"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.
But Massy looked puzzledly at the sky, as if he did not quite believe his eyes. The cloud now expanded very slowly, but still it grew. And it was not regular in shape. The bomb had not shattered quite evenly, and the vapor had poured out more on one side than the other. There was a narrow, arching arm of brightness—"It looks," said Riki breathlessly, "like a comet!"
And then Massy froze in every muscle. He stared at the cloud he had made aloft, and his hands clenched in their mittens, and he swallowed convulsively behind his cold-mask.
"Th-that's it," he said in a very queer voice indeed. "It's…very much like a comet. I'm glad you said that! We can make something even more like a comet. We…we can use all the bombs we've made, right away, to make it. And we've got to hurry so it won't get any colder tonight!"
Which, of course, sounded like insanity. Riki looked apprehensively at him. But Massy had just thought of something. And nobody had taught it to him and he hadn't gotten it out of books. But he'd seen a comet.
The new idea was so promising that he regarded it with anguished unease for fear it would not hold up. It was an idea that really ought to change the facts resulting naturally from a lowered solar constant in a Sol-type star.
Half the colony set to work to make more bombs when the effect of the second bomb showed up. They were not very efficient, at first, because they tended to want to stop work and dance from time to time. But they worked with an impassioned enthusiasm. They made more bomb-casings, and they prepared more sodium and potassium metal and more fuses, and more insulation to wrap around the bombs to protect them from the cold of airless space.
Because these were to go out to airlessness. The miniature grid could lift and hold a bomb steady in its field focus at seven hundred-and fifty thousand feet.But if a bomb was accelerated all the way out to that point, and the field was then snapped off—Why, it wasn't held anywhere. It kept on going with its attained velocity. And it burst when its fuse decided that it should, whereupon immediately a mass of sodium and potassium vapor, mixed with the fumes of high explosive, flung itself madly in all directions, out between the stars. Absolute vacuum tore the compressed gasified metals apart. The separate atoms, white-hot from the explosion, went swirling through sunlit space. The sunlight was dimmed a trifle, to be sure. But individual atoms of the lighter alkaline-earth metals have marked photoelectric properties. In sunshine these gas-molecules ionized, and therefore spread more widely, and did not coalesce into even microscopic droplets.
They formed, in fact, a cloud in space. An ionized cloud, in which no particle was too large to be responsive to the pressure of light. The cloud acted like the gases of a comet's tail. It was a comet's tail, though there was no comet. And it was an extraordinary comet's tail because it is said that you can put a comet's tail in your hat, at normal atmospheric pressure. But this could not have been put in a hat. Even before it turned to gas, it was the size of a basketball. And, in space, it glowed. It glowed with the brightness of the sunshine on it, which was light that would normally have gone away through the interstellar dark. And it filled one corner of the sky. Within one hour it was a comet's tail ten thousand miles long, which visibly brightened the daytime heavens. And it was only the first of such reflecting clouds.
The next bomb set for space exploded in a different quarter, because Massy'd had the miniature grid wrestled around the upcrop to point in a new and somewhat more carefully chosen line. The third bomb spattered brilliance in a different section still. And the brilliance lasted.
Massy flung his first bombs recklessly, because there could be more. But he was desperately anxious to hang as many comet tails as possible around the colony planet before nightfall. He didn't want it to get any colder.
And it didn't. In fact, there wasn't exactly any real nightfall on Lani III that night.
The planet turned on its axis, to be sure. But around it, quite close by, there hung gigantic streamers of shining gas. At their beginning, those streamers bore a certain resemblance to the furry wild-animal tails that little boys like to have hanging down from hunting-caps. Only they shone. And as they developed they merged, so that, there was an enormous shining curtain about Lani III. There were draperies of metal-mist to capture sunlight that should have been wasted, and to diffuse very much of it to Lani III. At midnight there was only one spot in all the night-sky where there was really darkness. That was directly overhead—directly outward from the planet from the sun. Gigantic shining streamers formed a wall, a tube, of comet-tail material, yet many times more dense and therefore brighter, which shielded the colony world against the dark and cold, and threw upon it a brilliant, warming brightness.
Riki maintained stoutly that she could feel the warmth from the sky, but that was improbable. But certainly heat did come from somewhere. The thermometer did not fall at all, that night. It rose. It was up to fifty below zero at dawn. During the day they sent out twenty more bombs that second day—it was up to twenty degrees below zero. By the day after, there was highly competent computation from the home planet, and the concrete results of abstruse speculation, and the third day's bombs were placed with optimum spacing for heating purposes.
And by dawn of the fourth day the air was a balmy five degrees below zero, and the day after that there was a small running stream in the valley at midday.
There was talk of stocking the stream with fish on the morning the Survey ship came in. The great landing-grid gave out a deep-toned vibrant, humming note, like the deepest possible note of the biggest organ that could be imagined. A speck appeared very, very high up in a pale-blue sky with trimmings of golden gas-clouds. The Survey ship came down and down and set, tied as a shining silver object in the very center of the gigantic red-painted landing-grid.
Later, her skipper came to find Massy. He was in Herndon's office. The skipper struggled to keep sheer blankness out of his expression.
"What…what the hell?" he demanded querulously of Massy. "This is the damnedest sight In the whole galaxy, and they tell me you're responsible! There've been ringed planets before, and there've been comets and who-knows-what! But shining gas pipes aimed at the sun, half a million miles across…What the? There are two of them! Both the occupied planets!"
Herndon explained with a bland succinctness why the curtains hung in space. There was a drop in the solar constant.
The skipper exploded. He wanted facts! Details! Something to report! And dammit, he wanted to know!
Massy was automatically on the defensive when the skipper shot his questions to him. A Senior Colonial Survey officer is not revered by the Survey ship-service officers. Men like Massy can be a nuisance to a hardworking ship's officer. They have to be carried to unlikely places for their work of checking over colonial installations. They have to be put down on hard-to-get-at colonies, and they have to be called for, sometimes, at times and places which are inconvenient. So a man in Massy's position is likely to feel unpopular.