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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sand Doom, by William Fitzgerald Jenkins
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sand Doom
+
+Author: William Fitzgerald Jenkins
+
+Release Date: August 31, 2007 [EBook #22467]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAND DOOM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover Page]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+SAND DOOM
+
+BY MURRAY LEINSTER
+
+Illustrated by Freas
+
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | _The problem was as neat a circle as one could ask for;      |
+    | without repair parts, they couldn't bring in the ship that   |
+    | carried the repair parts!_                                   |
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+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 he was well-traveled enough to know when things did not go
+right. He looked up from the bookscreen, waiting. Nobody came to explain
+the eccentricity of a spaceship using rockets. It 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 ahead, 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, an unusually 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 bookreels and some elaborate
+fancywork 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 groundfall within a
+matter of hours, certainly. He'd just gone through his specbook
+carefully and re-familiarized himself with the work he was to survey on
+Xosa II. It was a perfectly commonplace 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 infernolike wind
+sculptures--why 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 humorously, "the loudspeaker
+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 impossibly 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 its final
+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 ago. 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 stock-piling, 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 building
+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!
+
+But 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 specbook 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 dourly with a similar
+strip from the ship's figurebox. 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 a little 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 halfway 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 were lighter and
+some darker--and over at one edge there was blinding whiteness which
+could not be anything but an ice cap. But Bordman knew that there was no
+ocean or sea or lake on all this whole planet, and the ice cap was more
+nearly hoarfrost 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. 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. But behind them a
+blue-white sun shone terribly. Its light was warm--hot--even though it
+came through the polarized shielding ports.
+
+"Did ... 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
+disk. 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.
+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 bobbed 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. There were 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 had tawny flatnesses between, 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.
+There 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 and after a
+momentary pause, they were horribly loud--and the boat settled down and
+down upon its own tail of fire.
+
+There was a completely blinding mass of dust and rocket fumes which cut
+off all sight of everything else. Then there was 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, and he felt ridiculous. He saw the engineer at work
+unstrapping himself. He 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 there was 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 mountainsides 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--zestfully 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 spaceport city of
+Timbuk.
+
+So it was natural for Aletha to look at this wind-carved wilderness
+otherwise than as Bordman did. Her racial kindred 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 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 white stone tepee, and the best horses known to men
+were raised by ranchers with bronze skins and high cheekbones 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. The engineer snorted again.
+
+"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 breechcloth 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+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
+desiccated. 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. He held out his gloved hand.
+
+"I'm Bordman," he said painfully. "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, introducing himself. "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 field. 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?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Warlock_ rolled on in her newly-established orbit about Xosa II.
+The landing boat was aground, having removed the two passengers. It
+would come back. Nobody on the ship wanted to stay aground, because they
+knew the conditions and the situation below--unbearable heat and the
+complete absence of hope. But nobody had anything to do! The ship had
+been maintained in standard operating condition during its two-months'
+voyage from Trent to here. No repairs or overhaulings were needed. There
+was no maintenance-work to speak of. There would be only stand-by
+watches until something happened. There would be nothing to do on those
+watches. There would be off-watch time for twenty-one out of every
+twenty-four hours, and no purposeful activity to fill even half an hour
+of it. In a matter of--probably--years, the _Warlock_ should receive
+aid. She might be towed out of her orbit to space in which the Lawlor
+drive could function, or the crew might simply be taken off. But
+meanwhile, those on board were as completely frustrated as the colony.
+They could not do anything at all to help themselves.
+
+In one fashion the crewmen were worse off than the colonists. The
+colonists had at least the colorful prospect of death before them. They
+could prepare for it in their several ways. But the members of the
+_Warlock_'s crew had nothing ahead but tedium.
+
+The skipper faced the future with extreme, grim distaste.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ride to the colony was torment. Aletha rode behind her cousin on the
+saddle-blanket, and apparently suffered little if at all. But Bordman
+could only ride in the ground-car's cargo space, along with the sack of
+mail from the ship. The ground was unbelievably rough and the jolting
+intolerable. The heat was literally murderous. In the metal cargo space,
+the temperature reached a hundred and sixty degrees in the sunshine--and
+given enough time, food will cook in no more heat than that. Of course a
+man has been known to enter an oven and stay there while a roast was
+cooked, and to come out alive. But the oven wasn't throwing him
+violently about or bringing sun-heated--blue-white-sun heated--metal to
+press his heat-suit against him.
+
+The suit did make survival possible, but that was all. The contents of
+its canteens gave out just before arrival, and for a short time Bordman
+had only sweat for his suit to work with. It kept him alive by forced
+ventilation, but he arrived in a state of collapse. He drank the iced
+salt water they gave him and went to bed. He'd get back his strength
+with a proper sodium level in his blood. But he slept for twelve hours
+straight.
+
+When he got up, he was physically normal again, but abysmally ashamed.
+It did no good to remind himself that Xosa II was rated minimum-comfort
+class D--a blue-white sun and a mean temperature of one hundred and ten
+degrees. Africans could take such a climate--with night-relief quarters.
+Amerinds could do steel construction work in the open, protected only by
+insulated shoes and gloves. But Bordman could not venture out-of-doors
+except in a heat-suit. He couldn't stay long then. It was not a
+weakness. It was a matter of genetics. But he was ashamed.
+
+Aletha nodded to him when he found the Project Engineer's office. It
+occupied one of the hulls in which colony-establishment materials had
+been lowered by rocket power. There were forty of the hulls, and they
+had been emptied and arranged for inter-communication in three separate
+communities, so that an individual could change his quarters and
+ordinary associates from time to time and colony fever--frantic
+irritation with one's companions--was minimized.
+
+Aletha sat at a desk, busily making notes from a loose leaf volume
+before her. The wall behind the desk was fairly lined with similar
+volumes.
+
+"I made a spectacle of myself!" said Bordman, bitterly.
+
+"Not at all!" Aletha assured him. "It could happen to anybody. I
+wouldn't do too well on Timbuk."
+
+There was no answer to that. Timbuk was essentially a jungle planet,
+barely emerging from the carboniferous stage. Its colonists thrived
+because their ancestors had lived on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea,
+on Earth. But Anglos did not find its climate healthful, nor would many
+other races. Amerinds died there quicker than most.
