Murray Leinster

“ Aletha’s cousin mounted the control-saddle—though it was no more than a blanket—and Dr. Chuka mounted beside Bordman. The ground car got under way. It headed for the mountains.
The smoothness of the rock was [22] deceptive. The caterwheel car lurched and bumped and swayed and rocked. It rolled and dipped and wallowed. Nobody could have remained in a normal seat on such terrain, but Bordman felt hopelessly undignified riding what amounted to a hobbyhorse. Under the sunshade it was infuriatingly like a horse on a carousel. ”

“ Chuka’s assistants was curious about a certain mineral. He used the solar furnace that had made the silicone wool to smelt it. And Dr. Chuka saw him. And after one blank moment he bellowed laughter and went to see Ralph Redfeather. Whereupon Amerind steel-workers sawed apart a robot hull that was no 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. ”

“ Bordman was ashamed again because Chuka had spoken to cover up his own ill-nature.
“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.” ”

“ Who knows how much the ground-temperature drops here before dawn?”
“I do,” said Aletha’s cousin, mildly. “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. ”

“ 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, nor 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. ”

“ Power not only to work with, but to live by. The air-cooling machinery that made sleep possible also condensed from the cooled air the minute trace of water vapor it contained and that they needed for drink. But without power they would thirst. Without the landing grid and the power it took from the ionosphere, they could not receive supplies from the rest of the universe. So they would starve.
And the Warlock, now in orbit somewhere overhead, was well within the planet’s gravitational field and could not use its Lawlor drive to escape with news of their predicament. ”

“ Aletha rode behind her cousin on the saddle-blanket, and apparently suffered little if at all. But Bordman could only ride in the ground-car’s cargo space, along with the sack of mail from the ship. The ground was unbelievably rough and the jolting intolerable. The heat was literally murderous. In the metal cargo space, the temperature reached a hundred and sixty degrees in the sunshine—and given enough time, food will cook in no more heat than that. Of course a man has been known to enter an oven and stay there while a roast was cooked, and to come out alive. ”

“ The dunes yonder must be gigantic. But of course on a world the size of ancient Earth, and which was waterless save for snow-patches at its poles, the size to which sand dunes could grow had no limit. ”

“ But he did not know what they meant.
“Coups,” repeated Aletha matter-of-factly. “Ralph wears three eagle-feathers. You saw them. He has three coups. Pinions, too! He built the landing grids on Norlath and—Oh, you don’t know!”
“I don’t,” admitted Bordman, his temper not of the best because of what seemed unnecessary condescensions on Xosa II.
Aletha looked surprised.
“In the old days,” she explained, “back on Earth, if a man scalped an enemy, he counted coup. The first to strike an enemy in a battle counted coup, too—a lesser one. ”

“ Their heritage made them less than appreciative of urban life. Their inborn indifference to heights made them the steel-construction men of the cosmos, and more than two-thirds of the landing grids in the whole galaxy had their coup-feather symbols on the key posts. But the planet government on Algonka V was housed in a three-thousand-foot white stone tepee, and the best horses known to men were raised by ranchers with bronze skins and high cheekbones on the llano planet Chagan. ”

“ A lifeboat had Lawlor drive and could travel light-years, but in the place of rockets and rocket fuel it had air-purifiers and water-recovery units and food-stores. It couldn’t land without a landing grid aground, but it could get to a civilized planet. ”

“ 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 and 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. ”

“ We have arrived at Xosa II and have established an orbit about it. A landing will be made by boat.”
Bordman’s mouth dropped open.
“What the devil’s this?” he demanded.
“Adventure, maybe,” said Aletha. Her eyes crinkled very pleasantly when she smiled. She wore the modern Amerind dress—a sign of pride in the ancestry which now implied such diverse occupations as interstellar steel construction and animal husbandry and llano-planet colonization. ”

“ The ship could not land, because there was no landing grid in operation on the planet below them. They could not depart, because the Lawlor drive simply does not work within five diameters of an Earth-gravity planet. Space is warped only infinitesimally by so thin a field, but a Lawlor drive needs almost perfectly unstressed emptiness if it is to take hold. They did not have fuel enough to blast out the necessary thirty-odd thousand miles against gravity. The same consideration made their lifeboats useless. They could not escape by rocket-power and their Lawlor drives, also, were ineffective. ”

“ But it was visibly a miniature of the great, now-uncovered, re-painted landing grid which was qualified to handle interstellar cargo ships and all the proper space-traffic of a minerals-colony planet.
A caterwheel truck came lurching and rolling and rumbling down the side of the pit. It had a sunshade and ground-reflector wings, and Bordman rode tiredly on a hobbyhorse saddle in its back cargo section. He wore a heat-suit. ”

