sunshine these gas-molecules ionized, and therefore spread more widely,
and did not coalesce into even microscopic droplets.
They formed, in fact, a cloud in space. An ionized cloud, in which no
particle was too large to be responsive to the pressure of light. The
cloud acted like the gases of a comet's tail. It was a comet's tail,
though there was no comet. And it was an extraordinary comet's tail
because it is said that you can put a comet's tail in your hat, at
normal atmospheric pressure. But this could not have been put in a hat.
Even before it turned to gas, it was the size of a basketball. And, in
space, it glowed.
It glowed with the brightness of the sunshine on it, which was light
that would normally have gone away through the interstellar dark. And
it filled one corner of the sky. Within one hour it was a comet tail
ten thousand miles long, which visibly brightened the daytime heavens.
And it was only the first of such reflecting clouds.
The next bomb set for space exploded in a different quarter, because
Bordman had had the miniature grid wrestled around the upcrop to point
in a new and somewhat more carefully chosen line. The next spattered
brilliance in a different section still. And the brilliance lasted.
Bordman flung his first bombs recklessly, because there would be more,
and because he was desperately anxious to hang as many comet-tails as
possible around the colony-planet before nightfall. He didn't want it
to get any colder.
And it didn't. In fact, there wasn't exactly any real nightfall on Lani
III that night.
The planet turned on its axis, to be sure. But around it, quite close
by, there hung gigantic streamers of shining gas. At their beginning,
those streamers bore a certain resemblance to the furry wild-animal
tails that little boys like to have hanging down from hunting-caps.
Only they shone. And as they developed they merged, so that there was
an enormous shining curtain about Lani III, draperies of metal-mist to
capture sunlight that would otherwise have been wasted, and to diffuse
much of it on Lani II. At midnight there was only one spot in all the
night sky where there was really darkness. That was overhead, directly
outward from the planet, opposite from the sun. Gigantic shining
streamers formed a wall, a tube, of comet-tail material, yet many
times more dense and therefore more bright, which shielded the colony
world against the dark and cold, and threw upon it a shining, warming
brightness.
Riki maintained stoutly that she could feel the warmth from the
sky, but that was improbable. However, heat certainly did come from
somewhere. The thermometer did not fall at all, that night. It rose.
It was up to fifty below zero at dawn. During the day--they sent out
twenty more bombs that second day--it was up to twenty degrees below
zero. By the day after, there were competent computations from the home
planet, and the concrete results of abstruse speculation, and the third
day's bombs were placed with optimum spacing for heating purposes.
By dawn of the fourth day the air was a balmy five degrees below zero,
and the day after that there was a small running stream in the valley
at midday.
There was talk of stocking the stream with fish, on the morning the
Survey ship came in. The great landing-grid gave out a deep-toned,
vibrant, humming note, like the deepest possible note of the biggest
organ that could be imagined. A speck appeared high up in a pale-blue
sky with trimmings of golden gas clouds. The Survey ship came down and
down and settled as a shining silver object in the very center of the
gigantic red-painted landing-grid.
Her skipper came to find Bordman. He was in Herndon's office. The
skipper struggled to keep sheer blankness out of his expression.
"What the hell?" he demanded. "This is the damnedest sight in the whole
Galaxy, and they tell me you're responsible! There've been ringed
planets before, and there've been comets and who knows what! But
shining gas-pipes aimed at the sun, half a million miles across! And
there are two of them--both the occupied planets!"
Herndon explained why the curtains hung in space. There was a drop in
the solar constant....
The skipper exploded. He wanted facts! Details! Something to report!
Bordman was automatically on the defensive when the skipper swung his
questions at him. A Senior Colonial Survey officer is not revered by
the Survey ship-service officers. Men like Bordman can be a nuisance
to a hard-working ship's officer. They have to be carried to unlikely
places for their work of checking over colonial installations. They
have to be put down on hard-to-get-at colonies, and they have to be
called for, sometimes, at times and places which are inconvenient. So a
man in Bordman's position is likely to feel unpopular.
"I'd just finished the survey here," he said defensively, "when a cycle
of sunspot cycles matured. All the sunspot periods got in phase, and
the solar constant dropped. So I naturally offered what help I could to
meet the situation."