+
+"Ralph's on the way here now," added Aletha. "He and Dr. Chuka were out
+picking a place to leave the records. The sand dunes here are terrible,
+you know. When an explorer-ship does come to find out what's happened to
+us, these buildings could be covered up completely. Any place could be.
+It isn't easy to pick a record-cache that's quite sure to be found."
+
+"When," said Bordman skeptically, "there's nobody left alive to point it
+out. Is that it?"
+
+"That's it," agreed Aletha. "It's pretty bad all around. I didn't plan
+to die just yet."
+
+Her voice was perfectly normal. Bordman snorted. As a senior Colonial
+Survey officer, he'd been around. But he'd never yet known a human
+colony to be extinguished when it was properly equipped and after a
+proper pre-settlement survey. He'd seen panic, but never real cause for
+a matter-of-fact acceptance of doom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a clanking noise outside the hulk which was the Project
+Engineer's headquarters. Bordman couldn't see clearly through the
+filtered ports. He reached over and opened a door. The brightness
+outside struck his eyes like a blow. He blinked them shut instantly and
+turned away. But he'd seen a glistening, caterwheel ground car stopping
+not far from the doorway.
+
+He stood wiping tears from his light-dazzled eyes as footsteps sounded
+outside. Aletha's cousin came in, followed by a huge man with remarkably
+dark skin. The dark man wore eyeglasses with a curiously thick, corklike
+nosepiece to insulate the necessary metal of the frame from his skin. It
+would blister if it touched bare flesh.
+
+"This is Dr. Chuka," said Redfeather pleasantly, "Mr. Bordman. Dr.
+Chuka's the director of mining and mineralogy here."
+
+Bordman shook hands with the ebony-skinned man. He grinned, showing
+startlingly white teeth. Then he began to shiver.
+
+"It's like a freeze-box in here," he said in a deep voice. "I'll get a
+robe and be with you."
+
+He vanished through a doorway, his teeth chattering audibly. Aletha's
+cousin took half a dozen deliberate deep breaths and grimaced.
+
+"I could shiver myself," he admitted "but Chuka's really acclimated to
+Xosa. He was raised on Timbuk."
+
+Bordman said curtly:
+
+"I'm sorry I collapsed on landing. It won't happen again. I came here to
+do a degree-of-completion survey that should open the colony to normal
+commerce, let the colonists' families move in, tourists, and so on. But
+I was landed by boat instead of normally, and I am told the colony is
+doomed. I would like an official statement of the degree of completion
+of the colony's facilities and an explanation of the unusual points I
+have just mentioned."
+
+The Indian blinked at him. Then he smiled faintly. The dark man came
+back, zipping up an indoor warmth-garment. Redfeather dryly brought him
+up to date by repeating what Bordman had just said. Chuka grinned and
+sprawled comfortably in a chair.
+
+"I'd say," he remarked humorously, in that astonishingly deep-toned
+voice of his, "sand got in our hair. And our colony. And the landing
+grid. There's a lot of sand on Xosa. Wouldn't you say that was the
+trouble?"
+
+The Indian said with elaborate gravity:
+
+"Of course wind had something to do with it."
+
+Bordman fumed.
+
+"I think you know," he said fretfully, "that as a senior Colonial Survey
+officer, I have authority to give any orders needed for my work. I give
+one now. I want to see the landing grid--if it is still standing. I take
+it that it didn't fall down?"
+
+Redfeather flushed beneath the bronze pigment of his skin. It would be
+hard to offend a steelman more than to suggest that his work did not
+stand up.
+
+"I assure you," he said politely, "that it did not fall down."
+
+"Your estimate of its degree of completion?"
+
+"Eighty per cent," said Redfeather formally.
+
+"You've stopped work on it?"
+
+"Work on it has been stopped," agreed the Indian.
+
+"Even though the colony can receive no more supplies until it is
+completed?"
+
+"Just so," said Redfeather without expression.
+
+"Then I issue a formal order that I be taken to the landing-grid site
+immediately," said Bordman angrily. "I want to see what sort of
+incompetence is responsible! Will you arrange it--at once?"
+
+Redfeather said in a completely emotionless voice:
+
+"You want to see the site of the landing grid. Very good. Immediately."
+
+He turned and walked out into the incredible, blinding sunshine. Bordman
+blinked at the momentary blast of light, and then began to pace up and
+down the office. He fumed. He was still ashamed of his collapse from the
+heat during the travel from the landed rocket-boat to the colony.
+Therefore he was touchy and irritable. But the order he had given was
+strictly justifiable.
+
+He heard a small noise. He whirled. Dr. Chuka, huge and black and
+spectacled, rocked back and forth in his seat, suppressing laughter.
+
+"Now, what the devil does that mean?" demanded Bordman suspiciously. "It
+certainly isn't ridiculous to ask to see the structure on which the life
+of the colony finally depends!"
+
+"Not ridiculous," said Dr. Chuka. "It's--hilarious!"
+
+He boomed laughter in the office with the rounded ceiling of a remade
+robot hull. Aletha smiled with him, though her eyes were grave.
+
+"You'd better put on a heat-suit," she said to Bordman.
+
+He fumed again, tempted to defy all common sense because its dictates
+were not the same for everybody. But he marched away, back to the
+cubbyhole in which he had awakened. Angrily, he donned the heat-suit
+that had not protected him adequately before, but had certainly saved
+his life. He filled the canteens topping full--he suspected he hadn't
+done so the last time. He went back to the Project Engineer's office
+with a feeling of being burdened and absurd.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out a filter-window, he saw that men with skins as dark as Dr. Chuka's
+were at work on a ground car. They were equipping it with a sunshade and
+curious shields like wings. Somebody pushed a sort of caterwheel
+handtruck toward it. They put big, heavy tanks into its cargo space. Dr.
+Chuka had disappeared, but Aletha was back at work making notes from the
+loose-leaf volume on the desk.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"May I ask," asked Bordman with some irony, "what your work happens to
+be just now?"
+
+She looked up.
+
+"I thought you knew," she said in surprise. "I'm here for the Amerind
+Historical Society. I can certify coups. I'm taking coup-records for the
+Society. They'll go in the record-cache Ralph and Dr. Chuka are
+arranging, so no matter what happens to the colony, the record of the
+coups won't be lost."
