She was breathing hard, obviously nervous. "I want to talk to you, Bill," she said breathlessly.
I waited. I knew at least part of why she was nervous. The last time we had been together without other people around had been an incident neither of us wanted to remember.
"I'm not sure you understand why I threw myself at your head," she said, with an effort. "It's true, I suppose, I was trying to bribe you. I wanted to live -- oh, I know I was quite wrong. I've thought since about what you said. I misunderstood you completely. I -- "
She wasn't getting anywhere. "Must we talk about it, Leslie?" I asked quietly. "I'll forget it ever happened, if you like."
"I don't want that. I'm trying to explain. . . . You see, I didn't know you. I wanted to live. I wasn't honest, like Pat. What was it she said? 'I just carry on being myself without trying to buy myself a place on the ship by being someone else.' I didn't believe that at the time, but I did later. Anyway, I wasn't like that, and I knew it. I wasn't as honest as Pat, but at least I was honest with myself. I wanted to live more than anything. If you could be bribed, I was ready to bribe you."
She looked at me steadily, anxiously, trying to make me understand. "I thought it out carefully, and made sure I meant what I was doing. I had only one thing to bribe you with, and when I really thought of it honestly, it didn't seem to matter much to me. I know I was wrong -- the question is, how wrong was I?"
"Not terribly wrong," I said, smiling faintly. "But I still think the least said about the whole thing the better."
"No," Leslie insisted. "Because if I meant it then, I should mean it now. Do you want me?"
I frowned. "That's mad," I said flatly.
"I don't think so," she said stubbornly. "It couldn't be a question of money, because money won't matter for quite a while now. But suppose it was money. Suppose I offered you a thousand dollars to do something, and you did it without taking the money. I'd still want to give you the thousand dollars. I'd feel you'd have to take it so -- "
I burst out laughing. Leslie couldn't see the joke at first, but after a while she was laughing too. It was a ridiculous situation.
At last I said: "Leslie, I'm still turning down your bribe. I don't want you, you owe me nothing, and if you're trying to sell yourself I'm not in the market. Is that clear?"
"You're making a joke of it," she said, laughing despite herself, "and I was perfectly serious."
"Are you quite satisfied that you're not under any obligation to me?"
"Yes, if you say so.
"Right. Now that that's settled -- Leslie, will you marry me?"
She stopped smiling abruptly and looked at me in amazement.
"If you feel you owe me anything," I said, "the answer's no. Or if you don't think you could possibly love me, ever. But don't say no just because you don't love me now."
"I do love you now," she whispered.
She couldn't, really; she hadn't had an opportunity. But if she thought she loved me, all the better.
We kissed, and floated in the air in each other's arms.
Later I told her what I'd had in mind when I went looking for her. She thought over what I said, and agreed. We decided to set an example right away.
I stripped to trunks and Leslie took off her dress, stockings, and shoes. "Do you think this will make enough difference?" she asked.
"No, we'll have to do other things too."
We clasped hands, pushed off from a wall, and soared into the lounge together.
"Hold everything," I said, when everyone looked up, startled, "we're not starting an interplanetary branch of the SunA. I think we should all strip, and if anyone wants to go naked altogether, so much the better."
They still stared. So I explained. "Why has everyone a headache?" I asked patiently. "Why has Betty a fever? Why has Morgan a cold?"
Sammy, Miss Wallace, and Leslie knew what I was talking about. No one else. It's amazing sometimes how obvious a thing has to become before people will see it.
"The air in here," I said, "is kept fresh enough, but the temperature is going up and up." I pointed to the white panels on the walls. "That's neutralex, and it just doesn't conduct heat at all. It's rather too efficient, in fact -- combustion's going on in all of us, we're cooking food, and none of that heat's getting away. So the temperature's going up a degree at a time, and it'll keep going up until we find some way to stop it."
"Taking off our clothes won't help much," Morgan objected, and sneezed.
"True," I said, "but it's a start. The unhealthiest conditions occur when the air is warm and motionless. The skin isn't cooled and dried as it should be. In here, the hydroponics plant handles excess carbon dioxide well enough, and the water purifier mops up quite a lot of water vapor from the atmosphere. But the circulation set up by the hydroponics aeration plant is too slow to make much difference, when the temperature's so high. What we must do somehow is step up the circulation, bring down the temperature, and stop wearing clothes that we don't need any more."
Sammy threw off his sweater and pants. I caught his eye and he came over and joined Leslie and me.
"Wasn't there any provision for this?" Sammy demanded.
