material, and he'll use a solar mirror to get the heat he needs. Plenty
of temperature to make silicones! How much area will we need to pull in
four thousand gallons of water a night?"
"How do I know?" demanded Bordman. "What's the moisture-content of
the air here, anyhow?" Then he said, "Tell me! Are you using heat
exchangers to help cool the air you pump into the buildings, before you
use power to refrigerate it? It would save some power--"
The Indian project engineer said:
"Let's get to work on this! I'm a steel man myself, but--"
They settled down. Aletha turned a page.
* * * * *
The _Warlock_ spun around the planet. The members of its crew
withdrew into themselves. In even two months of routine tedious
voyaging to this planet there had been the beginnings of irritation
with the mannerisms of other men. Now there would be years of it.
Within two days of its establishment in orbit, the _Warlock_ was
manned by men already morbidly resentful of fate, with the psychology
of prisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but
ghastly period. On the third day there was a second fist-fight. A
bitter one.
Fist-fights are not healthy symptoms in a space-ship which cannot hope
to make port for a matter of years.
* * * * *
Most human problems are circular and fall apart when a single trivial
part of them is solved. There used to be enmity between races because
they were different, and they tended to be different because they
were enemies, so there was enmity.... The big problem of interstellar
flight was that nothing could travel faster than light, and nothing
could travel faster than light because mass increased with speed, and
mass increased with speed--obviously!--because ships remained in the
same time slot, and ships remained in the same time slot long after a
one-second shift was possible because nobody realized that it meant
traveling faster than light. And even before there was interstellar
travel, there was practically no interplanetary commerce because it
took so much fuel to take off and land. It took more fuel to carry
the fuel to take off and land, and more still to carry the fuel for
that, until somebody used power on the ground for heave-off instead of
take-off, and again on the ground for landing. And then interplanetary
ships carried cargos. On Xosa II there was an emergency because a
sandstorm had buried the almost-completed landing-grid under some
megatons of sand, and it couldn't be completed because there was only
storage power because it wasn't completed, because there was only
storage power because--
It took three weeks for the problem to be seen as the ultimately simple
thing it really was. Bordman had called it a circular problem, but he
hadn't seen its true circularity. It was actually--like all circular
problems--inherently an unstable set of conditions. It began to fall
apart simply because he saw that mere refrigeration would break its
solidity.
In one week there were ten acres of desert covered with silicone-wool
felt in great strips. By day a reflective surface was uppermost, and
at sundown caterwheel trucks hooked on to towlines and neatly pulled
it over on its back, to expose gridded black-body surfaces to the
starlight. The gridding was precisely designed so that winds blowing
across it did not make eddies in the grid squares. The chilled air in
those pockets remained undisturbed, and there was no conduction of
heat downward by eddy-currents, while there was admirable radiation of
heat out to space. This was in the manner of the night sides of all
planets, only somewhat more efficient.
In two weeks there was a water yield of three thousand gallons per
night, and in three weeks more there were similar grids over the colony
houses and a vast roofed cooling shed for pre-chilling air to be
used by the refrigeration systems themselves. The fuel-store--stored
power--was thereupon stretched to three times its former calculated
usefulness. The situation was no longer a simple and neat equation of
despair.
Then something else happened. One of Dr. Chuka's assistants was curious
about a certain mineral. He used the solar furnace that had made the
silicone wool to smelt it. And Dr. Chuka saw him. After one blank
moment he bellowed laughter and went to see Ralph Redfeather. Whereupon
Amerind steel-workers sawed apart a robot hull that was no longer a
fuel tank because its fuel was gone, and they built a demountable
solar mirror some sixty feet across--which African mechanics deftly
powered--and suddenly there was a spot of incandescence even brighter
than the sun of Xosa II, down on the planet's surface. It played upon
a mineral cliff, and monstrous smells developed and even the African
mining-technicians put on goggles because of the brightness. Presently
there were little rolls of molten metal and slag trickling--and
separating as they trickled--hesitantly down the cliffside. Dr. Chuka
beamed and slapped his sweating thighs, and Bordman went out in a
caterwheel truck, wearing a heat-suit, to watch it for all of twenty
minutes. When he got back to the Project Engineer's office he gulped
iced salt water and dug out the books he'd brought down from the
ship. There was the spec-book for Xosa II, and the other volumes of
definitions issued by the Colonial Survey. They were definitions of the
exact meanings of terms used in briefer specifications, for items of
equipment sometimes ordered by the Colony Office.