+
+"Coups?" demanded Bordman. He knew that Amerinds painted feathers on the
+key-posts of steel structures they'd built, and he knew that the posting
+of such "coup-marks" was a cherished privilege and undoubtedly a
+survival or revival of some American Indian tradition back on Earth.
+But he did not know what they meant.
+
+"Coups," repeated Aletha matter-of-factly. "Ralph wears three
+eagle-feathers. You saw them. He has three coups. Pinions, too! He built
+the landing grids on Norlath and--Oh, you don't know!"
+
+"I don't," admitted Bordman, his temper not of the best because of what
+seemed unnecessary condescensions on Xosa II.
+
+Aletha looked surprised.
+
+"In the old days," she explained, "back on Earth, if a man scalped an
+enemy, he counted coup. The first to strike an enemy in a battle counted
+coup, too--a lesser one. Nowadays a man counts coups for different
+things, but Ralph's three eagle-feathers mean he's entitled to as much
+respect as a warrior in the old days who, three separate times, had
+killed and scalped an enemy warrior in the middle of his own camp. And
+he is, too!"
+
+Bordman grunted.
+
+"Barbarous, I'd say!"
+
+"If you like," said Aletha. "But it's something to be proud of--and one
+doesn't count coup for making a lot of money!" Then she paused and said
+curtly: "The word 'snobbish' fits it better than 'barbarous.' We are
+snobs! But when the head of a clan stands up in Council in the Big Tepee
+on Algonka, representing his clan, and men have to carry the ends of the
+feather headdress with all the coups the members of his clan have
+earned--why one is proud to belong to that clan!" She added defiantly,
+"Even watching it on a vision-screen!"
+
+Dr. Chuka opened the outer door. Blinding light poured in. He did not
+enter--and his body glistened with sweat.
+
+"Ready for you, Mr. Bordman!"
+
+Bordman adjusted his goggles and turned on the motors of his heat-suit.
+He went out the door.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The heat and light outside were oppressive. He darkened the goggles
+again and made his way heavily to the waiting, now-shaded ground car. He
+noted that there were other changes beside the sunshade. The cover-deck
+of the cargo space was gone, and there were cylindrical riding seats
+like saddles in the back. The odd lower shields reached out sidewise
+from the body, barely above the caterwheels. He could not make out their
+purpose and irritably failed to ask.
+
+"All ready," said Redfeather coldly. "Dr. Chuka's coming with us. If
+you'll get in here, please----"
+
+Bordman climbed awkwardly into the boxlike back of the car. He bestrode
+one of the cylindrical arrangements. With a saddle on it, it would
+undoubtedly have been a comfortable way to cover impossibly bad terrain
+in a mechanical carrier. He waited. About him there were the squatty
+hulls of the space-barges which had been towed here by a colony ship,
+each one once equipped with rockets for landing. Emptied of their
+cargoes, they had been huddled together into the three separate,
+adjoining communities. There were separate living quarters and mess
+halls and recreation rooms for each, and any colonist lived in the
+community of his choice and shifted at pleasure, or visited, or remained
+solitary. For mental health a man has to be assured of his free will,
+and over-regimentation is deadly in any society. With men
+psychologically suited to colonize, it is fatal.
+
+Above--but at a distance, now--there was a monstrous scarp of mountains,
+colored in glaring and unnatural tints. Immediately about there was raw
+rock. But it was peculiarly smooth, as if sand grains had rubbed over it
+for uncountable aeons and carefully worn away every trace of unevenness.
+Half a mile to the left, dunes began and went away to the horizon. The
+nearer ones were small, but they gained in size with distance from the
+mountains--which evidently affected the surface-winds hereabouts--and
+the edge of seeing was visibly not a straight line. The dunes yonder
+must be gigantic. But of course on a world the size of ancient Earth,
+and which was waterless save for snow-patches at its poles, the size to
+which sand dunes could grow had no limit. The surface of Xosa II was a
+sea of sand, on which islands and small continents of wind-swept rock
+were merely minor features.
+
+Dr. Chuka adjusted a small metal object in his hand. It had a tube
+dangling from it. He climbed into the cargo space and fastened it to one
+of the two tanks previously loaded.
+
+"For you," he told Bordman. "Those tanks are full of compressed air at
+rather high pressure--a couple of thousand pounds. Here's a
+reduction-valve with an adiabatic expansion feature, to supply extra air
+to your heat-suit. It will be pretty cold, expanding from so high a
+pressure. Bring down the temperature a little more."
+
+Bordman again felt humiliated. Chuka and Redfeather, because of their
+races, were able to move about nine-tenths naked in the open air on this
+planet, and they thrived. But he needed a special refrigerated costume
+to endure the heat. More, they provided him with sunshades and
+refrigerated air that they did not need for themselves. They were
+thoughtful of him. He was as much out of his element, where they fitted
+perfectly, as he would have been making a degree-of-completion survey on
+an underwater project. He had to wear what was practically a diving suit
+and use a special air supply to survive!
+
+He choked down the irritation his own inadequacy produced.
+
+"I suppose we can go now," he said as coldly as he could.
+
+Aletha's cousin mounted the control-saddle--though it was no more than a
+blanket--and Dr. Chuka mounted beside Bordman. The ground car got under
+way. It headed for the mountains.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The smoothness of the rock was deceptive. The caterwheel car lurched
+and bumped and swayed and rocked. It rolled and dipped and wallowed.
+Nobody could have remained in a normal seat on such terrain, but Bordman
+felt hopelessly undignified riding what amounted to a hobbyhorse. Under
+the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on a carousel. That there
+were three of them together made it look even more foolish. He stared
+about him, trying to take his mind from his own absurdity. His goggles
+made the light endurable, but he felt ashamed.
+
+"Those side-fins," said Chuka's deep voice pleasantly, "the bottom ones,
+make things better for you. The shade overhead cuts off direct sunlight,
+and they cut off the reflected glare. It would blister your skin even
+if the sun never touched you directly."
+
+Bordman did not answer. The caterwheel car went on. It came to a patch
+of sand--tawny sand, heavily mineralized. There was a dune here. Not a
+big one for Xosa II. It was no more than a hundred feet high. But they
+went up its leeward, steeply slanting side. All the planet seemed to
+tilt insanely as the caterwheels spun. They reached the dune's crest,
+where it tended to curl over and break like a water-comber, and here the
+wheels struggled with sand precariously ready to fall, and Bordman had a
+sudden perception of the sands of Xosa II as the oceans that they really
+were. The dunes were waves which moved with infinite slowness, but the
+irresistible force of storm-seas. Nothing could resist them. Nothing!
