Sand Doom

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. "Domesticscience achievement." To Bordman she explained: "Her husband put a trayon 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 itfrom the heat of the sun. At night she takes off the top cover and poursher custard, thin, in the tray. Then she goes to bed. She has to get upbefore 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 knowwhy. She said it was done in a place called Babylonia on Earth, manythousands of years ago."

  Bordman blinked. Then he said decisively:

  "Damn! Who knows how much the ground-temperature drops here beforedawn?"

  "I do," said Aletha's cousin, mildly. "The top-sand temperature fallsforty-odd degrees. Warmer underneath, of course. But the air here isalmost cool when the sun rises. Why?"

  "Nights are cooler on all planets," said Bordman, "because every nightthe dark side radiates heat to empty space. There'd be frost everywhereevery morning if the ground didn't store up heat during the day. If weprevent daytime heat-storage--cover a patch of ground before dawn andleave it covered all day--and uncover it all night while shielding itfrom warm winds---- We've got refrigeration! The night sky is emptyspace itself! Two hundred and eighty below zero!"

  * * * * *

  There was a murmur. Then argument. The foremen of the Xosa IIcolony-preparation crew were strictly practical men, but they had thehabit of knowing why some things were practical. One does not do modernsteel construction in contempt of theory, nor handle modern mining toolswithout knowing why as well as how they work. This proposal sounded likesomething that was based on reason--that should work to some degree.But how well? Anybody could guess that it should cool something at leasttwice as much as the normal night temperature-drop. But somebodyproduced a slipstick and began to juggle it expertly. He astonishedlyannounced his results. Others questioned, and then verified it. Nobodypaid much attention to Bordman. But there was a hum of absorbeddiscussion, in which Redfeather and Chuka were immediately included. Bycalculation, it astoundingly appeared that if the air on Xosa II wasreally as clear as the bright stars and deep day-sky color indicated,every second night a total drop of one hundred and eighty degreestemperature could be secured by radiation to interstellar space--ifthere were no convection-currents, and they could be prevented by----

  It was the convection-current problem which broke the assembly intogroups with different solutions. But it was Dr. Chuka who boomed at allof them to try all three solutions and have them ready before daybreak,so the assembly left the hulk, still disputing enthusiastically. Butsomebody had recalled that there were dewponds in the one arid area onTimbuk, and somebody else remembered that irrigation on Delmos III wasaccomplished that same way. And they recalled how it was done----

  Voices went away in the ovenlike night outside. Bordman grimaced, andagain said:

  "Damn! Why didn't I think of that myself?"

  "Because," said Aletha, smiling, "you aren't a Doctor of Human Historywith a horse-raising husband and a fondness for ice cream. Even so, atechnician was needed to break down the problem here into really simpleterms." Then she said, "I think Bob Running Antelope might approve ofyou, 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 moreproblems."

  Her cousin came back into the room. He said with gratification:

  "Chuka can turn out silicone-wool insulation, he says. Plenty ofmaterial, and he'll use a solar mirror to get the heat he needs. Plentyof temperature to make silicones! How much area will we need to pull infour thousand gallons of water a night?"

  "How do I know?" demanded Bordman. "What's the moisture-content of theair here, anyhow?" Then he said vexedly, "Tell me! Are you usingheat-exchangers to help cool the air you pump into the buildings, beforeyou use power to refrigerate it? It would save some power----"

  The Indian project engineer said absorbedly:

  "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 withdrewinto themselves. In even two months of routine tedious voyaging to thisplanet, there had been the beginnings of irritation with the mannerismsof other men. Now there would be years of it. At the beginning, everyman tended to become a hermit so that he could postpone as long aspossible the time when he would hate his shipmates. Monotony was alreadyso familiar that its continuance was a foreknown evil. The crew of the_Warlock_ already knew how intolerable they would presently be to eachother, and the foreknowledge tended to make them intolerable now.

  Within two days of its establishment in orbit, the _Warlock_ was mannedby men already morbidly resentful of fate; with the psychology ofprisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but ghastlyperiod. On the third day there was a second fist fight. A bitter one.

  Fist fights are not healthy symptoms in a spaceship which cannot hope tomake port for a matter of years.

  * * * * *

  Most human problems are circular and fall apart when a single trivialpart of them is solved. There used to be enmity between races becausethey were different, and they tended to be different because they wereenemies, so there was enmity--The big problem of interstellar flight wasthat nothing could travel faster than light, and nothing could travelfaster than light because mass increased with speed, and mass increasedwith speed--obviously!--because ships remained in the same time-slot,and ships remained in the same time-slot long after a one-second shiftwas possible because nobody realized that it meant traveling faster thanlight. And even before there was interstellar travel, there waspractically no interplanetary commerce because it took so much fuel totake off and land. And it took more fuel to carry the fuel to take offand land, and more still to carry the fuel for that, until somebody usedpower on the ground for heave-off instead of take-off, and again on theground for landing. And then interplanetary ships carried cargoes. Andon Xosa II there was an emergency because a sandstorm had buried thealmost completed landing grid under some megatons of sand, and itcouldn't be completed because there was only storage power because itwasn't completed, because there was only storage power because----

  But it took three weeks for the problem to be seen as the ultimatelysimple thing it really was. Bordman had called it a circular problem,but he hadn't seen its true circularity. It was actually--like allcircular problems--inherently an unstable set of conditions. It began tofall apart when he saw that mere refrigeration would break its solidity.

  In one week there were ten acres of desert covered withsilicone-wool-felt in great strips. By day a reflective surface wasuppermost, and at sundown caterwheel trucks hooked on to towlines andneatly pulled it over on its back, to expose gridded black-body surfacesto the starlight. And the gridding was precisely designed so that windsblowing across it did not make eddies in the grid-squares, and thechilled air in those pockets remained undisturbed and there was noconduction of heat downward by eddy currents, while there was admirableradiation of heat out to space. And this was in the manner of the nightsides of all planets, only somewhat more efficient.

  * * * * *

  In two weeks there was a water yield of three thousand gallons pernight, and in three weeks more there were similar grids over the colonyhouses and a vast roofed cooling-shed for pre-chilling of air to be usedby the refrigeration systems themselves. The fuel-store--storedpower--was thereupon stretched to three times its former calculatedusefulness. The situation was no longer a simple and neat equation ofdespair.

  Then something else happened. One of Dr. Chuka's
assistants was curiousabout a certain mineral. He used the solar furnace that had made thesilicone wool to smelt it. And Dr. Chuka saw him. And after one blankmoment he bellowed laughter and went to see Ralph Redfeather. WhereuponAmerind steel-workers sawed apart a robot hull that was no longer a fueltank because its fuel was gone, and they built a demountable solarmirror some sixty feet across--which African mechanics deftlypowered--and suddenly there was a spot of incandescence even brighterthan the sun of Xosa II, down on the planet's surface. It played upon amineral cliff, and monstrous smells developed and even the Africanmining-technicians put on goggles because of the brightness, andpresently there were threads of molten metal and slag trickling--andseparating as they trickled--hesitantly down the cliff-side.

  And Dr. Chuka beamed and