Part 3

It was a tiny town, with plank streets, a beamphone exchange, and its warehouses over by the spaceport. It was merely a crude and rather ugly little settlement on a newly colonized planet. But it had been the center of an admirable system by which the Cetis Gamma Trading Company got magnificently rich and dispensed _thanar_ leaf (a milligram a day kept old age away) throughout all humanity at the very top price the traffic would bear. And the system was shaky now and Carson would be blamed for it.

Behind him, the colonists rejoiced as hugely as Carson suffered. But none of them got the proper perspective, because none of them looked at the sun.

About four o'clock in the afternoon, it got suddenly hotter again, as abruptly as before. It stayed hotter. Something made Cathy look up. There was a thin cloud overhead, just the right thickness to act something like a piece of smoked glass. She could look directly at the sun through it, examine the disk with her naked eye.

But it wasn't a disk any longer. Cetis Gamma was a bulging, irregularly shaped thing twice its normal size. As she looked, it grew larger still.

* * * * *

Out on the ninth planet, Rhadampsicus was absorbed in his contemplation of Cetis Gamma. With nothing to interfere with his scanning, he could follow the developments perfectly. There had been first one gigantic prominence, then two, which separated to opposite sides of its equator. Then two other prominences began to grow between them.

For two full days, the new prominences grew, and then split, so that the sun came to have the appearance of a ball of fire surrounded by a ring of blue-white incandescence.

Then came instability. Flame geysers spouting hundreds of thousands of miles into emptiness ceased to keep their formation. They turned north and south from the equatorial line. The outline of the sun became irregular. It ceased to be round in profile, and even the appearance of a ring around it vanished. It looked--though this would never have occurred to Rhadampsicus--very much like a fiercely glowing gigantic potato. Its evolution of heat went up incredibly. It much more than doubled its rate of radiation.

Rhadampsicus watched each detail of the flare-up with fascinated attention. Nodalictha dutifully watched with him. But she could not maintain her interest in so purely scientific a phenomenon.

When a thin streamer of pure blue-white jetted upward from the sun's pole, attaining a speed of six hundred and ninety-two miles per second, Rhadampsicus turned to her with enthusiasm.

"Exactly in the pattern of a flare-up according to Dhokis' theory!" he exclaimed. "I have always thought he was more nearly right than the modernists. Radiation pressure can build up in a closed system such as the interior of a sun. It can equal the gravitational constant. And obviously it would break loose at the pole."

Then he saw that Nodalictha's manner was one of distress. He was instantly concerned.

"What's the matter, darling?" he asked anxiously. "I didn't mean to neglect you, my precious one!"

Nodalictha did something that would have scared a human being out of a year's growth, but was actually the equivalent of an unhappy, stifled sob.

"I am a beast!" said Rhadampsicus penitently. "I've kept you here, in boredom, while I enjoyed myself watching this sun do tricks. I'm truly sorry, Nodalictha. We will go on at once. I shouldn't have asked you to--"

But Nodalictha said unhappily, "It isn't you, Rhadampsicus. It's me! While you've been watching the star, I've amused myself watching those quaint little creatures on the second planet. I've thought of them as--well, as pets. I've grown fond of them. It was absurd of me--"

"Oh, but it is wonderful of you," said Rhadampsicus tenderly. "I love you all the more for it, my darling. But why are you unhappy about them? I made sure they had food and energy."

"They're going to be burned up!" wailed Nodalictha, "and they're so cute!"

Rhadampsicus blinked his eyes--all sixteen of them. Then he said self-accusingly, "My dear, I should have thought of that. Of course this is only a flare-up, darling...." Then he made an impatient gesture. "I see! You would rather think of them as happy, in their little way, than as burned to tiny crisps."

He considered, scanning the second planet with the normal anxiety of a bridegroom to do anything that would remove a cloud from his bride's lovely sixteen eyes.