+
+They traveled over similar dunes for two miles. Then they began to climb
+the approaches to the mountains. And Bordman saw for the second
+time--the first had been through the ports of the landing-boat--where
+there was a notch in the mountain wall and sand had flowed out of it
+like a waterfall, making a beautifully symmetrical cone-shaped heap
+against the lower cliffs. There were many such falls. There was one
+place where there was a sand-cascade. Sand had poured over a series of
+rocky steps, piling up on each in turn to its very edge, and then
+spilling again to the next.
+
+They went up a crazily slanting spur of stone, whose sides were too
+steep for sand to lodge on, and whose narrow crest had a bare thin
+coating of powder.
+
+The landscape looked like a nightmare. As the car went on, wabbling and
+lurching and dipping on its way, the heights on either side made Bordman
+tend to dizziness. The coloring was impossible. The aridness, the
+desiccation, the lifelessness of everything about was somehow shocking.
+Bordman found himself straining his eyes for the merest, scrubbiest of
+bushes and for however stunted and isolated a wisp of grass.
+
+The journey went on for an hour. Then there came a straining climb up a
+now-windswept ridge of eroded rock, and the attainment of its highest
+point. The ground car went onward for a hundred yards and stopped.
+
+They had reached the top of the mountain range, and there was
+doubtlessly another range beyond. But they could not see it. Here, at
+the place to which they had climbed so effortfully, there were no more
+rocks. There was no valley. There was no descending slope. There was
+sand. This was one of the sand plateaus which were a unique feature of
+Xosa II. And Bordman knew, now, that the disputed explanation was the
+true one.
+
+Winds, blowing over the mountains, carried sand as on other worlds they
+carried moisture and pollen and seeds and rain. Where two mountain
+ranges ran across the course of long-blowing winds, the winds eddied
+above the valley between. They dropped sand into it. The equivalent of
+trade winds, Bordman considered, in time would fill a valley to the
+mountain tops, just as trade winds provide moisture in equal quantity on
+other worlds, and civilizations have been built upon it. But----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well?" said Bordman challengingly.
+
+"This is the site of the landing grid," said Redfeather.
+
+"Where?"
+
+"Here," said the Indian dryly. "A few months ago there was a valley
+here. The landing grid had eighteen hundred feet of height built. There
+was to be four hundred feet more--the lighter top construction justifies
+my figure of eighty per cent completion. Then there was a storm."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It was hot. Horribly, terribly hot, even here on a plateau at
+mountaintop height. Dr. Chuka looked at Bordman's face and bent down in
+the vehicle. He turned a stopcock on one of the air tanks brought for
+Bordman's necessity. Immediately Bordman felt cooler. His skin was dry,
+of course. The circulated air dried sweat as fast as it appeared. But he
+had the dazed, feverish feeling of a man in an artificial-fever box.
+He'd been fighting it for some time. Now the coolness of the expanded
+air was almost deliriously refreshing.
+
+Dr. Chuka produced a canteen. Bordman drank thirstily. The water was
+slightly salted to replace salt lost in sweat.
+
+"A storm, eh?" asked Bordman, after a time of contemplation of his inner
+sensations as well as the scene of disaster before him. There'd be some
+hundreds of millions of tons of sand in even a section of this plateau.
+It was unthinkable that it could be removed except by a long-time sweep
+of changed trade winds along the length of the valley. "But what has a
+storm to do----"
+
+"It was a sandstorm," said Redfeather coldly. "Probably there was a
+sunspot flare-up. We don't know. But the pre-colonization survey spoke
+of sandstorms. The survey team even made estimates of sandfall in
+various places as so many inches per year. Here all storms drop sand
+instead of rain. But there must have been a sunspot flare because this
+storm blew for"--his voice went flat and deliberate because it was
+stating the unbelievable--"for two months. We did not see the sun in all
+that time. And we couldn't work, naturally. The sand would flay a man's
+skin off his body in minutes. So we waited it out.
+
+"When it ended, there was this sand plateau where the survey had ordered
+the landing grid to be built. The grid was under it. It is under it. The
+top of eighteen hundred feet of steel is still buried two hundred feet
+down in the sand you see. Our unfabricated building-steel is piled ready
+for erection--under two thousand feet of sand. Without anything but
+stored power it is hardly practical"--Redfeather's tone was
+sardonic--"for us to try to dig it out. There are hundreds of millions
+of tons of stuff to be moved. If we could get the sand away, we could
+finish the grid. If we could finish the grid, we'd have power enough to
+get the sand away--in a few years, and if we could replace the machinery
+that wore out handling it. And if there wasn't another sandstorm."
+
+He paused. Bordman took deep breaths of the cooler air. He could think
+more clearly.
+
+"If you will accept photographs," said Redfeather politely, "you can
+check that we actually did the work."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bordman saw the implications. The colony had been formed of Amerinds for
+the steel work and Africans for the labor the Amerinds were congenitally
+averse to--the handling of complex mining-machinery underground and the
+control of modern high-speed smelting operations. Both races could
+endure this climate and work in it--provided that they had cooled
+sleeping quarters. But they had to have power. Power not only to work
+with, but to live by. The air-cooling machinery that made sleep possible
+also condensed from the cooled air the minute trace of water vapor it
+contained and that they needed for drink. But without power they would
+thirst. Without the landing grid and the power it took from the
+ionosphere, they could not receive supplies from the rest of the
+universe. So they would starve.
+
+And the _Warlock_, now in orbit somewhere overhead, was well within the
+planet's gravitational field and could not use its Lawlor drive to
+escape with news of their predicament. In the normal course of events it
+would be years before a colony ship capable of landing or blasting out
+of a planetary gravitational field by rocket-power was dispatched to
+find out why there was no news from Xosa II. There was no such thing as
+interstellar signaling, of course. Ships themselves travel faster than
+any signal that could be sent, and distances were so great that mere
+communication took enormous lengths of time. A letter sent to Earth from
+the Rim even now took ten years to make the journey, and another ten for
+a reply. Even the much shorter distances involved in Xosa II's
+predicament still ruled out all hope. The colony was strictly on its
+own.
