II

The sun was halfway toward mid-sky, and still attended by its sun-dogs,

though they were fainter than at the horizon. The sky was darker. The

mountain peaks reached skyward, serene and utterly aloof from the

affairs of men. This was a frozen world, where there should be no

inhabitants. 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. At the upper end of the valley 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. They were, of course, men using

sonic ice-breakers to shatter the frost which formed on the framework

at night. Falling shards of crystal made a liquidlike flashing. The

landing-grid needed to be cleared every ten days or so. Left uncleared,

it would acquire an increasingly thick coating of ice. 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 spaceships 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.

Massy reached the base of the grid on foot. It was not far from the

village of drone-hulls. 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 painfully out of his muffling

garments.

"Everything all right?" he asked.

The standby operator shrugged. Massy 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 Massy. _If I approve it doesn't mean

anything, and if I protest, it's bad._ He had always been lonely, but

it was a part of the job.

"I think," he said painstakingly, "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. Massy swallowed. It was not a Survey

officer's privilege to maintain discipline. But 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 demand-needle dropped abruptly, and 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.

Massy had to walk around the standby man to get at the voltmeter. It

was built around standard, old-fashioned vacuum tubes--standard for

generations, now. Massy patiently hooked it up and warmed the tubes

and tested it. He pushed in the contact-plugs. He read the no-drain

voltage. He 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 with the

process by which Massy 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' 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 Massy. "I just got some information here."

He got into his cold-garments again. He followed her out of the

control-hut.

"The figures from home aren't good," said Riki evenly, 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 Massy, inadequately.

"It's absurd!" said Riki fiercely. "It's monstrous! There've been

sunspots and sunspot cycles all along! I learned about them in school!

I learned myself 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--But

what's the use of scientists if they don't do their work right and

twenty million people die because of it?"

Massy 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. There was white frost on the front of her

cold-garments.

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.

Then they'll plant food-crops in the streets and gardens, and do what

hydroponic growing they can. They are afraid they can't do it fast

enough to save everybody, but they'll try!"

Massy clenched his hands inside their bulky mittens.

"Well?" demanded Riki. "Won't that do the trick?"