"Not that I know of. There's nothing we can use as a fan, but we may be able to lower the temperature."
"How?"
I swam to the wall and tapped the white paneling. "This neutralex," I said, "is simply a barrier cutting off all heat. There's no chink in it. But if we make one, we'll radiate heat at that spot."
Leslie frowned. "Space is at absolute zero, isn't it?" she objected. "Seems to me we'll lose too much heat too fast."
I shook my head. "Behind the panels is the shell of the ship. It's absorbing heat from the sun, more or less equalizing it through its whole volume by conduction, and radiating it again on the side away from the sun. Remember, there's no conduction or convection, only radiation. And balancing any heat we radiate, there's the quite considerable amount of heat radiation we're getting from the sun."
We set to work unscrewing one of the panels. As I worked, I glanced now and then at the others behind us in the lounge to see how they were reacting.
Perhaps I gave this too much importance, but as I saw it, though it might not make an enormous difference whether everybody on the ship stripped down or not, this, like the marriage question, was an index of their adaptability. They were being asked to change their behavior and ideas slightly, because circumstances had changed.
Immediately Sammy and Leslie had seen what I was getting at, they agreed -- they adapted. No argument. Jim Stowe and Bessie too -- Jim looked at his father, received no guidance, and threw off his shirt. Bessie didn't care in the slightest. She had no idea why we were taking off our clothes, but she obliged too, and nobody stopped her. She left only her white panties, and then, after a long, thoughtful stare at Leslie, began gravely to fashion herself a brassiere out of the sash of her frock. To Bessie this was another game.
But the others whispered together and showed no sign of following our example. Well, if they didn't believe what I said, or really didn't think it mattered, I didn't mind. If, however, they were stubbornly refusing to change their ideas, it didn't augur well for a future in which they might have to do that every day for years.
4
It was on the eighth day that we found the prophecies had been right and the sun had really stepped up its output.
We had licked the temperature difficulty, more or less. We removed enough panels to set the balance right, and I tinkered with the hydroponics aeration plant to increase the circulation in the ship generally, watched by an anxious Harry Phillips. The hydroponics plant was his baby, and he didn't quite trust me with it.
Despite my assurances, Leslie and Sammy remained afraid that we would all freeze if we left the panels off -- until at last, after it had been done, they saw that a nice balance had been achieved, and the temperature went neither up nor down. They also, incidentally, remained convinced for a long time that having cold spots on the
walls would set up a strong air circulation and we wouldn't have to bother about that.
I explained carefully that it wasn't the expansion of heated air, or the contraction of cooled air, that set up circulation. It was a question of density -- and on the lifeship, density just did not exist. Density is mass per unit volume; volume still existed, could still change, but there was no weight. Heat air on a weightless ship and it certainly expands, but it doesn't rise. It expands outward, evenly, and the compressed air around it tries to push it back evenly. There's no draft -- light a match where there's no weight and no air circulation, hold it still, and it promptly goes out.
When we had achieved our temperature balance, this was clear enough to Sammy and Leslie. We had a slow circulation, without which the measures we took wouldn't have been effective at all. The cooling areas had no effect whatever on the air circulation of the ship. On the mere movement of air they had some, since as the air cooled it contracted and dragged more air in. These, however, were only eddies and had nothing to do with the movement of air round and round the ship.
On the eighth day our temperature control was functioning and checked. There had been no significant variation in more than twenty-four hours.
Sammy, Leslie, the two children, and I were still going around wearing as little as possible, and we were still the only ones who were. Morgan's cold, Betty's fever, and the general headaches had all cleared up, so perhaps the other five thought it was now unnecessary to follow our example.
Then suddenly it was hot. It couldn't have been sudden, really, but it certainly seemed so. The temperature had been adjusted so that while it wasn't cold it was always cool, certainly for those of us who were lightly clad. Leslie was in the hydroponics plant, Sammy and I working on the water purifier, and we didn't notice the change until we found ourselves sweating.
"The sun!" Sammy exclaimed.
We knew at once what he meant. Eight days ago had been deadline; the sun's change might have occurred when it was supposed to, for all we knew. It was behind us -- the only way we had of looking at it was to put on the space suit and go out at the air lock to look back.
The change inside the lifeship, however, was so marked that we knew almost to the minute when the sun entered its new phase. The alloy outer skin of the ship, of course, was absorbing extra heat; the balance we had created was gone, and the temperature went up again.
That didn't matter much. We could handle that problem as we had handled it before. But something else did matter.
Earth was beginning to die. Already the extra heat was searing the world we had left. I saw Sammy's eyes cloud and knew what he was thinking.