The skipper regarded him incredulously.
"But it couldn't be done!" he said. "They told me how you did it, but
it couldn't be done! Do you realize that these vapor-curtains will make
fifty border-line worlds fit for use? Half a pound of sodium vapor
a week!" He gestured helplessly. "They tell me the amount of heat
reaching the surface here has been upped by fifteen per cent! D'you
realize what _that_ means?"
"I haven't been worrying about it," admitted Bordman. "There was a
local situation and something had to be done. I--er--remembered things,
and Riki suggested something I mightn't have thought of. So it's worked
out like this." Then he said abruptly: "I'm not leaving. I'll let you
take my resignation back. I think I'm going to settle here. It'll be a
long time before we get really temperate-climate conditions here, but
we can warm up a valley like this for cultivation, and it's going to
be a rather satisfying job. It's a brand new planet with a brand new
ecological system to be established."
The skipper of the Survey ship sat down hard. Then the sliding door of
Herndon's office opened and Riki came in. The skipper stood up again.
Bordman awkwardly made the introduction. Riki smiled.
"I'm telling him," said Bordman, "that I'm resigning from the Service
to settle down here."
Riki nodded. She put her hand in proprietary fashion on Bordman's arm.
The Survey skipper cleared his throat.
"I'm not going to carry your resignation," he said. "There've got to be
detailed reports on how this business works. Dammit, if vapor clouds in
space can be used to keep a planet warm, they can be used to shade a
planet, too! If you resign, somebody else will have to come out here to
make observations and work out the details of the trick. Nobody could
be gotten here in less than a year! You've got to stay here to build
up a report, and you ought to be available for consultation when this
thing's to be done somewhere else. I'll report that I insisted as a
Survey emergency--"
Riki said confidently:
"Oh, that's all right! He'll do that! Of course! Won't you?"
Bordman nodded. He thought, _I've been lonely all my life. I've
never belonged anywhere. But nobody could possibly belong anywhere
as thoroughly as I'll belong here when it's warm and green and even
the grass on the ground is partly my doing. But Riki'll like for me
still to be in the Service. Women like to see their husbands wearing
uniforms._
Aloud he said:
"Of course. If it really needs to be done. Though you realize that
there's nothing really remarkable about it. Everything I've done has
been what I was taught, or read in books."
"Hush!" said Riki. "You're wonderful!"
* * * * *
And so they were married, and Bordman was very, very happy. But people
who can serve their fellow-men are never left alone. We humans get into
so many predicaments!
Bordman had lived contentedly on Lani III for only three years when
there was an emergency on Kalen IV and no other qualified Space Survey
officer could possibly be gotten to the spot in time to handle it.
A special ship raced to ask him to act,--just for this once. And,
reluctantly, he went to do what he could, with the assurance to Riki
that he would be back in three months. But he was gone two years, and
his youngest child did not remember him when he came back.
He stayed home one year, and then there was an emergency on Seth IV.
That kept him only four months, but before he could get back to Lani
he was urgently required to check out a colony on Aleph I, whose
colonists could not enter into possession until a short-handed Survey
service licensed it. Then there was another call....
In the first ten years of his marriage, Bordman spent less than five
with his family. But he didn't like it. When he'd been married fifteen
years he'd made it clear at Headquarters that he was only carrying on
until a new class graduated from Space Survey training. Then he was
going home to stay.
SAND DOOM
Bordman knew there was something wrong when the throbbing, acutely
uncomfortable vibration of rocket-blasts shook the ship. Rockets were
strictly emergency devices, these days, so when they were used there
was obviously an emergency.
He sat still. He had been reading in the passenger-lounge of the
_Warlock_--a very small lounge indeed--but as a Senior Colonial
Survey Officer with considerable experience he was well-traveled
enough to know when things did not go right. He looked up from the
book-screen, waiting. Nobody came to explain the eccentricity of a
space-ship using rockets. The explanation would have been immediate on
a regular liner, but the _Warlock_ was practically a tramp. This
trip it carried just two passengers. Passenger service was not yet
authorized to the planet, and would not be until Bordman had made the
report he was on his way to compile. At the moment, though, the rockets
blasted, and stopped, and blasted again. There was something definitely
wrong.