“ 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 [34] 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. At the beginning, every man tended to become a hermit so that he could postpone as long as possible the time when he would hate his shipmates. ”

“ 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 sandproof. 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.” ”

“ And even before there was interstellar travel, there was practically no interplanetary commerce because it took so much fuel to take off and land. And 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. ”

“ There’d eventually be a report of noncommunication to the Colony Survey headquarters on Canna III. But it would take three months for that report to be received, and six more for a confirmation—even if ships made the voyages exactly at the most favorable intervals—and then there should at least be a complaint from the colony. There were lifeboats aground on Xosa II, for emergency communication, and if a lifeboat didn’t bring news of a planetary crisis, no crisis would be considered to exist. Nobody could imagine a landing grid failing! ”

“ The sand would flay a man’s skin off his body in minutes. So we waited it out.
“When it ended, there was this sand plateau where the survey had ordered the landing grid to be built. The grid was under it. It is under it. The top of eighteen hundred feet of steel is still buried two hundred feet down in the sand you see. Our unfabricated building-steel is piled ready for erection—under two thousand feet of sand. Without anything but stored power it is hardly practical”—Redfeather’s [25] tone was sardonic—“for us to try to dig it out. There are hundreds of millions of tons of stuff to be moved. ”

“ There would be off-watch time for twenty-one out of every twenty-four hours, and no purposeful activity to fill even half an hour of it. In a matter of—probably—years, the Warlock should receive aid. She might be towed out of her orbit to space in which the Lawlor drive could function, or the crew might simply be taken off. But meanwhile, those on board were as completely frustrated as the colony. They could not do anything at all to help themselves.
In one fashion the crewmen were worse off than the colonists. The colonists had at least the colorful prospect of death before them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, again curtly, “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. If one lets the buildings warm up a little, to stretch the fuel, there won’t be enough water to drink. ”

“ Bringing the Warlock in? Why the insistence on my being here?”
“Ralph has a problem,” said Chuka blandly. “He’s up there. See? He needs you. There’s a hoist. You’ve got to check degree-of-completion anyhow. You might take a look around while you’re up there. But he’s anxious for you to see something. There where you see the little knot of people. The platform.”
Bordman grimaced. When one was well started on a survey, one got used to heights and depths and all sorts of environments. But he hadn’t been up on steel-work in a good many months. Not since a survey on Kalka IV nearly a year ago. ”

“ Bordman went on coldly, “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 [30] something else. Redfeather tells me you accept the situation. ”

“ Amerinds died there quicker than most.
“Ralph’s on the way here now,” added Aletha. “He and Dr. Chuka were out picking a place to leave the records. The sand dunes here are terrible, you know. When an explorer-ship does come to find out what’s happened to us, these buildings could be covered up completely. Any place could be. It isn’t easy to pick a record-cache that’s quite sure to be found.”
“When,” said Bordman skeptically, “there’s nobody left alive to point it out. Is that it?”
“That’s it,” agreed Aletha. “It’s pretty bad all around. I didn’t plan to die just yet.” ”

“ The colony is no longer in danger, and we shall have the grid completely finished for your inspection before the ship is ready to return.”
Bordman said uncomfortably:
“That’s very good. It’s excellent. I’ll put it in my survey report.”
“But,” said Ralph, more ceremonially still, “we have the right to count coup for the members of our tribe and clan. Now——”
Then there was confusion. Aletha’s cousin was saying syllables that did not mean anything at all. The other Indians joined in at intervals, speaking gibberish. Aletha’s eyes were shining and she looked incredibly pleased and satisfied. ”

“ If we could get the sand away, we could finish the grid. If we could finish the grid, we’d have power enough to get the sand away—in a few years, and if we could replace the machinery that wore out handling it. ”

“ Aletha’s cousin shook hands cordially.
“I’m Ralph Redfeather,” he said, introducing himself. “Project engineer. About everything’s wrong. Our landing grid’s gone. We couldn’t contact your ship in time to warn it off. It was in our gravity field before it answered, and its Lawlor drive couldn’t take it away—not working because of the field. Our power, of course, went with the landing grid. The ship you came in can’t get back, and we can’t send a distress message anywhere, and our best estimate is that the colony will be wiped out—thirst and starvation—in six months. ”

“ A boat landing was nonsensical!
But he surveyed the contents of his cabin. Most of the cargo of the Warlock was smelter equipment which was to complete the outfitting of the colony. It was to be unloaded first. By the time the ship’s holds were wholly empty, the smelter would be operating. The ship would wait for a full cargo of pig metal. Bordman had expected to live in this cabin while he worked on the survey he’d come to make, and to leave again with the ship.
Now he was to go aground by boat. He fretted. The only emergency equipment he could possibly need was a heat-suit. ”