* * * * *

Night fell on Cetopolis, and with it came some slight alleviation of the dreadfulness that had begun that afternoon. The air was furnacelike in heat and dryness. There was the smell of smoke everywhere. The stars were faint and red and ominous, seen through the smoke that overlay everything. So far, to be sure, breathing was possible. It was even possible to be comfortable in an air-conditioned room. But this was only the beginning.

Lon and Cathy sat together on the porch of his house, after sundown. The other colonists had gone away to their own homes. When the crack of doom has visibly begun, men do queer things. In Cetopolis some undoubtedly got drunk, or tried to. But there were farmers who would spend this last night looking at their drooping crops, trying to persuade themselves that if Cetis Gamma only went back to normal before sunrise, the crops might yet be saved. But none of them expected it.

Off to the south there was an angry reddish glare in the sky. That was vegetation on the desert there, burning. It grew thick as jungle in the rainy season, and dried out to pure dessication in dry weather. It had caught fire of itself from the sun's glare in late afternoon. Great clouds of acrid smoke rose from it to the stars.

Beyond the horizon to the west there was destruction.

Lon and Cathy sat close together. She hadn't even asked to be taken back to Cetopolis, as convention would have required. The sun was growing hotter still while it sank below the horizon. It was expanding in fits and starts as new writhing spouts of stuff from its interior burst the bonds of gravity. Blazing magma flung upward in an unthinkable eruption. The sun had been three times normal size when it set.

Lon was no astronomer, but plainly the end of life on the inner planets of Cetis Gamma was at hand.

Cetis Gamma might, he considered, be in the process of becoming a nova. Certainly beyond the horizon there was even more terrible heat than had struck the human colony before sundown. Even if the sun did not explode, even if it was only as fiercely blazing as at its setting, they would die within hours after sunrise. If it increased in brightness, by daybreak its first rays would be death itself. When dawn came, the very first direct beams would set the shiver trees alight on the hilltops, and as it rose the fires would go down into the valleys. This house would smoke and writhe and melt; the air would become flame, and the planet's surface would glow red-hot as it turned into the sunshine.

* * * * *

"It's going to be--all right, Lon," Cathy said unconvincedly. "It's just something happening that'll be over in a little while. But--in case it isn't--we might as well be together. Don't you think so?"

Lon put his arm comfortingly around her. He felt a very strong impulse to lie. He could pretend to vast wisdom and tell her the sun's behavior was this or that, and never lasted more than a few hours, but she'd know he lied. They could spend their last hours trying to deceive each other out of pure affection. But they'd know it was deceit.

"D-don't you think so?" insisted Cathy faintly.

He said gently, "No, Cathy, and neither do you. This is the finish. It would've been a lot nicer to go on living, the two of us. We'd have had long, long years to be together. We'd have had kids, and they'd have grown up, and we'd have had--a lot of things. But now I'm afraid we won't."

He tried to smile at her, but it hurt. He thought passionately that he would gladly submit himself to be burned in the slowest and most excruciating manner if only she could be saved from it. But he couldn't do anything.

Cathy gulped. "I-I'm afraid so, too, Lon," she said in a small voice. "But it's nice we met each other, anyhow. Now we know we love each other. I don't like the idea of dying, but I'm glad we knew we loved each other before it happened."

Lon's hands clenched fiercely. Then the rage went away. He said almost humorously, "Carson--he's back in Cetopolis. I wonder how he feels. He has no better chance than anybody else. Maybe he's sent off spacegrams, but no ship could possibly get here in time."

Cathy shivered a little. "Let's not think about him. Just about us. We haven't much time."

And just then, very strangely, an idea came to Lon Simpson. He tensed.

After a moment, he said in a very queer voice, "This isn't a nova. It's a flare-up. The sun isn't exploding. It's just too hot, too big for the temperature inside it, and it's a closed system. So radiation pressure has been building up. Now it's got to be released. So it will spout geysers of its own substance. They'll go out over hundreds of thousands of miles. But in a couple of weeks it will be back--nearly--to normal."

