Massy said heavily:
“Has she got something to heat the air she breathes?”
“Naturally,” said Herndon. He added curiously,“What’s the matter?”
“We almost took our licking,” Massy told him. “I’m afraid for tonight, and tomorrow night, too. If the CO2 freezes—”
“We’ll have, power!” Herndon insisted. “We’ll build ice tunnels and ice domes. We’ll build a city under ice, if we have to. But we’ll have power. We’ll be all right!”
“I doubt it very much,” said Massy. “I wish you hadn’t told Riki of the bargain to get her away from here when the Survey ship comes!”
Herndon grinned.
“Is the little grid ready?”, asked Massy.
“Everything’s set,” said Herndon exuberantly. “It’s in the mine-tunnel with radiant heaters playing on it. The bombs are ready. We made enough to last for months, while we were at it. No use taking chances!”
Massy looked at him queerly. Then be said:
“We might as well go out, and try the thing, then.”
But he was very tired. He was not elated. Riki can’t be gotten away, he thought wearily, and I’m not going to go because it isn’t quite fitting to go and leave her. They’ll all be rejoicing presently, but nothing’s settled. Then he thought with exquisite irony, She thinks I was inspired to genius by her, when I haven’t done a thing I wasn’t taught or didn’t get out of books!
He put on the cold-garments as they were now modified for the increased frigidity. Nobody could breathe air at minus sixty-five degrees without getting his lungs frost-bitten. So there was now a plastic mask to cover one’s face, and the air one breathed outdoors was heated as it came through a wire-gauze snout. But still it was not wise to stay out of shelter for too long a time.
Massy went out-of-doors. He stepped out of the cold-lock and gazed about him. The sun seemed markedly paler, and now it had lost its sundogs again. Ice crystals no longer floated in the almost congealed air. The sky was dark. It was almost purple, and it seemed to Massy that he could detect faint flecks of light in it. They would be stars, shining in the daytime.
There seemed to be no one about at all, only the white coldness of the mountains. But there was a movement at the mine-drift, and something came out of it. Four men appeared, muffled up like Massy himself. They rolled the eighteen-foot grid out of the mine-mouth, moving it on those inflated bags which are so much better than rollers for rough terrain. They looked absurdly like bears with steaming noses, in their masks and clothing. They had some sort of powered pusher with them, and they got the metal cage to the very top of a singularly rounded stone upcrop which rose in the center of the valley.
“We picked that spot,” said Herndon’s muffled voice through the chill, “because by shifting the grid’s position it can be aimed, and be on a solid base. Right?”
“Quite all right,” said Massy. “We’ll go work it.”
He moved heavily across the valley, in which nothing moved except the padded figures of the four technicians. Their wire-gauze breathing-masks seemed to emit smoke. They waved to him in greeting.
I’m popular again, he thought drearily, but it doesn’t matter. Getting the Survey ship to ground won’t help now, since Riki’s forewarned. And this trick won’t solve anything permanently on the home planet. It’ll just postpone things.
He had a very peculiar ache inside. A Survey officer is naturally lonely. Massy had been lonely before he even entered the Service. He hadn’t had a feeling of belonging anywhere, or with anyone, and no planet was really his home. Now he could believe that he belonged with someone. But there was the slight matter of a drop in the solar constant of an unimportant Sol-type sun, and nothing could come of it.
Even when Riki, muffled like the rest, waved to him from the mouth of the tunnel, his spirits did not lift. The thing he wanted was to look forward to years and years of being with Riki. He wanted, in fact, to look forward to forever. And there might not be a tomorrow.
“I had the control board rolled out here,” she called breathlessly through her mask. “It’s cold, but you can watch!”
It wouldn’t be much to watch. If everything went all right, some dial-needles would kick over violently, and their readings would go up and up. But they wouldn’t be readings of temperature. Presently the big grid would report increased power from the sky. But tonight the temperature would drop a little farther. Tomorrow night it would drop farther still. When it reached one hundred and nine point three degrees below zero at ground level—why it would keep on falling indefinitely. Then it wouldn’t matter how much power could be drawn from the sky. The colony would die.
One of the figures that looked like a bear now went out of the mine-mouth, trudging toward the grid. It carried a muffled, well-wrapped object in its arms. It stooped and crept between the spokes of the grid. It put the object on the stone. Massy traced cables with his eyes. From the grid to the control board. From the board back to the reserve-power storage cells, deep in the mountain.
“The grid’s tuned to the bomb,” said Riki breathlessly, close beside him. “I checked that myself!”
The bearlike figure out in the valley jerked at the bomb. There was a small rising cloud of grayish vapor. It continued. The figure climbed hastily out of the grid. When the man was clear, Massy threw a switch.
There was a very tiny whining sound, and the wrapped, ridiculously smoking object leaped upward. It seemed to fall toward the sky. There was no more of drama than that. An object the size of a basketball fell upward, swiftly, until it disappeared. That was all.
Massy sat quite stiff, watching the control-board dials. Presently he corrected this, and shifted that. He did not want the bomb to have too high an upward velocity. At a hundred thousand feet it would find very little air to stop the rise of the vapor it was to release.
The field-focus dial reached it indication of one hundred thousand feet. Massy reversed the lift-switch. He counted and then switched the power off. The small, thin whine ended.
He threw the power-intake switch, which could have been on all the time. The power-yield needle stirred. The minute grid was drawing power like its vaster counterpart. But its field was infinitesimal by comparison. It drew power as a soda straw might draw water from wet sand.
Then the intake-needle kicked. It swung sharply, and wavered, and then began a steady, even, climbing movement across the markings on the dial-face. Riki was not watching that.
“They see something!“ she panted. “Look at them!” The four men who had trundled the smaller grid to its place, now stared upward. They flung out their arms. One of them jumped up and down. They leaped. They practically danced.
“Let’s go see,” said Massy.
He went out of the tunnel with Riki. They gazed upward. And directly overhead, where the sky was darkest blue and where it had seemed that stars shone through the daylight—there was a cloud. It seemed to Massy, very quaintly, that it was no bigger than a man’s hand. But it grew. Its edges were yellow-saffron-yellow. It expanded and spread. Presently it began to thin. As it thinned, it began to shine. It was luminous. And the luminosity had a strange, familiar quality.
Somebody came panting down the tunnel, from inside the mountain.
“The grid—” he panted. “The big grid! It’s ... pumping power! Big power! BIG power!”
He went pounding back, to gaze rapturously at the new position of a thin black needle on a large white dial, and to make incoherent noises of rejoicing as it moved very, very slowly toward higher and ever higher readings.