When Chuka came into the office presently, he carried the first crude
pig of Xosa II iron in his gloved hand. He gloated. Bordman was then
absent, and Ralph Redfeather worked feverishly at his desk.
"Where's Bordman?" demanded Chuka in that resonant bass voice of his.
"I'm ready to report for degree-of-completion credit that the mining
properties on Xosa II are prepared as of today to deliver pig iron,
cobalt, zirconium and beryllium in commercial quantities. We require
one day's notice to begin delivery of metal other than iron at the
moment, because we're short of equipment, but we can furnish chromium
and manganese on two days' notice--the deposits are farther away."
He dumped the pig of metal on the second desk, where Aletha sat with
her perpetual loose-leaf volumes before her. The metal smoked and began
to char the desk-top. He picked it up again and tossed it from one
gloved hand to the other.
"There y'are, Ralph!" he boasted. "You Indians go after your coups!
Match this coup for me! Without fuel and minus all equipment except of
our own making--I credit an assist on the mirror, but that's all--we're
set to load the first ship that comes in for cargo! Now what are you
going to do for the record? I think we've wiped your eye for you!"
Ralph hardly looked up. His eyes were very bright. Bordman had
shown him and he was copying figures and formulae from a section of
the definition book of the Colonial Survey. The book started with
the specifications for antibiotic growth equipment for colonies
with problems in local bacteria. It ended with definitions of the
required strength of material and the designs stipulated for cages
in zoos for motile fauna, sub-divided into flying, marine, and solid
ground creatures: sub-sub-divided into carnivores, herbivores, and
omnivores, with the special specifications for enclosures to contain
abyssal creatures requiring extreme pressures, and the equipment for
maintaining a healthfully re-poisoned atmosphere for creatures from
methane planets.
Redfeather had the third volume open at, "_Landing-Grids, Lightest
Emergency, Commerce Refuges, For Use Of._" There were some dozens
of non-colonized planets along the most traveled spaceways on which
refuges for shipwrecked spacemen were maintained. Small forces of
Patrol personnel manned them. Space lifeboats serviced them. They
had the minimum installations which could draw on their planets'
ionospheres for power, and they were not expected to handle anything
bigger than a twenty ton lifeboat. But the specifications for the
equipment of such refuges was included in the reference volumes for
Bordman's use in making colonial surveys. They were compiled for
the information of contractors who wanted to bid on Colonial Survey
installations, and for the guidance of people like Bordman who checked
up on the work. So they contained all the data for the building of a
landing-grid, lightest emergency, commerce refuge type, for use of, in
case of need. Redfeather copied feverishly.
Chuka ceased his boasting, but still he grinned.
"I know we're stuck, Ralph," he said, "but it's nice stuff to go in the
records. Too bad we don't keep coup-records like you Indians."
Aletha's cousin--Project Engineer--said crisply:
"Go away! Who made your solar mirror? It was more than an assist! You
get set to cast beams for us. Girders! I'm going to get a lifeboat
aloft and away to Trent. Build a minimum size landing-grid! Build a
fire under somebody so they'll send us a colony-ship with supplies. If
there's no new sandstorm to bury the radiation refrigerators Bordman
brought to mind, we can keep alive with hydroponics until a ship can
arrive with something useful!"
Chuka stared.
"You don't mean we might actually live through this! Really?"
Aletha regarded the two of them with impartial irony.
"Dr. Chuka," she said, "you accomplished the impossible. Ralph, here,
is planning to attempt the preposterous. Does it occur to you that
Mr. Bordman is nagging himself to achieve the inconceivable?--It is
inconceivable, even to him, but he's trying to do it."
"What's he trying to do?" demanded Chuka, wary but amused.