The _Warlock's_ other passenger came out of her cabin. She looked
surprised. She was Aletha Redfeather, a very lovely Amerind. It was
extraordinary that a girl could be so self-sufficient on a tedious
space-voyage, and Bordman approved of her. She was making the journey
to Xosa II as a representative of the Amerind Historical Society,
but she'd brought her own book-reels and some elaborate fancy-work
which--woman-fashion--she used to occupy her hands. She hadn't been
at all a nuisance. Now she tilted her head on one side as she looked
inquiringly at Bordman.
"I'm wondering too," he told her, just as an especially sustained and
violent shuddering of rocket-impulsion made his chair legs thutter on
the floor.
There was a long period of stillness. Then another violent but much
shorter blast. A shorter one still. Presently there was a half-second
blast which must have been from a single rocket-tube because of the
mild shaking it produced. After that there was nothing at all.
Bordman frowned to himself. He'd been anticipating ground-fall within
a matter of hours, certainly. He'd just gone through his spec-book
carefully and re-familiarized himself with the work he was to survey on
Xosa II. It was a perfectly common-place minerals-planet development,
and he'd expected to clear it FE--fully established--and probably TP
and NQ ratings as well, indicating that tourists were permitted and no
quarantine was necessary. Considering the aridity of the planet, no
bacteriological dangers could be expected to exist, and if tourists
wanted to view its monstrous deserts and inferno-like wind-sculptures,
they should be welcome.
But the ship had used rocket-drive in the planet's near vicinity.
Emergency. Which was ridiculous. This was a perfectly routine sort of
voyage. Its purpose was the delivery of heavy equipment--specifically a
smelter--and a Senior Colonial Survey Officer to report the completion
of primary development.
Aletha waited, as if for more rocket-blasts. Presently she smiled at
some thought that had occurred to her.
"If this were an adventure tape," she said, "the loud-speaker would
now announce that the ship had established itself in an orbit around
the strange, uncharted planet first sighted three days ago, and that
volunteers were wanted for a boat landing."
Bordman demanded impatiently:
"Do you bother with adventure tapes? They're nonsense! A pure waste of
time!"
Aletha smiled again.
"My ancestors," she told him, "used to hold tribal dances and make
medicine and boast about how many scalps they'd taken and how they
did it. It was satisfying--and educational for the young. Adolescents
became familiar with the idea of what we nowadays call adventure. They
were partly ready for it when it came. I suspect your ancestors used to
tell each other stories about hunting mammoths and such. So I think it
would be fun to hear that we were in orbit and that a boat landing was
in order."
Bordman grunted. There were no longer adventures. The universe was
settled, civilized. Of course there were still frontier planets--Xosa
II was one--but pioneers had only hardships. Not adventures.
The ship-phone speaker clicked. It said curtly:
"_Notice. We have arrived at Xosa II and have established an orbit
about it. A landing will be made by boat._"
Bordman's mouth dropped open.
"What the devil's this?" he demanded.
"Adventure, maybe," said Aletha. Her eyes crinkled very pleasantly when
she smiled. She wore the modern Amerind dress--a sign of pride in the
ancestry which now implied such diverse occupations as interstellar
steel construction and animal husbandry and llano-planet colonization.
"If it were adventure, as the only girl on this ship I'd have to be in
the landing party, lest the tedium of orbital waiting make the--" her
smile widened to a grin--"the pent-up restlessness of trouble-makers in
the crew--"
The ship phone clicked again.
"_Mr. Bordman. Miss Redfeather. According to advices from the ground,
the ship may have to stay in orbit for a considerable time. You will
accordingly be landed by boat. Will you make yourselves ready, please,
and report to the boat-blister?_" The voice paused and added,
"_Hand luggage only, please._"
Aletha's eyes brightened. Bordman felt the shocked incredulity of a man
accustomed to routine when routine is broken. Of course, survey ships
made boat landings from orbit, and colony ships let down robot hulls
by rocket when there was as yet no landing-grid for the handling of a
ship. But never before in his experience had an ordinary freighter, on
a routine voyage to a colony ready for a degree-of-completion survey,
ever landed anybody by boat.
