"Let's go see," said Bordman.
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 minute cloud. 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!"
But Bordman was looking 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 Bordman froze in every muscle. He stared at the cloud he had made aloft, and his hands clenched in their mittens, and he swallowed behind his cold-mask.
"Th-that's it," he said in a hushed voice. "It's—verymuch like a comet. I'm glad you said that! We can make something even more like a comet. 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 Bordman 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 first bomb showed up. The men 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 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 Bordman had had the miniature grid wrestled around the upcrop to point in a new and somewhat more carefully chosen line. The next spattered brilliance in a different section still. And the brilliance lasted.
Bordman flung his first bombs recklessly, because there would be more, and because 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, draperies of metal-mist to capture sunlight that would otherwise have been wasted, and to diffuse much of it on Lani II. At midnight there was only one spot in all the night sky where there was really darkness. That was overhead, directly outward from the planet, opposite from the sun. Gigantic shining streamers formed a wall, a tube, of comet-tail material, yet many times more dense and therefore more bright, which shielded the colony world against the dark and cold, and threw upon it a shining, warming brightness.
Riki maintained stoutly that she could feel the warmth from the sky, but that was improbable. However, heat certainly 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 were competent computations 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.
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 high up in a pale-blue sky with trimmings of golden gas clouds. The Survey ship came down and down and settled as a shining silver object in the very center of the gigantic red-painted landing-grid.
Her skipper came to find Bordman. He was in Herndon's office. The skipper struggled to keep sheer blankness out of his expression.
"What the hell?" he demanded. "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! And there are two of them—both the occupied planets!"
Herndon explained why the curtains hung in space. There was a drop in the solar constant....
The skipper exploded. He wanted facts! Details! Something to report!
Bordman was automatically on the defensive when the skipper swung his questions at him. A Senior Colonial Survey officer is not revered by the Survey ship-service officers. Men like Bordman can be a nuisance to a hard-working 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 Bordman's position is likely to feel unpopular.
"I'd just finished the survey here," he said defensively, "when a cycle of sunspot cycles matured. All the sunspot periods got in phase, and the solar constant dropped. So I naturally offered what help I could to meet the situation."
The skipper regarded him incredulously.
"But it couldn't be done!" he said. "They told me how you did it, but it couldn't be done! Do you realize that these vapor-curtains will make fifty border-line worlds fit for use? Half a pound of sodium vapor a week!" He gestured helplessly. "They tell me the amount of heat reaching the surface here has been upped by fifteen per cent! D'you realize whatthatmeans?"
"I haven't been worrying about it," admitted Bordman. "There was a local situation and something had to be done. I—er—remembered things, and Riki suggested something I mightn't have thought of. So it's worked out like this." Then he said abruptly: "I'm not leaving. I'll let you take my resignation back. I think I'm going to settle here. It'll be a long time before we get really temperate-climate conditions here, but we can warm up a valley like this for cultivation, and it's going to be a rather satisfying job. It's a brand new planet with a brand new ecological system to be established."
The skipper of the Survey ship sat down hard. Then the sliding door of Herndon's office opened and Riki came in. The skipper stood up again. Bordman awkwardly made the introduction. Riki smiled.
"I'm telling him," said Bordman, "that I'm resigning from the Service to settle down here."
Riki nodded. She put her hand in proprietary fashion on Bordman's arm. The Survey skipper cleared his throat.
"I'm not going to carry your resignation," he said. "There've got to be detailed reports on how this business works. Dammit, if vapor clouds in space can be used to keep a planet warm, they can be used to shade a planet, too! If you resign, somebody else will have to come out here to make observations and work out the details of the trick. Nobody could be gotten here in less than a year! You've got to stay here to build up a report, and you ought to be available for consultation when this thing's to be done somewhere else. I'll report that I insisted as a Survey emergency—"
Riki said confidently:
"Oh, that's all right! He'll do that! Of course! Won't you?"
Bordman nodded. He thought,I've been lonely all my life. I've never belonged anywhere. But nobody could possibly belong anywhere as thoroughly as I'll belong here when it's warm and green and even the grass on the ground is partly my doing. But Riki'll like for me still to be in the Service. Women like to see their husbands wearing uniforms.
Aloud he said:
"Of course. If it really needs to be done. Though you realize that there's nothing really remarkable about it. Everything I've done has been what I was taught, or read in books."
"Hush!" said Riki. "You're wonderful!"
And so they were married, and Bordman was very, very happy. But people who can serve their fellow-men are never left alone. We humans get into so many predicaments!
Bordman had lived contentedly on Lani III for only three years when there was an emergency on Kalen IV and no other qualified Space Survey officer could possibly be gotten to the spot in time to handle it. A special ship raced to ask him to act,—just for this once. And, reluctantly, he went to do what he could, with the assurance to Riki that he would be back in three months. But he was gone two years, and his youngest child did not remember him when he came back.
He stayed home one year, and then there was an emergency on Seth IV. That kept him only four months, but before he could get back to Lani he was urgently required to check out a colony on Aleph I, whose colonists could not enter into possession until a short-handed Survey service licensed it. Then there was another call....
In the first ten years of his marriage, Bordman spent less than five with his family. But he didn't like it. When he'd been married fifteen years he'd made it clear at Headquarters that he was only carrying on until a new class graduated from Space Survey training. Then he was going home to stay.