He suddenly knew that. He knew why it was so. He could have explained it completely and precisely. But he didn't know how he knew. The items that added together were themselves so self evident that he didn't even wonder how he knew them. They _had_ to be so!

* * * * *

Cathy said muffledly, her face against his shoulder, "But we won't be alive in a couple of weeks, Lon. We can't live long past daybreak."

He did not answer. There were more ideas coming into his mind. He didn't know where they came from. But again they were such self evident, unquestionable facts that he did not wonder about them. He simply paid tense, desperately concentrated attention as they formed themselves.

"We--may live," he said shakily. "There's an ionosphere up at the top of the atmosphere here, just like there is on Earth. It's made by the sunlight ionizing the thin air. The--stronger sunlight will multiply the ionization. There'll be an--actually conducting layer of air.... Yes.... The air will become a conductor, up there." He wet his lips. "If I make a--gadget to--short-circuit that conducting layer to the ground here.... When radiation photons penetrate a transparent conductor--but there aren't any transparent conductors--the photons will--follow the three-finger rule....

"They'll move at right angles to their former course--"

He swallowed. Then he got up very quietly. He put her aside. He went to his tool shed. He climbed to the roof of the barn now filled with _thanar_ leaves. He swung his axe.

The barn was roofed with aluminum over malleable plastic. The useful property of malleable plastic is that it does not yield to steady pressure, but does yield to shock. It will stay in shape indefinitely under a load, but one can tap it easily into any form one desires.

Lon swung his axe, head down. Presently he asked Cathy to climb up a ladder and hold a lantern for him. He didn't need light for the rough work--the burning desert vegetation gave enough for that. But when one wants to make a parabolic reflector by tapping with an axe, one needs light for the finer part of the job.

* * * * *

In Cetopolis, Carson agitatedly put his records on tape and sent it all off by spacegram. He'd previously reported on Lon Simpson, but now he knew that he was going to die. And he followed his instinct to transmit all his quite useless records, in order that his superiors might realize he had been an admirable employee. It did not occur to him that his superiors might be trying frantically to break his sending beam to demand that he find out how Lon Simpson made his power gadget and how he converted vegetation, before it was too late. They didn't succeed in breaking his beam, because Carson kept it busy.

He was true to type.

Elsewhere, other men were true to type, too. The human population of Cetis Gamma Two was very small. There were less than five thousand people on the planet--all within a hundred miles of Cetopolis, and all now on the night side. The rest of the planet's land masses scorched and shriveled and burst into flame where the sun struck them. The few small oceans heated and their surfaces even boiled. But nobody saw it. The local fauna and flora died over the space of continents.

But in the human settlement area, people acted according to their individual natures. Some few ran amok and tried to destroy everything--including themselves--before the blazing sun could return to do it. More sat in stunned silence, waiting for doom. A few dug desperately, trying to excavate caves or pits in which they or their wives or children could be safe....

But Lon pounded at his barn roof. He made a roughly parabolic mirror some three yards across. He stripped off aluminum siding and made a connection with the ground. He poured water around that connection. He built a crude multiply twisted device of copper wire and put it in the focus of the parabolic mirror.

He looked up at the sky. The stars seemed dimmer. He took the copper thing away, and they brightened a little. He carefully adjusted it until the stars were at their dimmest.

He descended to the ground again. He felt an odd incredulity about what he'd done. He didn't doubt that it would work. He was simply unable to understand how he'd thought of it.

* * * * *

"There, darling! Your pets are quite safe!" Rhadampsicus said pleasedly.

Nodalictha scanned the second planet. It was apparently coated with a metallic covering. But it was not quite like metal. It was misty, like an unsubstantial barrier to light--and to Nodalictha's penetrating thoughts.

"I had your male pet," Rhadampsicus explained tenderly, "set up a power beam link to the ionosphere. With several times the usual degree of ionization--because of the flaring sun--the grounded ionosphere became a _Rhinthak_ screen about the planet. The more active the sun, the more dense the screen. They'll have light to see by when their side of the planet is toward the sun, but no harmful radiation can get down to them. And the screen will fade away as the sun goes back to its normal state."