"This is ridiculous!" said Bordman, fuming.
"Maybe it's adventure," said Aletha. "I'll pack."
She disappeared into her cabin, Bordman hesitated. Then he went into
his own. The colony on Xosa II had been established two years since.
Minimum-comfort conditions had been realized within six months. A
temporary landing-grid for light supply ships was up within a year. It
had permitted stockpiling, and it had been taken down to be rebuilt
as a permanent grid with every possible contingency provided for. The
eight months since the last ship-landing was more than enough for the
rebuilding of the gigantic, spidery, half-mile-high structure which
would handle this planet's interstellar commerce. There was no excuse
for an emergency. A boat landing was nonsensical!
He surveyed the contents of his cabin. Most of the cargo of the
_Warlock_ was smelter equipment which was to complete the
outfitting of the colony. It was to be unloaded first. By the time the
ship's holds were wholly empty, the smelter would be operating. The
ship would wait for a full cargo of pig-metal. Bordman had expected to
live in this cabin while he worked on the survey he'd come to make and
to leave again with the ship.
Now he was to go aground by boat. He fretted. The only emergency
equipment he could possibly need was a heat-suit. He doubted the
urgency of that. But he packed some clothing for indoors, and then
defiantly included his spec-book and the volumes of definitive data to
which specifications for structures and colonial establishments always
referred. He'd get to work on his report immediately he landed.
He went out of the passenger's lounge to the boat-blister. An
engineer's legs projected from the boat port. The engineer withdrew,
with a strip of tape from the boat's computer. He compared it with a
similar strip from the ship's figure-box. Bordman consciously acted
according to the best traditions of passengers.
"What's the trouble?" he asked.
"We can't land," said the engineer shortly.
He went away--according to the tradition by which ships' crews are
always scornful of passengers.
Bordman scowled. Then Aletha came, carrying a not-too-heavy bag.
Bordman put it in the boat, disapproving of the crampedness of the
craft. But this wasn't a lifeboat. It was a landing-boat. A lifeboat
had Lawlor drive and could travel light-years, but in the place of
rockets and rocket-fuel it had air purifiers and water recovery units
and food stores. It couldn't land without a landing-grid aground,
but it could get to a civilized planet. This landing-boat could land
without a grid, but its air wouldn't last long.
"Whatever's the matter," said Bordman darkly, "it's incompetence
somewhere!"
But he couldn't figure it out. This was a cargo-ship. Cargo-ships
neither took off nor landed under their own power. It was too costly of
fuel they would have to carry. So landing-grids used local power--which
did not have to be lifted--to heave ships out into space, and again
used local power to draw them to ground again. Therefore ships carried
fuel only for actual space flight, which was economy. Yet landing-grids
had no moving parts, and while they did have to be monstrous structures
they actually drew power from planetary ionospheres. So with no
moving parts to break down and no possibility of the failure of a
power-source, landing-grids couldn't fail! So there couldn't be an
emergency to make a ship ride orbit around a planet which had a
landing-grid.
The engineer came back. He carried a mail sack full of letter-reels.
He waved his hand. Aletha crawled into the landing-boat port. Bordman
followed. Four people, with considerable crowding, could have gotten
into the little ship. Three pretty well filled it. The engineer
followed them and sealed the port.
"Sealed off," he said into the microphone before him.
The exterior-pressure needle moved half-way across the dial. The
interior-pressure needle stayed steady.
"All tight," said the engineer.
The exterior-pressure needle flicked to zero. There were clanking
sounds. The long halves of the boat-blister stirred and opened, and
abruptly the landing-boat was in an elongated cup in the hull plating,
and above them there were many, many stars. The enormous disk of a
nearby planet floated into view around the hull. It was monstrous and
blindingly bright. It was of a tawny color, with great, irregular areas
of yellow and patches of bluishness. But most of it was the color of
sand. And all its colors varied in shade--some places lighter and some
darker--and over at one edge there was blinding whiteness which could
not be anything but an ice-cap. Bordman knew that there was no ocean or
sea or lake on all this whole planet, and the ice-cap was more nearly
hoar-frost than such mile-deep glaciation as would be found at the
poles of a maximum-comfort world.
