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 truck reached the pit’s bottom. There was a tool shed there. The caterwheel-truck bumped up to it and stopped. Bordman got out, visibly cramped by the jolting, rocking, exhausting-to-unaccustomed-muscles ride.
“Do you want to go in the shed and cool off?” asked Chuka brightly.
“I’m all right,” said Bordman curtly. “I’m quite comfortable, so long as you feed me that expanded air.” It was plain that he resented needing even a special air supply. “What’s all this about? 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. He would be dizzy at first.
He accompanied Chuka to the spot where a steel cable dangled from an almost invisibly thin beam high above. There was a strictly improvised cage to ascend in—planks and a handrail forming an insecure platform that might hold four people. He got into it, and Dr. Chuka got in beside him. Chuka waved his hand. The cage started up.
Bordman winced as the ground dropped away below. It was ghastly to be dangling in emptiness like this. He wanted to close his eyes. The cage went up and up and up. It took many long minutes to reach the top.
There was a platform there. Newly-made. The sunlight was blindingly bright. The landscape was an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his goggles to maximum darkness and stepped gingerly from the swaying cage to the hardly more solid-seeming area. Here he was in mid-air on a platform barely ten feet square. It was rather more than twice the height of a metropolitan skyscraper from the ground. There were actual mountain-crests only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman was acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but——
“Well?” he asked fretfully. “Chuka said you needed me here. What’s the matter?”
Ralph Redfeather nodded very formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of Chuka’s foremen—one did not look happy—and four of the Amerind steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman.
“I wanted you to see,” said Aletha’s cousin, “before we threw on the current. It doesn’t look like that little grid could handle the sand it took care of. But Lewanika wants to report.”
A dark man who worked under Chuka—and looked as if he belonged on solid ground—said carefully:
“We cast the beams for the small landing grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into molds as it flowed down.”
He stopped. One of the Indians said:
“We made the girders into the small landing grid. It bothered us because we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn’t understand why you ordered it there. But we built it.”
The second dark man said with a trace of swagger:
“We made the coils, Mr. Bordman. We made the small grid so it would work the same as the big one when it was finished. And then we made the big grid work, finished or not!”
Bordman said impatiently:
“All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?”
“Just so,” said Aletha, smiling. “Be patient, Mr. Bordman!”
Her cousin said conversationally:
“We built the small grid on the top of the sand. And it tapped the ionosphere for power. No lack of power then! And we’d set it to heave up sand instead of ships. Not to heave it out into space, but to give it up to mile a second vertical velocity. Then we turned it on.”
“And we rode it down, that little grid,” said one of the remaining Indians, grinning. “What a party! Manitou!”
Redfeather frowned at him and took up the narrative.
“It hurled the sand up from its center. As you said it would, the sand swept air with it. It made a whirlwind, bringing more sand from outside the grid into its field. It was a whirlwind with fifteen megakilowatts of power to drive it. Some of the sand went twenty miles high. Then it made a mushroom-head and the winds up yonder blew it to the west. It came down a long way off, Mr. Bordman. We’ve made a new dune-area ten miles downwind. And the little grid sank as the sand went away from around it. We had to stop it three times, because it leaned. We had to dig under parts of it to get it straight up again. But it went down into the valley.”
Bordman turned up the power to his heat-suit motors. He felt uncomfortably warm.
“In six days,” said Ralph, almost ceremonially, “it had uncovered half the original grid we’d built. Then we were able to modify that to heave sand and to let it tap the ionosphere. We were able to use a good many times the power the little grid could apply to sand-lifting! In two days more the landing grid was clear. The valley bottom was clean. We shifted some hundreds of millions of tons of sand by landing grid, and now it is possible to land the Warlock, and receive her supplies, and the solar-power furnace is already turning out pigs for her loading. We wanted you to see what we have done. 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.
“But what ... what’s this?” demanded Bordman when they stopped.
Aletha spoke proudly.
“Ralph just formally adopted you into the tribe, Mr. Bordman—and into his clan and mine! He gave you a name I’ll have to write down for you, but it means, ‘Man-who-believes-not-his-own-wisdom.’ And now——”
Ralph Redfeather—licensed interstellar engineer, graduate of the stiffest technical university in this quarter of the galaxy, wearer of three eagle-pinion feathers and clad in a pair of insulated sandals and a breechcloth—whipped out a small paint-pot and a brush from somewhere and began carefully to paint on a section of girder ready for the next tier of steel. He painted a feather on the metal.
“It’s a coup,” he told Bordman over his shoulder. “Your coup. Placed where it was earned—up here. Aletha is authorized to certify it. And the head of the clan will add an eagle-feather to the headdress he wears in council in the Big Tepee on Algonka, and—your clan-brothers will be proud!”