Murray Leinster - Sand Doom

In one fashion the crewmen were worse off than the colonists. The colonists had at least the colorful prospect of death before them. They could prepare for it in their several ways. But the members of the Warlock ’s crew had nothing ahead but tedium.

The skipper faced the future with extreme, grim distaste.

The ride to the colony was torment. Aletha rode behind her cousin on the saddle-blanket, and apparently suffered little if at all. But Bordman could only ride in the ground-car’s cargo space, along with the sack of mail from the ship. The ground was unbelievably rough and the jolting intolerable. The heat was literally murderous. In the metal cargo space, the temperature reached a hundred and sixty degrees in the sunshine—and given enough time, food will cook in no more heat than that. Of course a man has been known to enter an oven and stay there while a roast was cooked, and to come out alive. But the oven wasn’t throwing him violently about or bringing sun-heated—blue-white-sun heated—metal to press his heat-suit against him.

The suit did make survival possible, but that was all. The contents of its canteens gave out just before arrival, and for a short time Bordman had only sweat for his suit to work with. It kept him alive by forced ventilation, but he arrived in a state of collapse. He drank the iced salt water they gave him and went to bed. He’d get back his strength with a proper sodium level in his blood. But he slept for twelve hours straight.

When he got up, he was physically normal again, but abysmally ashamed. It did no good to remind himself that Xosa II was rated minimum-comfort class D—a blue-white sun and a mean temperature of one hundred and ten degrees. Africans could take such a climate—with night-relief quarters. Amerinds could do steel construction work in the open, protected only by insulated shoes and gloves. But Bordman could not venture out-of-doors except in a heat-suit. He couldn’t stay long then. It was not a weakness. It was a matter of genetics. But he was ashamed.

Aletha nodded to him when he found the Project Engineer’s office. It occupied one of the hulls in which colony-establishment materials had been lowered by rocket power. There were forty of the hulls, and they had been emptied and arranged for inter-communication in three separate communities, so that an individual could change his quarters and ordinary associates from time to time and colony fever—frantic irritation with one’s companions—was minimized.

Aletha sat at a desk, busily making notes from a loose leaf volume before her. The wall behind the desk was fairly lined with similar volumes.

“I made a spectacle of myself!” said Bordman, bitterly.

“Not at all!” Aletha assured him. “It could happen to anybody. I wouldn’t do too well on Timbuk.”

There was no answer to that. Timbuk was essentially a jungle planet, barely emerging from the carboniferous stage. Its colonists thrived because their ancestors had lived on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea, on Earth. But Anglos did not find its climate healthful, nor would many other races. Amerinds died there quicker than most.

“Ralph’s on the way here now,” added Aletha. “He and Dr. Chuka were out picking a place to leave the records. The sand dunes here are terrible, you know. When an explorer-ship does come to find out what’s happened to us, these buildings could be covered up completely. Any place could be. It isn’t easy to pick a record-cache that’s quite sure to be found.”

“When,” said Bordman skeptically, “there’s nobody left alive to point it out. Is that it?”

“That’s it,” agreed Aletha. “It’s pretty bad all around. I didn’t plan to die just yet.”

Her voice was perfectly normal. Bordman snorted. As a senior Colonial Survey officer, he’d been around. But he’d never yet known a human colony to be extinguished when it was properly equipped and after a proper pre-settlement survey. He’d seen panic, but never real cause for a matter-of-fact acceptance of doom.

There was a clanking noise outside the hulk which was the Project Engineer’s headquarters. Bordman couldn’t see clearly through the filtered ports. He reached over and opened a door. The brightness outside struck his eyes like a blow. He blinked them shut instantly and turned away. But he’d seen a glistening, caterwheel ground car stopping not far from the doorway.

He stood wiping tears from his light-dazzled eyes as footsteps sounded outside. Aletha’s cousin came in, followed by a huge man with remarkably dark skin. The dark man wore eyeglasses with a curiously thick, corklike nosepiece to insulate the necessary metal of the frame from his skin. It would blister if it touched bare flesh.

“This is Dr. Chuka,” said Redfeather pleasantly, “Mr. Bordman. Dr. Chuka’s the director of mining and mineralogy here.”

Bordman shook hands with the ebony-skinned man. He grinned, showing startlingly white teeth. Then he began to shiver.

“It’s like a freeze-box in here,” he said in a deep voice. “I’ll get a robe and be with you.”

He vanished through a doorway, his teeth chattering audibly. Aletha’s cousin took half a dozen deliberate deep breaths and grimaced.

“I could shiver myself,” he admitted “but Chuka’s really acclimated to Xosa. He was raised on Timbuk.”

Bordman said curtly:

“I’m sorry I collapsed on landing. It won’t happen again. I came here to do a degree-of-completion survey that should open the colony to normal commerce, let the colonists’ families move in, tourists, and so on. But I was landed by boat instead of normally, and I am told the colony is doomed. I would like an official statement of the degree of completion of the colony’s facilities and an explanation of the unusual points I have just mentioned.”

The Indian blinked at him. Then he smiled faintly. The dark man came back, zipping up an indoor warmth-garment. Redfeather dryly brought him up to date by repeating what Bordman had just said. Chuka grinned and sprawled comfortably in a chair.

“I’d say,” he remarked humorously, in that astonishingly deep-toned voice of his, “sand got in our hair. And our colony. And the landing grid. There’s a lot of sand on Xosa. Wouldn’t you say that was the trouble?”

The Indian said with elaborate gravity:

“Of course wind had something to do with it.”

Bordman fumed.

“I think you know,” he said fretfully, “that as a senior Colonial Survey officer, I have authority to give any orders needed for my work. I give one now. I want to see the landing grid—if it is still standing. I take it that it didn’t fall down?”

Redfeather flushed beneath the bronze pigment of his skin. It would be hard to offend a steelman more than to suggest that his work did not stand up.

“I assure you,” he said politely, “that it did not fall down.”

“Your estimate of its degree of completion?”

“Eighty per cent,” said Redfeather formally.

“You’ve stopped work on it?”

“Work on it has been stopped,” agreed the Indian.

“Even though the colony can receive no more supplies until it is completed?”

“Just so,” said Redfeather without expression.

“Then I issue a formal order that I be taken to the landing-grid site immediately,” said Bordman angrily. “I want to see what sort of incompetence is responsible! Will you arrange it—at once?”

Redfeather said in a completely emotionless voice:

“You want to see the site of the landing grid. Very good. Immediately.”

He turned and walked out into the incredible, blinding sunshine. Bordman blinked at the momentary blast of light, and then began to pace up and down the office. He fumed. He was still ashamed of his collapse from the heat during the travel from the landed rocket-boat to the colony. Therefore he was touchy and irritable. But the order he had given was strictly justifiable.