Herndon said dully:
“But we couldn’t live here without supplies from home. Or even without the equipment we brought. But they can’t get supplies from anywhere, and they can’t make such equipment for everybody! They’ll die!” He swallowed, and there was a clicking noise in his throat. “They … they know it, too. So they … warn us to try to save ourselves because ... they can’t help us anymore.”
There are many reasons why a man can feel shame that he belongs to a race which can do the things that some men do. But sometimes there are reasons to be proud, as well. The home world of this colony was doomed, but it sent a warning to the tiny group on the colony-world, to allow them to try to save themselves.
“I … wish we were there to … share what they have to face,” said Riki. Her voice sounded as if her throat hurt. “I ... don’t want to keep on living if ... everybody who ... ever cared about us is going to die!”
Massy felt lonely. He could understand that nobody would want to live as the only human alive. Nobody would want to live as a member of the only group of people left alive. And everybody thinks of his home planet as all the world there is. I don’t think that way, thought Massy. But maybe it’s the way I’d feel about living if Riki were to die. It would be natural to want to share any danger or any disaster she faced. Which he was.
“L-look!” he said, stammering a little. “You don’t see! It isn’t a case of your living while they die! If your home world becomes like this, what will this be like? We’re farther from the sun! We’re colder to start with! Do you think we’ll live through anything they can’t take? Food supplies or no, equipment or no, do you think we’ve got a chance? Use your brains!”
Herndon and Riki stared at him. And then some of the strained look left Riki’s face and body. Herndon blinked, and said slowly:
“Why … that’s so! We were thought to be taking a terrific risk when we came here. But it’ll be as much worse here—Of course! We are in the same fix they’re in!”
He straightened a little. Color actually came back into his face. Riki managed to smile. And then Herndon said almost naturally:
“That makes things look more sensible! We’ve got to fight for our lives, too! And we’ve very little chance of saving them! What do we do about it, Massy?”
II
The sun was halfway toward mid-sky, and still attended by its sundogs, though they were fainter than at the horizon. The sky was darker. The mountain peaks reached skyward, serene and utterly aloof from the affairs of man. This was a frozen world, where there should be no inhabitants. The city was a fleet of metal hulks, neatly arranged on the valley floor, emptied of the material they had brought for the building of the colony. At the upper end of the valley the landing-grid stood. It was a gigantic skeleton of steel, rising from legs of unequal length bedded in the hillsides, and reaching two thousand feet toward the stars. Human figures, muffled almost past recognition, moved about a catwalk three-quarters of the way up. There was a tiny glittering below where they moved. They were, of course, men using sonic ice-breakers to shatter the frost which formed on the framework at night. Falling shards of crystal made a liquidlike flashing. The landing-grid needed to be cleared every ten days or so. Left uncleared, it would acquire an increasingly thick coating of ice. In time it could collapse. But long before that time it would have ceased to operate, and without its operation there could be no space travel. Rockets for lifting spaceships were impossibly heavy, for practical use. But the landing-grids could lift them out to the unstressed space where Lawlor drives could work, and draw them to ground with cargoes they couldn’t possibly have carried if they’d needed rockets.
Massy reached the base of the grid on foot. It was not far from the village of drone-hulls. He was dwarfed by the ground-level upright beams. He went through the cold-lock to the small control-house at the grid’s base.
He nodded to the man on standby as he got painfully out of his muffling garments.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
The standby operator shrugged. Massy was Colonial Survey. It was his function to find fault, to expose inadequacies in the construction and operation of colony facilities. It’s natural for me to be disliked by men whose work I inspect, thought Massy. If I approve it doesn’t mean anything, and if I protest, it’s bad. He had always been lonely, but it was a part of the job.
“I think,” he said painstakingly, “that there ought to be a change in maximum no-drain voltage. I’d like to check it.”
The operator shrugged again. He pressed buttons under a phone-plate.
“Shift to reserve power,” he commanded when a face appeared in the plate. “Gotta check no-drain juice.”
“What for?” demanded the face in the plate.
“You-know-who’s got ideas,” said the grid operator scornfully. “Maybe we’ve been skimping something. Maybe there’s some new specification we didn’t know about. Maybe anything! But shift to reserve power.”
The face in the screen grumbled. Massy swallowed. It was not a Survey officer’s privilege to maintain discipline. But there was no particular virtue in discipline here and now. He watched the current-demand dial. It stood a little above normal day-drain, which was understandable. The outside temperature was down. There was more power needed to keep the dwellings warm, and there was always a lot of power needed in the mine the colony had been formed to exploit. The mine had to be warmed for the men who worked to develop it.
The demand-needle dropped abruptly, and hung steady, and dropped again and again as additional parts of the colony’s power-uses were switched to reserve. The needle hit bottom. It stayed there.
Massy had to walk around the standby man to get at the voltmeter. It was built around standard, old-fashioned vacuum tubes—standard for generations, now. Massy patiently hooked it up and warmed the tubes and tested it. He pushed in the contact plugs. He read the no-drain voltage. He licked his lips and made a note. He reversed the leads, so it would read backward. He took another reading. He drew in his breath very quietly.
“Now I want the power turned on in sections,” he told the operator. “The mine first, maybe. It doesn’t matter. But I want to get voltage-readings at different power take-offs.”
The operator looked pained. He spoke with unnecessary elaboration to the face in the phone-plate, and grudgingly went through with the process by which Massy measured the successive drops in voltage with power drawn from the ionosphere. The current available from a layer of ionized gas is, in effect, the current-flow through a conductor with marked resistance. It is possible to infer a gas’ ionization from the current it yields.
The cold-lock door opened. Riki Herndon came in, panting a little.
“There’s another message from home,” she said sharply. Her voice seemed strained. “They picked up our answering-beam and are giving the information you asked for.”
“I’ll be along,” said Massy. “I just got some information here.”
He got into his cold-garments again. He followed her out of the control-hut.
“The figures from home aren’t good,” said Riki evenly, when mountains visibly rose on every hand around them. “Ken says they’re much worse than he thought. The rate of decline in the solar constant’s worse than we figured or could believe.”
“I see,” said Massy, inadequately.
“It’s absurd!” said Riki fiercely. “It’s monstrous! There’ve been sun spots and sunspot cycles all along! I learned about them in school! I learned myself about a four-year and a seven-year cycle, and that there were others! They should have known! They should have calculated in advance! Now they talk about - sixty-year cycles coming in with a hundred-and-thirty-year cycle to pile up with all the others—But what’s the use of scientists if they don’t do their work right and twenty million people die because of it?”