"He's trying," said Aletha, "to prove to himself that he's the best man
on this planet. Because he's physically least capable of living here.
His vanity's hurt. Don't underestimate him!"
"He the best man here?" demanded Chuka blankly. "In his way he's all
right. The refrigeration proves that. But he can't walk out-of-doors
without a heat-suit!"
Ralph Redfeather, without ceasing his work, said:
"Nonsense, Aletha. He has courage. I give him that. But he couldn't
walk a beam twelve hundred feet up. In his own way, yes. He's capable.
But the best man--"
"I'm sure," agreed Aletha, "that he couldn't sing as well as the
worst of your singing crew, Dr. Chuka, and any Amerind could outrun
him. Even I could. But he's got something we haven't got, just as we
have qualities he hasn't. We're secure in our competences. We knew
what we can do, and that we can do it better than any--" her eyes
twinkled--"than any pale-face. But he doubts himself. All the time and
in every way. And that's why he may be the best man on this planet.
I'll bet he does prove it!"
Redfeather said scornfully:
"_You_ suggested radiation refrigeration! What does it prove that
he applied it?"
"That," said Aletha, "he couldn't face the disaster that was here
without trying to do something about it--even when it was impossible.
He couldn't face the deadly facts. He had to torment himself by seeing
that they wouldn't be deadly if only this or that or the other were
twisted a little. His vanity was hurt because nature had beaten men.
His dignity was offended. And a man with easily-hurt dignity won't ever
be happy, but he can be pretty good."
Chuka raised his ebony bulk from the chair in which he still shifted
the iron pig from gloved hand to gloved hand.
"You're kind," he said, chuckling. "Too kind! I don't want to hurt his
feelings. I wouldn't, for the world! But really--I've never heard a man
praised for his vanity before, or admired for being touchy about his
dignity! If you're right--why--it's been convenient. It might even mean
hope. But--hm ... would you want to marry a man like that?"
"Great Manitou forbid!" said Aletha firmly. She grimaced at the bare
idea. "I'm an Amerind. I'll want my husband to be contented. I want
to be contented along with him. Mr. Bordman will never be either
happy or content. No pale-face husband for me! But I don't think he's
through here yet. Sending for help won't satisfy him. It's a further
hurt to his vanity. He'll be miserable if he doesn't prove himself--to
himself--a better man than that!"
Chuka shrugged his massive shoulders. Redfeather tracked down the last
item he needed and fairly bounced to his feet.
"What tonnage of iron can you get out, Chuka?" he demanded. "What can
you do in the way of castings? What's the elastic modulus--how much
carbon in this iron? And when can you start making castings? Big ones?"
"Let's go talk to my foremen," said Chuka. "We'll see how fast
my--ah--mineral spring is trickling metal down the cliff face. If you
can really launch a lifeboat, we might get some help here in a year and
a half instead of five...."
They went out-of-doors together. There was a small sound in the next
office. Aletha was suddenly very still. She sat motionless for a long
half minute. Then she turned her head.
"I owe you an apology, Mr. Bordman," she said ruefully. "It won't take
back the discourtesy, but--I'm very sorry."
Bordman came into the office from the next room. He was rather pale. He
said wrily:
"Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves, eh?--Actually I was on
the way in here when I heard--references to myself. It would embarrass
Chuka and your cousin to know I heard. So I stopped. Not to listen, but
to keep them from knowing I'd heard their private opinions of me. I'll
be obliged if you don't tell them. They're entitled to their opinions
of me. I've mine of them." He added, "Apparently I think more highly of
them than they do of me!"
"It must have sounded horrible!" Aletha said. "But they--we--all of us
think better of you than you do of yourself!"
Bordman shrugged.
"You in particular. Would you marry someone like me? Great Manitou, no!"
"For an excellent reason," said Aletha. "When I get back from
here--_if_ I get back from here--I'm going to marry Bob Running
Antelope. He's nice. I like the idea of marrying him. But I look
forward not only to happiness but to contentment. To me that's
important. It isn't to you, or to the woman you ought to marry. And
I--well--I simply don't envy either of you a bit."