+
+Bordman said heavily:
+
+"I'll accept the photographs. I even accept the statement that the
+colony will die. I will prepare my report for the cache Aletha tells me
+you're preparing. And I apologize for any affront I may have offered
+you."
+
+Dr. Chuka nodded approvingly. He regarded Bordman with benign warmth.
+Ralph Redfeather said cordially enough:
+
+"That's perfectly all right. No harm done."
+
+"And now," said Bordman shortly, "since I have authority to give any
+orders needed for my work, I want to survey the steps you've taken to
+carry out those parts of your instructions dealing with emergencies. I
+want to see right away what you've done to beat this state of things. I
+know they can't be beaten, but I intend to leave a report on what you've
+tried!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Warlock_ swung in emptiness around the planet Xosa II. It was
+barely five thousand miles above the surface, so the mottled terrain of
+the dry world flowed swiftly and perpetually beneath it. It did not seem
+beneath, of course. It simply seemed out--away--removed from the ship.
+And in the ship's hull there was artificial gravity, and light, and
+there were the humming sounds of fans which kept the air in motion and
+flowing through the air apparatus. Also there was food, and adequate
+water, and the temperature was admirably controlled. But nothing
+happened. Moreover, nothing could be expected to happen. There were
+eight men in the crew, and they were accustomed to space-voyages which
+lasted from one month to three. But they had traveled a good two months
+from their last port. They had exhausted the visireels, playing them
+over and over until they were intolerable. They had read and reread all
+the bookreels they could bear. On previous voyages they had played chess
+and similar games until it was completely predictable who would beat
+whom in every possible contest.
+
+Now they viewed the future with bitterness. The ship could not land,
+because there was no landing grid in operation on the planet below them.
+They could not depart, because the Lawlor drive simply does not work
+within five diameters of an Earth-gravity planet. Space is warped only
+infinitesimally by so thin a field, but a Lawlor drive needs almost
+perfectly unstressed emptiness if it is to take hold. They did not have
+fuel enough to blast out the necessary thirty-odd thousand miles against
+gravity. The same consideration made their lifeboats useless. They could
+not escape by rocket-power and their Lawlor drives, also, were
+ineffective.
+
+The crew of the _Warlock_ was bored. The worst of the boredom was that
+it promised to last without limit. They had food and water and physical
+comfort, but they were exactly in the situation of men sentenced to
+prison for an unknown but enormous length of time. There was no escape.
+There could be no alleviation. The prospect invited frenzy by
+anticipation.
+
+A fist fight broke out in the crew's quarters within two hours after the
+_Warlock_ had established its orbit--as a first reaction to their
+catastrophe. The skipper went through the ship and painstakingly
+confiscated every weapon. He locked them up. He, himself, already felt
+the nagging effect of jangling nerves. There was nothing to do. He
+didn't know when there would ever be anything to do. It was a condition
+to produce hysteria.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was night. Outside and above the colony there were uncountable
+myriads of stars. They were not the stars of Earth, of course, but
+Bordman had never been on Earth. He was used to unfamiliar
+constellations. He stared out a port at the sky, and noted that there
+were no moons. He remembered, when he thought, that Xosa II had no
+moons. There was a rustling of paper behind him. Aletha Redfeather
+turned a page in a loose-leaf volume and painstakingly made a note. The
+wall behind her held many more such books. From them could be extracted
+the detailed history of every bit of work that had been done by the
+colony-preparation crews. Separate, tersely-phrased items could be
+assembled to make a record of individual men.
+
+There had been incredible hardships, at first. There were heroic feats.
+There had been an attempt to ferry water supplies down from the pole by
+aircraft. It was not practical, even to build up a reserve of fluid.
+Winds carried sand particles here as on other worlds they carried
+moisture. Aircraft were abraded as they flew. The last working flier
+made a forced landing five hundred miles from the colony. A caterwheel
+expedition went out and brought the crew in. The caterwheel trucks were
+armored with silicone plastic, resistant to abrasion, but when they got
+back they had to be scrapped. There had been men lost in sudden
+sand-squalls, and heroic searches for them, and once or twice rescues.
+There had been cave-ins in the mines. There had been accidents. There
+had been magnificent feats of endurance and achievement.
+
+Bordman went to the door of the hull which was Ralph Redfeather's
+Project Engineer office. He opened it. He stepped outside.
+
+It was like stepping into an oven. The sand was still hot from the
+sunshine just ended. The air was so utterly dry that Bordman instantly
+felt it sucking at the moisture of his nasal passages. In ten seconds
+his feet--clad in indoor footwear--were uncomfortably hot. In twenty the
+soles of his feet felt as if they were blistering. He would die of the
+heat at night, here! Perhaps he could endure the outside near dawn, but
+he raged a little. Here where Amerinds and Africans lived and throve, he
+could live unprotected for no more than an hour or two--and that at one
+special time of the planet's rotation!
+
+He went back in, ashamed of the discomfort of his feet and angrily
+letting them feel scorched rather than admit to it.
+
+Aletha turned another page.
+
+"Look, here!" said Bordman angrily. "No matter what you say, you're
+going to go back on the _Warlock_ before----"
+
+She raised her eyes.
+
+"We'll worry about that when the time comes. But I think not. I'd
+rather stay here."
+
+"For the present, perhaps," snapped Bordman. "But before things get too
+bad you go back to the ship! They've rocket fuel enough for half a dozen
+landings of the landing boat. They can lift you out of here!"
+
+Aletha shrugged.
+
+"Why leave here to board a derelict? The _Warlock_'s practically that.
+What's your honest estimate of the time before a ship equipped to help
+us gets here?"
+
+Bordman would not answer. He'd done some figuring. It had been a
+two-month journey from Trent--the nearest Survey base--to here. The
+_Warlock_ had been expected to remain aground until the smelter it
+brought could load it with pig metal. Which could be as little as two
+weeks, but would surprise nobody if it was two months instead. So the
+ship would not be considered due back on Trent for four months. It would
+not be considered overdue for at least two more. It would be six months
+before anybody seriously wondered why it wasn't back with its cargo.
