Murray Leinster - Sand Doom

Aletha said tentatively:

“Mr. Bordman——”

He turned, annoyed. Aletha said almost apologetically:

“On Chagan there was a—you might call it a woman’s coup given to a woman I know. Her husband raises horses. He’s mad about them. And they live in a sort of home on caterwheels out on the plains—the llanos. Sometimes they’re months away from a settlement. And she loves ice cream and refrigeration isn’t too simple. But she has a Doctorate in Human History. So she had her husband make an insulated tray on the roof of their trailer and she makes her ice cream there.”

Men looked at her. Her cousin said amusedly:

“That should rate some sort of technical-coup feather!”

“The Council gave her a brass pot—official,” said Aletha. “Domestic science achievement.” To Bordman she explained: “Her husband put a tray on the roof of their house, insulated from the heat of the house below. During the day there’s an insulated cover on top of it, insulating it from the heat of the sun. At night she takes off the top cover and pours her custard, thin, in the tray. Then she goes to bed. She has to get up before daybreak to scrape it up, but by then the ice cream is frozen. Even on a warm night.” She looked from one to another. “I don’t know why. She said it was done in a place called Babylonia on Earth, many thousands of years ago.”

Bordman blinked. Then he said decisively:

“Damn! Who knows how much the ground-temperature drops here before dawn?”

“I do,” said Aletha’s cousin, mildly. “The top-sand temperature falls forty-odd degrees. Warmer underneath, of course. But the air here is almost cool when the sun rises. Why?”

“Nights are cooler on all planets,” said Bordman, “because every night the dark side radiates heat to empty space. There’d be frost everywhere every morning if the ground didn’t store up heat during the day. If we prevent daytime heat-storage—cover a patch of ground before dawn and leave it covered all day—and uncover it all night while shielding it from warm winds—— We’ve got refrigeration! The night sky is empty space itself! Two hundred and eighty below zero!”

There was a murmur. Then argument. The foremen of the Xosa II colony-preparation crew were strictly practical men, but they had the habit of knowing why some things were practical. One does not do modern steel construction in contempt of theory, nor handle modern mining tools without knowing why as well as how they work. This proposal sounded like something that was based on reason—that should work to some degree. But how well? Anybody could guess that it should cool something at least twice as much as the normal night temperature-drop. But somebody produced a slipstick and began to juggle it expertly. He astonishedly announced his results. Others questioned, and then verified it. Nobody paid much attention to Bordman. But there was a hum of absorbed discussion, in which Redfeather and Chuka were immediately included. By calculation, it astoundingly appeared that if the air on Xosa II was really as clear as the bright stars and deep day-sky color indicated, every second night a total drop of one hundred and eighty degrees temperature could be secured by radiation to interstellar space—if there were no convection-currents, and they could be prevented by——

It was the convection-current problem which broke the assembly into groups with different solutions. But it was Dr. Chuka who boomed at all of them to try all three solutions and have them ready before daybreak, so the assembly left the hulk, still disputing enthusiastically. But somebody had recalled that there were dewponds in the one arid area on Timbuk, and somebody else remembered that irrigation on Delmos III was accomplished that same way. And they recalled how it was done——

Voices went away in the ovenlike night outside. Bordman grimaced, and again said:

“Damn! Why didn’t I think of that myself?”

“Because,” said Aletha, smiling, “you aren’t a Doctor of Human History with a horse-raising husband and a fondness for ice cream. Even so, a technician was needed to break down the problem here into really simple terms.” Then she said, “I think Bob Running Antelope might approve of you, Mr. Bordman.”

Bordman fumed to himself.

“Who’s he? Just what does that whole comment mean?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Aletha, “when you’ve solved one or two more problems.”

Her cousin came back into the room. He said with gratification:

“Chuka can turn out silicone-wool insulation, he says. Plenty of material, and he’ll use a solar mirror to get the heat he needs. Plenty of temperature to make silicones! How much area will we need to pull in four thousand gallons of water a night?”

“How do I know?” demanded Bordman. “What’s the moisture-content of the air here, anyhow?” Then he said vexedly, “Tell me! Are you using heat-exchangers to help cool the air you pump into the buildings, before you use power to refrigerate it? It would save some power——”

The Indian project engineer said absorbedly:

“Let’s get to work on this! I’m a steel man myself, but——”

They settled down. Aletha turned a page.

The Warlock spun around the planet. The members of its crew withdrew into themselves. In even two months of routine tedious voyaging to this planet, there had been the beginnings of irritation with the mannerisms of other men. Now there would be years of it. At the beginning, every man tended to become a hermit so that he could postpone as long as possible the time when he would hate his shipmates. Monotony was already so familiar that its continuance was a foreknown evil. The crew of the Warlock already knew how intolerable they would presently be to each other, and the foreknowledge tended to make them intolerable now.

Within two days of its establishment in orbit, the Warlock was manned by men already morbidly resentful of fate; with the psychology of prisoners doomed to close confinement for an indeterminate but ghastly period. On the third day there was a second fist fight. A bitter one.

Fist fights are not healthy symptoms in a spaceship which cannot hope to make port for a matter of years.

Most human problems are circular and fall apart when a single trivial part of them is solved. There used to be enmity between races because they were different, and they tended to be different because they were enemies, so there was enmity—The big problem of interstellar flight was that nothing could travel faster than light, and nothing could travel faster than light because mass increased with speed, and mass increased with speed—obviously!—because ships remained in the same time-slot, and ships remained in the same time-slot long after a one-second shift was possible because nobody realized that it meant traveling faster than light. And even before there was interstellar travel, there was practically no interplanetary commerce because it took so much fuel to take off and land. And it took more fuel to carry the fuel to take off and land, and more still to carry the fuel for that, until somebody used power on the ground for heave-off instead of take-off, and again on the ground for landing. And then interplanetary ships carried cargoes. And on Xosa II there was an emergency because a sandstorm had buried the almost completed landing grid under some megatons of sand, and it couldn’t be completed because there was only storage power because it wasn’t completed, because there was only storage power because——

But it took three weeks for the problem to be seen as the ultimately simple thing it really was. Bordman had called it a circular problem, but he hadn’t seen its true circularity. It was actually—like all circular problems—inherently an unstable set of conditions. It began to fall apart when he saw that mere refrigeration would break its solidity.