The polar icecaps were melting. Elsewhere, clouds of water vapor were rising from every open body of water. Soon lakes would bubble and gurgle; real steam would begin to rise. The ground would crack and leaves would shrivel. There would be earthquakes, as the wave of heat tried to equalize itself through Earth's brittle crust.
SunAs were ecstatically offering their bodies to the new sun, glorying in the new warmth in cold spots, throwing away furs and heavy coats. In the warmer places the SunAs were arching back luxuriously in the new blinding heat -- and in a few minutes screaming as it blackened their skin.
Wood houses were catching fire spontaneously, bridges buckling, girders pushing their way through masonry and plaster. Parched winds were rising, sweeping hissing steam along city streets. Lamp standards buckled, water tanks burst, glass cracked and fell in splinters.
People were running, then tripping as the sidewalks split, screaming as their clothes began to smolder. People were dashing into bathrooms, turning on the cold shower and being scalded by the boiling water and steam that emerged. Others, unthinking, were running for lakes and pools, unaware that the water was already well on the way to being steam. Once more the astonishing thing would be that human beings lived so long, still moving, trying to survive in a world where every tree was blazing. All over one side of the planet people who were dead, their bodies roasted, still moved and shrieked and strove for blessed coolness which no longer existed.
Now even the polar regions would be hidden under boiling clouds. Down in the depths of the sea there was still coolness, while the waters above boiled and tried to leap bodily into the atmosphere. Some deep-sea fish would still be swimming about unaware of disaster.
People on the slopes of high mountains were climbing higher and higher, and then finding abruptly that there was no escape. Even the icecaps of high mountains were turning to steam.
Hurricanes were sweeping the world, for the heat was still uneven. But they weren't cold gales -- they were tearing blasts of hot air that could lift a stream bodily and never let it down.
Coalpits were burning, grassland was burning, forests were burning, whole streets in towns were ablaze. Yet there would still be freak spots in this mad world where people and animals out in the open were still alive, and water existed as water, not steam.
Now there would be volcanoes where there never had been volcanoes, the ravaged Earth adding her own contribution to the devastation. Perhaps Atlantis had risen again and was dry as a bone in a matter of minutes.
The side of Earth where it was night was having a very different, but no less frightening, experience. Tremors, sudden winds, a hot breath from somewhere, no more. Time to prepare, for obviously something was happening, something worse was going to happen; suspense, not actuality. A few minutes, even an hour or two, of reports from the other side of the world, jamming the wires and the ether -- then silence. More tremors, earthquakes; the first tidal waves. And all the time the Earth was spinning, bringing millions of square miles of undevastated land into the glare, tilting seared land and boiling sea into darkness and comparative coolness -- too late.
Then storms, pouring rain as water-sodden air swept around the world, cooled, and unloaded millions of tons of water on the dark land and sea. Still the world turned, giving more and more of its surface to the killing heat. Hot hurricanes were following the cool monsoons on the dark side. Already, in the night, the quarter of the Earth that remained was feeling the burning breath of the new sun. The moon was strangely bright, reflecting a stronger glare.
The part of the Earth which had been in the glare of the sun since the beginning was by this time cauterized, sterilized by heat. Nothing remained, not animals, not birds, not reptiles, not insects, not plant life. And there was no liquid for fish to live in. The bodies of the creatures which had died, if not burned, were desiccated.
But even in this part there was still life, human life. The Trogs lived -- the scientific cavemen, the people who had known what was coming and prepared for it, digging deep and very special holes in the ground.
This, however, was only the start. Even when the Earth turned and there was not a square inch of ground that had not been seared by the new, more passionate sun, it was no more than a beginning. The mean temperature of the Earth, through all its mass, probably hadn't risen more than one degree yet. . . .
That was for the future -- the next day, then the next. But no one would be around to see what happened in the later stages.
What brought me back to the lifeship, which was my concern, from the doomed Earth, which wasn't, was the prosaic fact that Harry Phillips was taking off his shirt.
I forced my attention back to the present, the lifeship. Earth was the past -- we had known that since we left it.
It wasn't unimportant that Harry was taking off his shirt. Given the lead, Morgan Smith started to peel off his clothes too. They had thought in their various ways of the world they had left, and suddenly, perhaps for the first time, they realized they had left it and that its standards, its way of life, and the things it demanded no longer had any real meaning.
It was hot in the lifeship, stifling hot; Bill Easson was probably right after all. So they stripped, and another part of Earth died. We were no longer men and women of the third planet, the green world.
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