"I see!" said Bordman with irony. He didn't. "I wish you all the
contentment you look for." Then he snapped: "But what's this business
about expecting more from me? What spectacular idea do you expect me to
pull out of somebody's hat now?--Because I'm frantically vain?"
"I haven't the least idea," said Aletha. "But I think you'll come up
with something we couldn't possibly imagine. And I didn't say it was
because you were vain, but because you are discontented with yourself.
It's born in you. And there you are!"
"If you mean neurotic," snapped Bordman, "you're all wrong. I'm not
neurotic. I'm hot, and I'm annoyed. I'll get hopelessly behind schedule
because of this mess. But that's all!"
Aletha stood up and shrugged her shoulders ruefully.
"I repeat my apology," she told him, "and leave you the office. But
I also repeat that I think you'll turn up something nobody else
expects--and I've no idea what it will be. But you'll do it now to
prove that I'm wrong about how your mind works."
She went out. Bordman clamped his jaws tightly. He felt that especially
haunting discomfort which comes of suspecting that one has been told
something about oneself which may be true.
"Idiotic!" he fumed, all alone. "Me neurotic? Me wanting to prove I'm
the best man here out of vanity?" He made a scornful noise. He sat
impatiently at the desk. "Absurd!" he muttered. "Why should I need to
prove to myself I'm capable? What would I do if I felt such a need,
anyhow?"
Scowling, he stared at the wall. It was a nagging sort of question.
What would he do if she were right? If he did need constantly to prove
to himself--
He stiffened, suddenly. A look of intense surprise came upon his face.
He'd thought of what a self-doubtful, discontented man would try to do,
here on Xosa II at this juncture.
The surprise was because he had also thought of how it could be done.
* * * * *
The _Warlock_ came to life. Her skipper gloomily answered
the emergency call from Xosa II. In a minute he clicked off the
communicator and hastened to an exterior port, deeply darkened against
those times when the blue-white sun Xosa shone upon this side of the
hull. He moved the manual control to make it more transparent, and
stared down at the monstrous, tawny, mottled surface of the planet five
thousand miles away. He searched for the spot he knew was the colony's
site.
He saw what he'd been told he'd see. It was an infinitely fine,
threadlike projection from the surface of the planet. It rose at a
slight angle--it leaned toward the planet's west--and it expanded and
widened and formed an extraordinary sort of mushroom-shaped object
that was completely impossible. It could not be. Humans do not create
visible objects twenty miles high, which at their tops expand like
toadstools on excessively slender stalks, and which drift westward,
fray, and grow thin, and are constantly renewed.
But it was true. The skipper of the _Warlock_ gazed until he was
completely sure. It was no atomic bomb, because it continued to exist.
It faded, but was constantly replenished. There was no such thing!
He went through the ship, bellowing, and faced mutinous snarlings. But
when the _Warlock_ was around on that side of the planet again,
the members of the crew saw the strange appearance, too. They examined
it with telescopes. They grew hysterical. They went frantically to work
to clear away the signs of a month and a half of mutiny and despair.
It took them three days to get the ship to tidiness again, and during
all that time the peculiar tawny jet remained. On the sixth day the jet
was fainter. On the seventh it was larger than before. It continued
larger. And telescopes at highest magnification verified what the
emergency communication had said.
Then the crew began to experience frantic impatience. It was worse,
waiting those last three or four days, than even all the hopeless time
before. But there was no reason to hate anybody now. The skipper was
very much relieved.
* * * * *
Eighteen hundred feet of steel grid soared overhead. It made a
criss-cross, ring-shaped wall more than a quarter mile high and almost
to the top of the surrounding mountains. But the valley was not
exactly a normal one. It was a crater, now: a steeply sloping, conical
pit whose walls descended smoothly to the outer girders of the red
painted, glistening steel structure. More girders for the completion
of the grid projected from the sand just outside its circle. And in
the landing-grid there was now a smaller, elaborate, truss-braced
object. It rested on the rocky ground, unpainted and quite small. A
hundred feet high, perhaps, and no more than three hundred across. But
it was visibly a miniature of the great, newly-uncovered, repainted
landing-grid which was qualified to handle interstellar cargo-ships and
all the proper space-traffic of a minerals colony-planet.