+There'd be a wait for lifeboats to come in, should there have been a
+mishap in space. There'd eventually be a report of noncommunication to
+the Colony Survey headquarters on Canna III. But it would take three
+months for that report to be received, and six more for a
+confirmation--even if ships made the voyages exactly at the most
+favorable intervals--and then there should at least be a complaint from
+the colony. There were lifeboats aground on Xosa II, for emergency
+communication, and if a lifeboat didn't bring news of a planetary
+crisis, no crisis would be considered to exist. Nobody could imagine a
+landing grid failing!
+
+Maybe in a year somebody would think that maybe somebody ought to ask
+around about Xosa II. It would be much longer before somebody put a note
+on somebody else's desk that would suggest that when, or if, a suitable
+ship passed near Xosa II, or if one should be available for the inquiry,
+it might be worth while to have the noncommunication from the planet
+looked into. Actually, to guess at three years before another ship
+arrived would be the most optimistic of estimates.
+
+"You're a civilian," said Bordman shortly. "When the food and water run
+low, you go back to the ship. You'll at least be alive when somebody
+does come to see what's the matter here!"
+
+Aletha said mildly:
+
+"Maybe I'd rather not be alive. Will you go back to the ship?"
+
+Bordman flushed. He wouldn't. But he said doggedly;
+
+"I can order you sent on board, and your cousin will carry out the
+order!"
+
+"I doubt it very much," said Aletha pleasantly.
+
+She returned to her task.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were crunching footsteps outside the hulk. Bordman winced a
+little. With insulated sandals, it was normal for these colonists to
+move from one part of the colony to another in the open, even by
+daylight. He, Bordman, couldn't take out-of-doors at night! His lips
+twisted bitterly.
+
+Men came in. There were dark men with rippling muscles under glistening
+skin, and bronze Amerinds with coarse straight hair. Ralph Redfeather
+was with them. Dr. Chuka came in last of all.
+
+"Here we are," said Redfeather. "These are our foremen. Among us, I
+think we can answer any questions you want to ask."
+
+He made introductions. Bordman didn't try to remember the names.
+Abeokuta and Northwind and Sutata and Tallgrass and T'ckka and
+Spottedhorse and Lewanika---- They were names which in combination would
+only be found in a very raw, new colony. But the men who crowded into
+the office were wholly at ease, in their own minds as well as in the
+presence of a senior Colonial Survey officer. They nodded as they were
+named, and the nearest shook hands. Bordman knew that he'd have liked
+their looks under other circumstances. But he was humiliated by the
+conditions on this planet. They were not. They were apparently only
+sentenced to death by them.
+
+"I have to leave a report," said Bordman curtly--and he was somehow
+astonished to know that he did expect to leave a report rather than make
+one; he accepted the hopelessness of the colony's future--"on the
+degree-of-completion of the work here. But since there's an emergency, I
+have also to leave a report on the measures taken to meet it."
+
+The report would be futile, of course. As futile as the coup-records
+Aletha was compiling, which would be read only after everybody on the
+planet was dead. But Bordman knew he'd write it. It was unthinkable that
+he shouldn't.
+
+"Redfeather tells me," he added, again curtly, "that the power in
+storage can be used to cool the colony buildings--and therefore condense
+drinking water from the air--for just about six months. There is food
+for about six months. If one lets the buildings warm up a little, to
+stretch the fuel, there won't be enough water to drink. Go on half
+rations to stretch the food, and there won't be enough water to last and
+the power will give out anyhow. No profit there!"
+
+There were nods. The matter had been thrashed out long before.
+
+"There's food in the _Warlock_ overhead," Bordman went on coldly, "but
+they can't use the landing boat more than a few times. It can't use ship
+fuel. No refrigeration to hold it stable. They couldn't land more than a
+ton of supplies all told. There are five hundred of us here. No help
+there!"
+
+He looked from one to another.
+
+"So we live comfortably," he told them with irony, "until our food and
+water and minimum night-comfort run out together. Anything we do to try
+to stretch anything is useless because of what happens to something
+else. Redfeather tells me you accept the situation. What are you
+doing--since you accept it?"
+
+Dr. Chuka said amiably:
+
+"We've picked a storage place for our records, and our miners are
+blasting out space in which to put away the record of our actions to the
+last possible moment. It will be sandproof. Our mechanics are building a
+broadcast unit we'll spare a tiny bit of fuel for. It will run
+twenty-odd years, broadcasting directions so it can be found regardless
+of how the terrain is changed by drifting sand."
+
+"And," said Bordman, "the fact that nobody will be here to give
+directions."
+
+Chuka added benignly:
+
+"We're doing a great deal of singing, too. My people are ... ah ...
+religious. When we are ... ah ... no longer here ... there have been
+boastings that there'll be a well-practiced choir ready to go to work in
+the next world."
+
+White teeth showed in grins. Bordman was almost envious of men who could
+grin at such a thought. But he went on grimly:
+
+"And I understand that athletics have also been much practiced."
+
+Redfeather said:
+
+"There's been time for it. Climbing teams have counted coup on all the
+worst mountains within three hundred miles. There's been a new record
+set for the javelin, adjusted for gravity constant, and Johnny Cornstalk
+did a hundred yards in eight point four seconds. Aletha has the records
+and has certified them."
+
+"Very useful!" said Bordman sardonically. Then he disliked himself for
+saying it even before the bronze-skinned men's faces grew studiedly
+impassive.
+
+Chuka waved his hand.
+
+"Wait, Ralph! Lewanika's nephew will beat that within a week!"
+
+Bordman was ashamed again because Chuka had spoken to cover up his own
+ill-nature.
+
+"I take it back!" he said irritably. "What I said was uncalled for. I
+shouldn't have said it! But I came here to do a completion survey and
+what you've been giving me is material for an estimate of morale! It's
+not my line! I'm a technician, first and foremost! We're faced with a
+technical problem!"
+
+Aletha spoke suddenly from behind him.
+
+"But these are men, first and foremost, Mr. Bordman. And they're faced
+with a very human problem--how to die well. They seem to be rather good
+at it, so far."
