Then be drooped.
“But they can’t spare power to warm up the ground under cities. They need all the power they’ve got to build roofs. And it takes time to build grids.”
Massy snapped:
“Yes, if they’re building regulation ones! ‘By the time they were finished they’d be useless! The ionization here is dropping already. But they don’t need to build grids that will be useless later! They can weave cables together on the ground and hang them in the air by helicopters! They wouldn’t hold up a landing ship for an instant, but they’ll draw power right away! They’ll even power the helis that hold them up! Of course they’ve defects! They’ll have to come down in high winds. They won’t be dependable. But they can put heat in the ground to come out under roofs, to grow food by, to save lives by. What’s the matter with them?”
Herndon stirred again. His eyes ceased to be dull and lifeless.
“I’ll give the orders for turning off the sidewalks. And I’ll send what you just said back home. They ... should like it.”
He looked very respectfully at Massy.
“I guess you know what I’m thinking right now,” he said awkwardly.
Massy flushed. It was not dignified for a Colonial Survey officer to show off. He felt that Herndon was unduly impressed. But Herndon didn’t see that the device wouldn’t solve anything. It would merely postpone the effects of a disaster. It could not possibly prevent them.
“It ought to be done,” he said curtly. “There’ll be other things to be done, too.”
“When you tell them to me,” said Herndon warmly, “they’ll get done! I’ll have Riki put this into that pulse-code you explained to us and she’ll get it off right away!”
He stood up.
“I didn’t explain the code to her!” insisted Massy. “She was already translating it when you gave her my suggestion!”
“All right,” said Herndon. “I’ll get this sent back at once!”
He hurried out of the office. This, thought Massy irritably, is how reputations are made, I suppose. I’m getting one. But his own reaction was extremely inappropriate. If the people of Lani II did suspend helicopter-supported grids of wire in the atmosphere, they could warm masses of underground rock and stone and earth. They could establish what were practically reservoirs of life giving heat under their cities. They could contrive that the warmth from below would rise only as it was needed. But—
Two hundred days to conditions corresponding to the colony-planet. Then two thousand days of minimum heat conditions. Then very, very slow return to normal temperature, long after the sun was back to its previous brilliance. They couldn’t store enough heat for so long. It couldn’t be done. It was ironic that in the freezing of ice and the making of glaciers the planet itself could store cold.
And there would be monstrous storms and blizzards on Lani II as it cooled. As cold conditions got worse the wire grids could be held aloft for shorter and shorter periods, and each time they would pull down less power than before. Their effectiveness would diminish even faster than the need for effectiveness increased.
Massy felt even deeper depression as be worked out the facts. His proposal was essentially futile. It would be encouraging, and to a very slight degree and for a certain short time it would palliate the situation on the inner planet. But in the long run its effect would be zero.
He was embarrassed, too, that Herndon was so admiring. Herndon would tell Riki that he was marvelous. She might—though cagily—be inclined to agree. But he wasn’t marvelous. This trick of a flier-supported grid was not new. It had been used on Saril to supply power for giant peristaltic pumps emptying a polder that had been formed inside a ring of indifferently upraised islands.
All I know, thought Massy bitterly, is what somebody’s showed me or I’ve read in books. And nobody’s showed or written how to handle a thing like this! He went to Herndon’s desk. Herndon had made a new graph on the solar-constant observations forwarded from home. It was a strictly typical curve of the results of coinciding cyclic changes. It was the curve of a series of frequencies at the moment when they were all precisely in phase. From this much one could extrapolate and compute. Massy took a pencil, frowning unhappily. His fingers clumsily formed equations and solved them. The result was just about as bad as it could be. The change in brightness of the sun Lani would not be enough to be observed on Kent IV—the nearest other inhabited world—when the light reached there four years from now. Lani would never be classed as a variable star, because the total change in light and heat would be relatively minute. But the formula for computing planetary temperatures is not simple. Among its factors are squares and cubes of the variables. Worse, the heat radiated from a sun’s photosphere varies not as the square or cube, but as the fourth power of its absolute temperature. A very small change in the sun’s effective temperature, producible by sunspots, could make an altogether disproportionate difference in the warmth its worlds received. Massy’s computations were not pure theory. The data came from Sol itself, where alone in the galaxy there had been daily solar-constant measurements for three hundred years. The rest of his deductions were based ultimately on Earth observations, too. Most scientific data had to refer back to Earth to get an adequate continuity. But there was no possible doubt about the sunspot data, because Sol and Lani were of the same type and nearly equal size.
Using the figures on the present situation, Massy reluctantly arrived at the fact that here, on this already frozen world, the temperature would drop until CO2 froze out of the atmosphere. When that happened, the temperature would plummet until there was no really significant difference between it and that of empty space. It is carbon dioxide which is responsible for the greenhouse effect, by which a planet is in thermal equilibrium only at a temperature above its surroundings—as a greenhouse in sunlight is warmer than the outside air.
The greenhouse effect would vanish soon on the colony world. When it vanished on the mother planet, Massy found himself thinking, if Riki won’t leave when the Survey ship comes, I’ll resign from the Service. I’ll have to if I’m to stay. And I won’t go unless she does.
III
“If you want to come, it’s all right,” said Massy ungraciously.
He waited while Riki slipped into the bulky cold-garments that were needed out-of-doors in the daytime, and were doubly necessary at night. There were heavy boots with inches-thick insulating soles, made in one piece with the many-layered trousers. There was the airpuffed, insulated over-tunic with its hood and mittens which were a part of the sleeves.
“Nobody goes outside at night,” she said when they stood together in the cold-lock.
“I do,” he told her. “I want to find out something.” The outer door opened and he stepped out. He held his arm for her, because the steps and walkway were no longer heated. Now they were covered with a filmy layer of something which, was not frost, but a faint, faint bloom of powder. It was the equivalent of dust, but it was miscroscopic snow-crystals frozen out of the air by the unbearable chill of night.
There was no moon, of course, yet the ice-clad mountains glowed faintly. The drone-hulls arranged in such an orderly fashion were dark against the frosted ground. There was silence; stillness; the feeling of ancient quietude. No wind stirred anywhere. Nothing moved. Nothing lived. The soundlessness was enough to crack the eardrums.