A caterwheel truck came lurching and rolling and rumbling down the side
of the pit. It had a sunshade and ground reflector wings, and Bordman
slouched on a hobby-horse saddle in its back cargo section. He wore a
heat-suit.
The truck reached the pit's bottom and bumped up to a tool-shed and
stopped. Bordman got out, visibly cramped by the jolting, rocking,
exhausting ride.
"Do you want to go in the shed and cool off?" asked Chuka.
"I'm all right," said Bordman. "I'm quite comfortable, so long as you
feed me that expanded air." It was plain that he resented needing
even a special air-supply. "What's all this about? Bringing the
_Warlock_ in? Why the insistence on my being here?"
"Ralph has a problem," said Chuka blandly. "He's up there--See? He
needs you. There's a hoist. You've got to check degree-of-completion
anyhow. You might take a look around while you're up there. But he's
anxious for you to see something. There where you see the little knot
of people. The platform."
Bordman grimaced. When one was well started on a survey, one got used
to heights and depths and all sorts of environments. But he hadn't been
up on steel work in a good many months. Not since a survey on Kalka IV
nearly a year ago. He would be dizzy at first.
He accompanied Chuka to the spot where a steel cable dangled from an
almost invisibly thin beam high above. There was a strictly improvised
cage to ascend in--planks and a hand rail forming an insecure platform
that might hold four people. He got into it, and Dr. Chuka got in
beside him. Chuka waved his hand. The cage started up.
Bordman winced as the ground dropped away below. It was ghastly to be
dangling in emptiness like this. He wanted to close his eyes. The cage
went up and up. It took many long minutes to reach the top.
There was a newly-made platform there. The sunlight was blindingly
bright, the landscape an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his
goggles to maximum darkness and stepped gingerly from the swaying
cage to the hardly more solid-seeming area. Here he was in mid-air
on a platform barely ten feet square. It was rather more than
twice the height of a metropolitan skyscraper from the ground. The
mountain-crests were only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman
was acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but--
"Well?" he asked. "Chuka said you needed me here. What's the matter?"
Ralph Redfeather nodded formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of
Chuka's foremen--one did not look happy--and four of the Amerind
steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman.
"I wanted you to see," said Aletha's cousin, "before we threw on the
current. It doesn't look like that little grid could handle the sand it
took care of. But Lewanika wants to report."
A dark man who worked under Chuka--and looked as if he belonged on
solid ground--said:
"We cast the beams for the small landing-grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted
the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into moulds as it flowed down."
He stopped. One of the Indians said:
"We made the girders into the small landing-grid. It bothered us
because we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn't
understand why you ordered it there. But we built it."
The second dark man said with a trace of swagger:
"We made the coils, Mr. Bordman. We made the small grid so it would
work the same as the big one when it was finished. And then we made the
big grid work, finished or not!"
Bordman said impatiently:
"All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?"
"Just so," said Aletha, smiling. "Be patient, Mr. Bordman!"
Her cousin said:
"We built the small grid on the top of the sand. And it tapped the
ionosphere for power. No lack of power then! And we'd set it to heave
up sand instead of ships. Not to heave it out into space, but to give
it up to a mile a second vertical velocity. Then we turned it on."
"And we rode it down, that little grid," said one of the remaining
Indians, grinning. "What a party! Manitou!"
Redfeather frowned at him and took up the narrative.
"It hurled the sand up from its center, as you said it would. The sand
swept air with it. It made a whirlwind, bringing more sand from outside
the grid into its field. It was a whirlwind with fifteen megakilowatts
of power to drive it. Some of the sand went twenty miles high. Then it
made a mushroom head and the winds up yonder blew it to the west. It
came down a long way off, Mr. Bordman. We've made a new dune area ten
miles down-wind. And the little grid sank as the sand went away from
around it. We had to stop it three times, because it leaned. We had to
dig under parts of it to get it straight up again. But it went down
into the valley."
Bordman turned up the power to his heat-suit motors. He felt
uncomfortably warm.