Planets of Adventure [сборник]

Herndon thought. 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 ice-caps. It wasn't economical to mine it. So they put heaters down in boreholes and heated up the whole shale 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 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."

Bordman 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'll have defects; they'll have to come down in high winds, for example. They won't be too 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 respectfully at Bordman.

"I guess you know what I'm thinking right now," he said.

Bordman flushed. He felt that Herndon was unduly impressed. 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. "There'll be other things to be done, too."

"Then when you tell them to me," said Herndon, "they'll get done! I'll have Riki put this into that pulse-code you explained to us and she'll get it off right away."

He stood up.

"I didn't explain the code to her," insisted Bordman. "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 Bordman 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.

Also, there would be monstrous storms and blizzards on Lani II 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.

Bordman felt even deeper depression as he 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 Bordman 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 of the solar-constant observations forwarded from home. It was a strictly typical curve of the results of coinciding cyclic change. 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.

Bordman took a pencil, frowning. 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. 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.