"Strap in," said the engineer over his shoulder. "No-gravity coming,
and then rocket-push. Settle your heads."
Bordman irritably strapped himself in. He saw Aletha busy at the same
task, her eyes shining. Without warning, there came a sensation of
acute discomfort. It was the landing-boat detaching itself from the
ship and the diminishment of the ship's closely-confined artificial
gravity field. That field suddenly dropped to nothingness, and
Bordman had the momentary sickish dizziness that flicked-off gravity
always produces. At the same time his heart pounded unbearably in the
instinctive, racial-memory reaction to the feel of falling.
Then roarings. He was thrust savagely back against his seat. His tongue
tried to slide back into his throat. There was an enormous oppression
on his chest and he found himself thinking panicky profanity.
Simultaneously the vision-ports went black, because they were out of
the shadow of the ship. The landing-boat turned--but there was no
sensation of centrifugal force--and they were in a vast obscurity with
merely a dim phantom of the planetary surface to be seen. Behind them a
blue-white sun shone terribly. Its light was warm--hot--even though it
came through the polarized, shielding ports.
"Did you say," panted Aletha happily--breathless because of the
acceleration--"that there weren't any adventures?"
Bordman did not answer. But he did not count discomfort as an adventure.
The engineer did not look out the ports at all. He watched the screen
before him. There was a vertical line across the side of the lighted
ship. A blip moved downward across it, showing their height in
thousands of miles. After a long time the blip reached the bottom, and
the vertical line became double and another blip began to descend. It
measured height in hundreds of miles. A bright spot--a square--appeared
at one side of the screen. A voice muttered metallically, and suddenly
seemed to shout, and then muttered again. Bordman looked out one of the
black ports and saw the planet as if through smoked glass. It was a
ghostly reddish thing which filled half the cosmos. It had mottlings,
and its edge was curved. That would be the horizon.
The engineer moved controls and the white square moved. It went across
the screen. He moved more controls. It came back to the center. The
height-in-hundreds blip was at the bottom, now, and the vertical line
tripled and a tens-of-miles-height blip crawled downward.
There were sudden, monstrous plungings of the landing-boat. It had hit
the outermost fringes of atmosphere. The engineer said words it was
not appropriate for Aletha to hear. The plungings became more violent.
Bordman held on, to keep from being shaken to pieces despite the
straps, and stared at the murky surface of the planet. It seemed to be
fleeing from them and they to be trying to overtake it. Gradually, very
gradually, its flight appeared to slow. They were down to twenty miles,
then.
Quite abruptly the landing-boat steadied. The square spot bobbled about
in the center of the astrogation-screen. The engineer worked controls
to steady it.
The ports cleared a little. Bordman could see the ground below more
distinctly. There were patches of every tint that mineral coloring
could produce, and vast stretches of tawny sand. A little while more,
and he could see the shadows of mountains. He made out mountain-flanks
which should have had valleys between them and other mountain-flanks
beyond, but they were joined by tawny flatnesses instead. These, he
knew, would be the sand-plateaus which had been observed on this planet
and which had only a still-disputed explanation. But he could see areas
of glistening yellow and dirty white, and splashes of pink and streaks
of ultramarine and gray and violet, and the incredible red of iron
oxide covering square miles--too much to be believed.
The landing-boat's rockets cut off. It coasted. Presently the horizon
tilted and all the dazzling ground below turned sedately beneath
them. Then came staccato instructions from a voice-speaker, which the
engineer obeyed. The landing-boat swung low--below the tips of giant
mauve mountains with a sand-plateau beyond them--and its nose went up.
It stalled.
Then the rockets roared again--and now, with air about them, they were
horribly loud--and the boat settled down and down upon its own tail of
fire.
A blinding mass of dust and rocket-fumes cut off all sight of
everything else. Then a crunching crash, and the engineer swore
peevishly to himself. He cut the rockets again. Finally.