+
+Bordman ground his teeth. He was again humiliated. In his own fashion he
+was attempting the same thing. But just as he was genetically not
+qualified to endure the climate of this planet, he was not prepared for
+a fatalistic or pious acceptance of disaster. Amerind and African,
+alike, these men instinctively held to their own ideas of what the
+dignity of a man called upon him to do when he could not do anything but
+die. But Bordman's idea of his human dignity required him to be still
+fighting: still scratching at the eyes of fate or destiny when he was
+slain. It was in his blood or genes or the result of training. He simply
+could not, with self-respect, accept any physical situation as hopeless
+even when his mind assured him that it was.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I agree," he said coldly, "but still I have to think in technical
+terms. You might say that we are going to die because we cannot land the
+_Warlock_ with food and equipment. We cannot land the _Warlock_ because
+we have no landing grid. We have no landing grid because it and all the
+material to complete it is buried under millions of tons of sand. We
+cannot make a new light-supply-ship type of landing grid because we have
+no smelter to make beams, nor power to run it if we had, yet if we had
+the beams we could get the power to run the smelter we haven't got to
+make the beams. And we have no smelter, hence no beams, no power, no
+prospect of food or help because we can't land the _Warlock_. It is
+strictly a circular problem. Break it at any point and all of it is
+solved."
+
+One of the dark men muttered something under his breath to those near
+him. There were chuckles.
+
+"Like Mr. Woodchuck," explained the man, when Bordman's eyes fell on
+him. "When I was a little boy there was a story like that."
+
+Bordman said icily:
+
+"The problem of coolness and water and food is the same sort of problem.
+In six months we could raise food--if we had power to condense
+moisture. We've chemicals for hydroponics--if we could keep the plants
+from roasting as they grew. Refrigeration and water and food are
+practically another circular problem."
+
+Aletha said tentatively:
+
+"Mr. Bordman----"
+
+He turned, annoyed. Aletha said almost apologetically:
+
+"On Chagan there was a--you might call it a woman's coup given to a
+woman I know. Her husband raises horses. He's mad about them. And they
+live in a sort of home on caterwheels out on the plains--the llanos.
+Sometimes they're months away from a settlement. And she loves ice cream
+and refrigeration isn't too simple. But she has a Doctorate in Human
+History. So she had her husband make an insulated tray on the roof of
+their trailer and she makes her ice cream there."
+
+Men looked at her. Her cousin said amusedly:
+
+"That should rate some sort of technical-coup feather!"
+
+"The Council gave her a brass pot--official," said Aletha. "Domestic
+science achievement." To Bordman she explained: "Her husband put a tray
+on the roof of their house, insulated from the heat of the house below.
+During the day there's an insulated cover on top of it, insulating it
+from the heat of the sun. At night she takes off the top cover and pours
+her custard, thin, in the tray. Then she goes to bed. She has to get up
+before daybreak to scrape it up, but by then the ice cream is frozen.
+Even on a warm night." She looked from one to another. "I don't know
+why. She said it was done in a place called Babylonia on Earth, many
+thousands of years ago."
+
+Bordman blinked. Then he said decisively:
+
+"Damn! Who knows how much the ground-temperature drops here before
+dawn?"
+
+"I do," said Aletha's cousin, mildly. "The top-sand temperature falls
+forty-odd degrees. Warmer underneath, of course. But the air here is
+almost cool when the sun rises. Why?"
+
+"Nights are cooler on all planets," said Bordman, "because every night
+the dark side radiates heat to empty space. There'd be frost everywhere
+every morning if the ground didn't store up heat during the day. If we
+prevent daytime heat-storage--cover a patch of ground before dawn and
+leave it covered all day--and uncover it all night while shielding it
+from warm winds---- We've got refrigeration! The night sky is empty
+space itself! Two hundred and eighty below zero!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a murmur. Then argument. The foremen of the Xosa II
+colony-preparation crew were strictly practical men, but they had the
+habit of knowing why some things were practical. One does not do modern
+steel construction in contempt of theory, nor handle modern mining tools
+without knowing why as well as how they work. This proposal sounded like
+something that was based on reason--that should work to some degree.
+But how well? Anybody could guess that it should cool something at least
+twice as much as the normal night temperature-drop. But somebody
+produced a slipstick and began to juggle it expertly. He astonishedly
+announced his results. Others questioned, and then verified it. Nobody
+paid much attention to Bordman. But there was a hum of absorbed
+discussion, in which Redfeather and Chuka were immediately included. By
+calculation, it astoundingly appeared that if the air on Xosa II was
+really as clear as the bright stars and deep day-sky color indicated,
+every second night a total drop of one hundred and eighty degrees
+temperature could be secured by radiation to interstellar space--if
+there were no convection-currents, and they could be prevented by----
+
+It was the convection-current problem which broke the assembly into
+groups with different solutions. But it was Dr. Chuka who boomed at all
+of them to try all three solutions and have them ready before daybreak,
+so the assembly left the hulk, still disputing enthusiastically. But
+somebody had recalled that there were dewponds in the one arid area on
+Timbuk, and somebody else remembered that irrigation on Delmos III was
+accomplished that same way. And they recalled how it was done----
+
+Voices went away in the ovenlike night outside. Bordman grimaced, and
+again said:
+
+"Damn! Why didn't I think of that myself?"
+
+"Because," said Aletha, smiling, "you aren't a Doctor of Human History
+with a horse-raising husband and a fondness for ice cream. Even so, a
+technician was needed to break down the problem here into really simple
+terms." Then she said, "I think Bob Running Antelope might approve of
+you, Mr. Bordman."
+
+Bordman fumed to himself.
+
+"Who's he? Just what does that whole comment mean?"
+
+"I'll tell you," said Aletha, "when you've solved one or two more
+problems."
+
+Her cousin came back into the room. He said with gratification:
+
+"Chuka can turn out silicone-wool insulation, he says. Plenty of
+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 vexedly, "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 absorbedly:
+
+"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. At the beginning, every
+man tended to become a hermit so that he could postpone as long as
+possible the time when he would hate his shipmates. Monotony was already
+so familiar that its continuance was a foreknown evil. The crew of the
+_Warlock_ already knew how intolerable they would presently be to each
+other, and the foreknowledge tended to make them intolerable now.
+
+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 spaceship 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. And 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 cargoes. And
+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----
+
+But 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 when 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. And the gridding was precisely designed so that winds
+blowing across it did not make eddies in the grid-squares, and 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. And 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 of 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. And 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, and
+presently there were threads of molten metal and slag trickling--and
+separating as they trickled--hesitantly down the cliff-side.