Nodalictha rejoiced. Then she was a little distressed.

"But now I can't watch them!" she pouted. Rhadampsicus watched her gravely. She said ruefully, "I see, Rhadampsicus. You've spoiled me! But if I can't watch them for the time being, I won't have anything to occupy me. Darling Rhadampsicus, you must talk to me sometimes!"

He talked to her absorbedly. He seemed to think, however, that discussion of the local solar phenomena was conversation. With feminine guile, she pretended to be satisfied, but presently she went back to her housekeeping. She began to dream of their life when they had returned home, and of the residence they would inhabit there. Presently she was planning the parties she would give as a young matron, with canapés of krypton snow and zenon ice, with sprinklings of lovely red nickel bromide crystals for a garnish--

* * * * *

The sun rose again, and they lived. It was as if the sky were covered with a thick cloud bank which absorbed the monstrous radiation of a sun now four times its previous diameter and madly changing shape like a monstrous ameba of flame.

In time the sun set. It rose again. It set. And Cetis Gamma Two remained a living planet instead of being a scorched cinder.

When four days had gone by and nobody died, the colonists decided that they might actually keep on living. They had at first no especially logical foundation for their belief.

But Cathy boasted. And she boasted in Cetopolis. Since they were going to keep on living, the conventions required that she return to the planet's one human settlement and her duties as a beamphone operator. It wasn't proper for her to stay unchaperoned so long as she and Lon weren't married yet.

She had no difficulty with Carson. He didn't refer to her desertion. Carson had his own troubles. Now that he had decided that he would live, his problems multiplied. The colonists' barns were filled to capacity with _thanar_ leaves which would pay off their debts to the Company. He began to worry about that.

Lost without the constant directives from the Company, he had his technicians step up the power in the settlement transmitter. He knew that the screen Lon had put up would stop ordinary spacegram transmission. Even with a tight beam, he could broadcast and receive only at night, when the screen was thinnest. Even so, he had to search out holes in the screen.

The system didn't work perfectly--it wasn't two-way at all, until the Company stepped up the power in its own transmitter--but spacegrams started to get through again.

Carson smiled in relief. He began to regain some of his old arrogantly bored manner. Now that the Company's guiding hand was once more with him, nothing seemed as bad as it had been. He was able to report that something had happened to save the colony from extinction, and that Lon Simpson had probably done it.

In return, he got a spacegram demanding full particulars, and precise information on the devices he had reported Lon Simpson to have made.

Humbly, Carson obeyed his corporation.

* * * * *

He pumped Cathy--which was not difficult, because she was bursting with pride in Lon. She confirmed, in detail, the rumor that Lon was somehow responsible for the protective screen that was keeping everybody alive.

Carson sent the information by spacegram. He was informed that a special Company ship was heading for Cetis Gamma Two at full speed. Carson would take orders from its skipper when it arrived. Meanwhile, he would buy _thanar_ leaf if absolutely necessary, but stall as long as possible. The legal staff of the Trading Company was working on the problem of adapting the system to get the new surplus supplies of _thanar_ without letting anybody get anything in particular for it. He would keep secret the coming of the special ship, which was actually the space yacht of a member of the Board of Directors. And he would display great friendliness toward Lon Simpson.

The last was the difficult part, because Lon Simpson was becoming difficult. With the sun writhing as if in agony overhead--seen dimly through a permanent blessed mistiness--and changing shape from hour to hour, Lon Simpson had discovered something new to get mad about. Lon had felt definitely on top of the world. He had solved the problem of clearing his debts and getting credit sufficient for two passages back to Earth, with money there to take care of getting rich on his inventions. There was no reason to delay marriage. He wanted to get married. And through a deplorable oversight, there had been no method devised by which a legal marriage ceremony could be performed on Cetis Gamma Two.

