Chapter II: Part 2

"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.

Because these were to go out to airlessness. The miniature grid could 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.

Bordman found himself staring straight up, still strapped in his chair. The boat had settled on its own tail-fins, and his feet were higher than his head. He felt ridiculous. He saw the engineer at work unstrapping himself, and duplicated the action, but it was absurdly difficult to get out of the chair.

Aletha managed more gracefully. She didn't need help.

"Wait," said the engineer ungraciously, "till somebody comes."

So they waited, using what had been chair-backs for seats.

The engineer moved a control and the windows cleared further. They saw the surface of Xosa II. There was no living thing in sight. The ground itself was pebbles and small rocks and minor boulders--all apparently tumbled from the starkly magnificent mountains to one side. There were monstrous, many-colored cliffs and mesas, every one eaten at in the unmistakable fashion of wind erosion. Through a notch in the mountain wall before them a strange, fan-shaped, frozen formation appeared. If such a thing had been credible, Bordman would have said that it was a flow of sand simulating a waterfall. And everywhere was a blinding brightness and the look and feel of blistering sunshine. But there was not one single leaf or twig or blade of grass. This was pure desert. This was Xosa II.

Aletha regarded it with bright eyes.

"Beautiful!" she said happily. "Isn't it?"

"Personally," said Bordman, "I never saw a place that looked less homelike or attractive."

Aletha laughed.

"My eyes see it differently."

Which was true. It was accepted, nowadays, that humankind might be one species but was many races, and each saw the cosmos in its own fashion. On Kalmet III there was a dense, predominantly Asiatic population which terraced its mountain-sides for agriculture and deftly mingled modern techniques with social customs not to be found on--say--Demeter I, where there were many red-tiled stucco towns and very many olive groves. In the llano planets of the Equis cluster, Amerinds--Aletha's kin--rode over plains dotted with the descendants of buffalo and antelope and cattle brought from ancient Earth. On the oases of Rustam IV there were date palms and riding camels and much argument about what should be substituted for the direction of Mecca at the times for prayer, while wheat-fields spanned provinces on Canna I and highly civilized emigrants from the continent of Africa on Earth stored jungle-gums and lustrous gems in the warehouses of their space-port city of Timbuk.

So it was natural for Aletha to look at this wind-carved wilderness otherwise than as Bordman did. Her racial kin were the pioneers of the stars, these days. Their heritage made them less than appreciative of urban life. Their inborn indifference to heights made them the steel construction men of the cosmos, and more than two thirds of the landing-beam grids in the whole galaxy had their coup-feather symbols on the key posts. But the planet government on Algonka V was housed in a three-thousand-foot stone tepee, and the best horses known to men were raised by ranchers with bronze skins and high cheek-bones on the llano planet Chagan.

Now, here, in the _Warlock's_ landing-boat, the engineer snorted. A vehicle came around a cliff wall, clanking its way on those eccentric caterwheels that new-founded colonies find so useful. The vehicle glittered. It crawled over tumbled boulders, and flowed over fallen scree. It came briskly toward them.

"That's my cousin Ralph!" said Aletha in pleased surprise.

Bordman blinked and looked again. He did not quite believe his eyes. But they told the truth. The figure controlling the ground car was Indian--Amerind--wearing a breechclout and thick-soled sandals and three streamlined feathers in a band about his head. Moreover, he did not ride in a seat. He sat astride a semi-cylindrical part of the ground car, over which a gaily colored blanket had been thrown.

The ship's engineer rumbled disgustedly. But then Bordman saw how sane this method of riding was--here. The ground vehicle lurched and swayed and rolled and pitched and tossed as it came over the uneven ground. To sit in anything like a chair would have been foolish. A back rest would throw one forward in a frontward lurch, and give no support in case of a backward one. A sidewise tilt would tend to throw one out. Riding a ground car as if in a saddle was sense!

But Bordman was not so sure about the costume. The engineer opened the port and spoke hostilely out of it:

"D'you know there's a lady in this thing?"

The young Indian grinned. He waved his hand to Aletha, who pressed her nose against a viewport. And just then Bordman did understand the costume or lack of it. Air came in the open exit-port. It was hot and dessicated. It was furnace-like!

"How, 'Letha," called the rider on the caterwheel steed. "Either dress for the climate or put on a heat-suit before you come out of there!"

Aletha chuckled. Bordman heard a stirring behind him. Then Aletha climbed to the exit-port and swung out. Bordman heard a dour muttering from the engineer. Then he saw her greeting her cousin. She had slipped out of the conventionalized Amerind outfit to which Bordman was accustomed. Now she was clad as Anglo-Saxon girls dressed for beaches on the cool-temperature planets.

For a moment Bordman thought of sunstroke, with his own eyes dazzled by the still partly-filtered sunlight. But Aletha's Amerind coloring was perfectly suited to sunshine even of this intensity. Wind blowing upon her body would cool her skin. Her thick, straight black hair was at least as good protection against sunstroke as a heat-helmet. She might feel hot, but she would be perfectly safe. She wouldn't even sunburn. But he, Bordman....

He grimly stripped to underwear and put on the heat-suit from his bag. He filled its canteens from the boat's water tank. He turned on the tiny, battery-powered motors. The suit ballooned out. It was intended for short periods of intolerable heat. The motors kept it inflated--away from his skin--and cooled its interior by the evaporation of sweat plus water from its canteen tanks. It was a miniature air-conditioning system for one man, and it should enable him to endure temperatures otherwise lethal to someone with his skin and coloring. But it would use a lot of water.

He climbed to the exit-port and went clumsily down the exterior ladder to the tail fin. He adjusted his goggles. He went over to the chattering young Indians, young man and girl, and held out his gloved hand.

"I'm Bordman," he said. "Here to make a degree-of-completion survey. What's wrong that we had to land by boat?"

Aletha's cousin shook hands cordially.

"I'm Ralph Redfeather," he said. "Project engineer. About everything's wrong. Our landing-grid's gone. We couldn't contact your ship in time to warn it off. It was in our gravity-field before it answered, and its Lawlor drive couldn't take it away--not working because of the gravity stresses. Our power, of course, went with the landing-grid. The ship you came in can't get back, and we can't send a distress message anywhere, and our best estimate is that the colony will be wiped out--thirst and starvation--in six months. I'm sorry you and Aletha have to be included."

Then he turned to Aletha and said amiably:

"How's Mike Thundercloud and Sally Whitehorse and the gang in general, 'Letha?"