The Planet Explorer

by Murray Leinster

  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 non-communication 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. “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:

  “I can order you sent on board, and your cousin will carry out the order."

  “I doubt it very much,” said Aletha.

  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!

  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'chka 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—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—"I have to leave a report 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, “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 also. If one lets the building 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, “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 sand-proof. 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 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:

  “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 had spoken to cover up his own bad temper.

  “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, “but I still 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, no 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:<
br />
  “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 loved 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 prefabricated teepee, 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, 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:

  “Damn! Who know how much the ground temperature drops here before dawn?"

  “I do,” said Aletha's cousin. “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 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. Nobody paid much attention to Bordman. But there was a hum of discussion, in which Redfeather and Chuka were immediately included. By calculation, it 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 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. 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 oven-like night outside. Bordman grimaced, and again said:

  “Darn! 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 problems 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, “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:

  “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. 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 flights 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. 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 cargos. 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—

  It took three weeks for the problem to be seen as the ultimate 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 simply because 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. The gridding was precisely designed so that winds blowing across it did not make eddies in the grid squares. 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. 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 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 heat equation of despair.

  Then something else happened. One of Dr. Chuka's assistants was curious about a certain mi
neral. He used the solar furnace that had made the silicone wool to smelt it. And Dr. Chuka saw him. After one blank moment he bellowed laughter and went to see Ralph Redfeather. Whereupon Amerind steel workers sawed apart a robot hull that was not 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. Presently there were little rolls of molten metal and slag trickling—and separating as they trickled—hesitantly down the cliffside. 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 spec-book for Xosa II, and the other volumes of definitions issued by the Colonial Survey. They were definitions of the exact meaning 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."