"I don't see—"
"What we've got right here," said Herndon, "is what they're going to have back home. And worse. But there's no chance for us to keep alive here! You are the one who pointed it out! I've been figuring, and the way the solar-constant curve is going—I plotted it from the figures they gave us—it couldn't possibly level out until the oxygen, anyhow, is frozen out of the atmosphere here. We aren't equipped to stand anything like that, and we can't get equipped. There couldn't be equipment to let us stand it indefinitely! Anyhow, the maximum cold conditions will last two thousand days back home—six Earth-years. And there'll be storage of cold in frozen oceans and piled-up glaciers. It'll be twenty years before home will be back to normal in temperature, and the same here. Is there any point in trying to live—just barely to survive—for twenty years before there'll be a habitable planet to go back to?"
Massy said irritably:
"Don't be a fool! Doesn't it occur to you that this planet is a perfect experiment-station, two hundred days ahead of the home world, where ways to beat the whole business can be tried? If we can beat it here, they can beat it there!"
Herndon said detachedly:
"Can you name one thing to try here?"
"Yes," snapped Massy. "I want the walk-heaters and the step-heaters outside turned off. They use power to keep walkways clear of frost and doorsteps not slippery. I want to save that heat!"
Herndon said without interest:
"And when you've saved it, what will you do with it?"
"Put it underground to be used as needed!" Massy said angrily. "Store it in the mine! I want to put every heating-device we can contrive to work in the mine! To heat the rock! I want to draw every watt the grid will yield and warm up the inside of the mountain while we can draw power to do it with! I want the deepest part of the mine too hot to enter! We'll lose a lot of heat, of course. It's not like storing electric power! But we can store heat now, and the more we store the more will be left when we need it!"
Herndon thought heavily. Presently he stirred slightly.
"Do you know, that is an idea—" He looked up. "Back home there was a shale-oil deposit up near the icecaps. It wasn't economical to mine it. So they put beaters down in bore-holes and heated up the wholeshale deposit! Drill-holes let out the hot oil vapors to be condensed. They got out every bit of oil without disturbing the shale! And then…why…the shale stayed warm for years. Farmers bulldozed soil over it and raised crops with glaciers all around them! That could be done again. They could be storing up heat back home!"
Then he drooped.
"But they can't spare power to warm up the ground under cities. They need all the power they've got to build roofs. And it takes time to build grids."
Massy snapped:
"Yes, if they're building regulation ones! By the time they were finished they'd be useless! The ionization here is dropping already. But they don't need to build grids that will be useless later! They can weave cables together on the ground and hang them in the air by helicopters! They wouldn't hold up a landing ship for an instant, but they'll draw power right away! They'll even power the helis that hold them up! Of course they've defects! They'll have to come down in high winds. They won't be dependable. But they can put heat in the ground to come out under roofs, to grow food by, to save lives by. What's the matter with them?"
Herndon stirred again. His eyes ceased to be dull and lifeless.
"I'll give the orders for turning off the sidewalks. And I'll send what you just said back home. They should like it."
He looked very respectfully at Massy.
"I guess you know what I'm thinking right now," he said awkwardly.
Massy flushed. It was not dignified for a Colonial Survey officer to show off. He felt that Herndon was unduly impressed. But Herndon didn't see that the device wouldn't solve anything. It would merely postpone the effects of a disaster. It could not possibly prevent them.
"It ought to be done," he said curtly. "There'll be other things to be done, too."
"When you tell them to me," said Herndon warmly, "they'll get done! I'll have Riki put this into that pulsecode you explained to us and she'll get it off right away!"
He stood up.
"I didn't explain the code to her!" insisted Massy. "She was already translating it when you gave her my suggestion!"
"All right," said Herndon. "I'll get this sent back at once!"
He hurried out of the office. This, thought Massy irritably, is how reputations are made, I suppose I'm getting one. But his own reaction was extremely inappropriate. If the people of Lani II did suspend helicopter-supported grids of wire in the atmosphere, they could warm masses of underground rock and stone and earth. They could establish what were practically reservoirs of life giving heat under their cities. They could contrive that the warmth from below would rise only as it was needed. But...
Two hundred days to conditions corresponding to the colony-planet. Then two thousand days of minimum heat conditions. Then very, very slow return to normal temperature, long after the sun was back to its previous brilliance. They couldn't store enough heat for so long. It couldn't be done. It was ironic that in the freezing of ice and the making of glaciers the planet itself could store cold.
And there would be monstrous storms and blizzards on Lani II as it cooled. As cold conditions got worse the wire grids could be held aloft for shorter and shorter periods, and each time they would pull down less power than before. Their effectiveness would diminish even faster than the need for effectiveness increased.
Massy felt even deeper depression as be worked out the facts. His proposal was essentially futile. It would be encouraging, and to a very slight degree and for a certain short time it would palliate the situation on the inner planet. But in the long run its effect would be zero.
He was embarrassed, too, that Herndon was so admiring. Herndon would tell Riki that he was marvelous. She might—though cagily—be inclined to agree. But he wasn't marvelous. This trick of a flier-supported grid was not new. It had been used on Saril to supply power for giant peristaltic pumps emptying a [polder] that had been formed inside a ring of indifferently upraised islands.
All I know, thought Massy bitterly, is what somebody's showed me or I've read in books. And nobody's showed or written how to handle a thing like this! He went to Herndon's desk. Herndon had made a new graph on the solar-constant observations forwarded from home. It was a strictly typical curve of the results of coinciding cyclic changes. It was the curve of a series of frequencies at the moment when they were all precisely in phase. From this much one could extrapolate and compute. Massy took a pencil, frowning unhappily. His fingers clumsily formed equations and solved them. The result was just about as bad as it could be. The change in brightness of the sun Lani would not be enough to be observed on Kent IV—the nearest other inhabited world—when the light reached there four years from now. Lani would never be classed as a variable star, because the total change in light and heat would be relatively minute. But the formula for computing planetary temperatures is not simple. Among its factors are squares and cubes of the variables. Worse, the heat radiated from a sun's photosphere varies not as the square or cube, but as the fourth power of its absolute temperature. A very small change in the sun's effective temperature, producible by sunspots, could make an altogether disproportionate difference in the warmth its worlds received. Massy's computations were not pure theory. The data came from Sol itself, where alone in the galaxy there had been daily solar-constant measurements for three hundred years. The rest of his deductions were based ultimately on Earth observations, too. Most scientific data had to refer back to Earth to get an adequate continuity. But there was no possible doubt about the sunspot data, because Sol and Lani were of the same type and nearly equal size.