It was one of those accidental omissions which would presently be rectified. But the legal minds who'd set up the system for the planet had been thinking of money, not marriages. They hadn't envisioned connubial bliss as a service the Company should provide. And Lon was raising cain. His barn was literally bursting with _thanar_ leaves, and he was filling up his attic, extra bedroom, living quarters and kitchen with more. He was rich. He wanted to get married. And it wasn't possible.

Lon was in a position to raise much more cain than ordinary. He'd made an amicable bargain with his fellow colonists. They brought truckloads of miscellaneous foliage to be put into his vegetation converter, and he converted it all into _thanar_ leaves. The product was split two ways. Everybody was happy--except Carson--Because every colonist had already acquired enough _thanar_ leaf to pay himself out of debt, and was working on extra capital.

If this kept up, the galactic market would be broken.

Carson had nightmares about that.

* * * * *

So the sun went through convulsions in emptiness, and nobody on its second planet paid any attention at all. After about a week, it occasionally subsided. When that happened, the ionization of the planet's upper atmosphere lessened, the radiation screen grew thinner, and a larger proportion of light reached the surface. When the sun flared higher, the shield automatically grew thicker. An astronomical phenomenon which should have destroyed all life on the inner planets came to be taken for granted.

But events on the second planet were not without consequences elsewhere. The Board of Directors of the Cetis Gamma Trading Company simultaneously jittered and beamed with anticipation. If Lon could convert one form of vegetable product into another, then the Company's monopoly of _thanar_ would vanish as soon as he got loose with his device. On the other hand, if the Company could get that device for its very own....

_Thanar_ had a practically unlimited market. Every year a new age group of the population needed a milligram a day to keep old age away. But besides that, there was Martian _zuss_ fiber, which couldn't be marketed because there wasn't enough of it, but would easily fetch a thousand credits a kilo if Lon's gadget could produce it from samples. There was that Arcturian _sicces_ dust--the pollen of an inordinately rare plant on Arcturus Four--which could be sold at more than its weight in diamonds, for perfume. And--

The directors of the Company shivered over what might happen; and gloated over what could. So they kept their fingers crossed while the space yacht of one of their number sped toward Cetis Gamma Two, manned by very trustworthy men who would carry out their instructions with care and vigor and no nonsense about it.

Lon Simpson worked with his neighbors, converting all sorts of vegetable debris--the fact that some of it was scorched did not seem to matter--into _thanar_ leaf which was sound legal tender on that particular planet. From time to time he went to Cetopolis. He talked sentimentally and yearningly to Cathy. And then he went to Carson's office and raised the very devil because there was as yet no arrangement by which he and Cathy could enter into the state of holy matrimony.

* * * * *

Rhadampsicus looked over his notes and was very well pleased. He explained to Nodalictha that from now on the return of Cetis Gamma to its normal condition would be a cut-and-dried affair. He would like to stay and watch it, but the important phenomena were all over now. He said solicitously that if she wanted to go on, completing their nuptial journey.... She might be anxious to see her family and friends.... She might be lonely....

Nodalictha smiled at him. The process would have been horrifying to a human who watched, but Rhadampsicus smiled back.

"Lonely?" asked Nodalictha coyly. "With you, Rhadampsicus?"

He impulsively twined his eye stalks about hers. A little later he was saying tenderly, "Then I'll just finish my observations, darling, and we'll go on--since you don't mind waiting."

"I'd like to see my pets again," said Nodalictha, nestling comfortably against him.

Together, they scanned the second planet, but their thoughts could not penetrate its _Rhinthak_ screen. They saw the space yacht flash up to it. Rhadampsicus inspected the minds of the bipeds inside it. Nodalictha, of course, modestly refrained from entering the minds of male creatures other than her husband.

"Peculiar," commented Rhadampsicus. "Very peculiar. If I were a sociologist, I might find it less baffling. But they must have a very queer sort of social system. They actually intend to harm your pets, Nodalictha, because the male now knows how to supply them all with food and energy! Isn't that strange? I wish the _Rhinthak_ screen did not block off scanning.... But it will fade, presently."