+
+And 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 specbook for Xosa II, and there were 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-leafed 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 feverishly the figures and formulae from a section of
+the definition book of the Colonial Survey. The books 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, subdivided 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 were included in the reference volumes for Bordman's use in the
+making of 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 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 amiably, "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 gently, "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 said dryly, without ceasing his feverish work:
+
+"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 know what we
+can do, and that we can do it better than any--" her eyes
+twinkled--"paleface. 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 one 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-m-m---- 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 paleface 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 complacently. "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, 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 wryly:
+
+"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 grimly, "Apparently I think more highly
+of them than they do of me!"
+
+Aletha said contritely:
+
+"It must have sounded horrible! 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 firmly. "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. I want to! 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 calmly. "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 not. 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 himself 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 wrathfully. "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 irritating. 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. He listened. He clicked off the communicator and
+hastened to an exterior port, deeply darkened against those times when
+the blue-white sun of Xosa shone upon this side of the hull. He moved
+the manual control to make it more transparent. He stared down at the
+monstrous, tawny, mottled surface of the planet five thousand miles
+away. He searched for the spot he bitterly 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 and 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 hysterically happy. 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was eighteen hundred feet of steel grid overhead. It made a
+crisscross, 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 half-mile circle. And in the
+landing grid there was now a smaller, elaborate, truss-braced object. It
+rested on the rocky ground, and it was not painted, and it was quite
+small. A hundred feet high, perhaps, and no more than three hundred
+across. But it was visibly a miniature of the great, now-uncovered,
+re-painted 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
+rode tiredly on a hobbyhorse saddle in its back cargo section. He wore a
+heat-suit.
+
+The truck reached the pit's bottom. There was a tool shed there. The
+caterwheel-truck bumped up to it and stopped. Bordman got out, visibly
+cramped by the jolting, rocking, exhausting-to-unaccustomed-muscles
+ride.
+
+"Do you want to go in the shed and cool off?" asked Chuka brightly.
+
+"I'm all right," said Bordman curtly. "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 handrail 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 and up. It took many long minutes to reach the top.
+
+There was a platform there. Newly-made. The sunlight was blindingly
+bright. The landscape was 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. There were actual
+mountain-crests only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman was
+acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well?" he asked fretfully. "Chuka said you needed me here. What's the
+matter?"
+
+Ralph Redfeather nodded very 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 carefully:
+
+"We cast the beams for the small landing grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted
+the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into molds 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 conversationally:
+
+"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 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 downwind. 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.
+
+"In six days," said Ralph, almost ceremonially, "it had uncovered half
+the original grid we'd built. Then we were able to modify that to heave
+sand and to let it tap the ionosphere. We were able to use a good many
+times the power the little grid could apply to sand-lifting! In two days
+more the landing grid was clear. The valley bottom was clean. We shifted
+some hundreds of millions of tons of sand by landing grid, and now it is
+possible to land the _Warlock_, and receive her supplies, and the
+solar-power furnace is already turning out pigs for her loading. We
+wanted you to see what we have done. The colony is no longer in danger,
+and we shall have the grid completely finished for your inspection
+before the ship is ready to return."
+
+Bordman said uncomfortably:
+
+"That's very good. It's excellent. I'll put it in my survey report."
+
+"But," said Ralph, more ceremonially still, "we have the right to count
+coup for the members of our tribe and clan. Now----"
+
+Then there was confusion. Aletha's cousin was saying syllables that did
+not mean anything at all. The other Indians joined in at intervals,
+speaking gibberish. Aletha's eyes were shining and she looked incredibly
+pleased and satisfied.
+
+"But what ... what's this?" demanded Bordman when they stopped.
+
+Aletha spoke proudly.
+
+"Ralph just formally adopted you into the tribe, Mr. Bordman--and into
+his clan and mine! He gave you a name I'll have to write down for you,
+but it means, 'Man-who-believes-not-his-own-wisdom.' And now----"
+
+Ralph Redfeather--licensed interstellar engineer, graduate of the
+stiffest technical university in this quarter of the galaxy, wearer of
+three eagle-pinion feathers and clad in a pair of insulated sandals and
+a breechcloth--whipped out a small paint-pot and a brush from somewhere
+and began carefully to paint on a section of girder ready for the next
+tier of steel. He painted a feather on the metal.
+
+"It's a coup," he told Bordman over his shoulder. "Your coup. Placed
+where it was earned--up here. Aletha is authorized to certify it. And
+the head of the clan will add an eagle-feather to the headdress he wears
+in council in the Big Tepee on Algonka, and--your clan-brothers will be
+proud!"
+
+Then he straightened up and held out his hand.
+
+Chuka said benignly:
+
+"Being civilized men, Mr. Bordman, we Africans do not go in for
+uncivilized feathers. But we ... ah ... rather approve of you, too. And
+we plan a corroboree at the colony after the _Warlock_ is down, when
+there will be some excellently practiced singing. There is ... ah ... a
+song, a sort of choral calypso, about this ... ah ... adventure you have
+brought to so satisfying a conclusion. It is quite a good calypso. It's
+likely to be popular on a good many planets."
+
+Bordman swallowed. He was acutely uncomfortable. He felt that he ought
+to say something, and he did not know what.
+
+But just then there was a deep-toned humming in the air. It was a
+vibrant tone, instinct with limitless power. It was the
+eighteen-hundred-foot landing grid, giving off that profoundly bass and
+vibrant, note it uttered while operating. Bordman looked up.
+
+The _Warlock_ was coming down.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE END
+
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+    | Transcriber's Notes & Errata                                 |
+    |                                                              |
+    | This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction      |
+    | December 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any        |
+    | evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was     |
+    | renewed.                                                     |
+    |                                                              |
+    | Illustrations have been moved to their appropriate places in |
+    | the text.                                                    |
+    |                                                              |
+    | The following typographical errors have been corrected.      |
+    |                                                              |
+    | |Error                    |Correction        |               |
+    | |                         |                  |               |
+    | |dessicated               |desiccated        |               |
+    | |Anglo-Anglo-Saxon--girls |Anglo-Saxon girls |               |
+    | |carrousel                |carousel          |               |
+    | |dessication              |desiccation       |               |
+    | |derelect                 |derelict          |               |
+    | |sand-swept               |sand swept        |               |
+    +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sand Doom, by William Fitzgerald Jenkins
+
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