Sand Doom by Murray Leinster (read full novel .txt) 📖

had been an attempt to ferry water supplies down from the pole by aircraft. It was not practical, even to build up a reserve of fluid. Winds carried sand particles here as on other worlds they carried moisture. Aircraft were abraded as they flew. The last working flier made a forced landing five hundred miles from the colony. A caterwheel expedition went out and brought the crew in. The caterwheel trucks were armored with silicone plastic, resistant to abrasion, but when they got back they had to be scrapped. There had been men lost in sudden sand-squalls, and heroic searches for them, and once or twice rescues. There had been cave-ins in the mines. There had been accidents. There had been magnificent feats of endurance and achievement.

Bordman went to the door of the hull which was Ralph Redfeather’s Project Engineer office. He opened it. He stepped outside.

It was like stepping into an oven. The sand was still hot from the sunshine just ended. The air was so utterly dry that Bordman instantly felt it sucking at the moisture of his nasal passages. In ten seconds his feet—clad in indoor footwear—were uncomfortably hot. In twenty the soles of his feet felt as if they were blistering. He would die of the heat at night, here! Perhaps he could endure the outside near dawn, but he raged a little. Here where Amerinds and Africans lived and throve, he could live unprotected for no more than an hour or two—and that at one special time of the planet’s rotation!

He went back in, ashamed of the discomfort of his feet and angrily letting them feel scorched rather than admit to it.

Aletha turned another page.

“Look, here!” said Bordman angrily. “No matter what you say, you’re going to go back on the Warlock before——”

She raised her eyes.

“We’ll worry about that when the[28] time comes. But I think not. I’d rather stay here.”

“For the present, perhaps,” snapped Bordman. “But before things get too bad you go back to the ship! They’ve rocket fuel enough for half a dozen landings of the landing boat. They can lift you out of here!”

Aletha shrugged.

“Why leave here to board a derelict? The Warlock’s practically that. What’s your honest estimate of the time before a ship equipped to help us gets here?”

Bordman would not answer. He’d done some figuring. It had been a two-month journey from Trent—the nearest Survey base—to here. The Warlock had been expected to remain aground until the smelter it brought could load it with pig metal. Which could be as little as two weeks, but would surprise nobody if it was two months instead. So the ship would not be considered due back on Trent for four months. It would not be considered overdue for at least two more. It would be six months before anybody seriously wondered why it wasn’t back with its cargo. There’d be a wait for lifeboats to come in, should there have been a mishap in space. There’d eventually be a report of noncommunication to the Colony Survey headquarters on Canna III. But it would take three months for that report to be received, and six more for a confirmation—even if ships made the voyages exactly at the most favorable intervals—and then there should at least be a complaint from the colony. There were lifeboats aground on Xosa II, for emergency communication, and if a lifeboat didn’t bring news of a planetary crisis, no crisis would be considered to exist. Nobody could imagine a landing grid failing!

Maybe in a year somebody would think that maybe somebody ought to ask around about Xosa II. It would be much longer before somebody put a note on somebody else’s desk that would suggest that when, or if, a suitable ship passed near Xosa II, or if one should be available for the inquiry, it might be worth while to have the noncommunication from the planet looked into. Actually, to guess at three years before another ship arrived would be the most optimistic of estimates.

“You’re a civilian,” said Bordman shortly. “When the food and water run low, you go back to the ship. You’ll at least be alive when somebody does come to see what’s the matter here!”

Aletha said mildly:

“Maybe I’d rather not be alive. Will you go back to the ship?”

Bordman flushed. He wouldn’t. But he said doggedly;

“I can order you sent on board, and your cousin will carry out the order!”

“I doubt it very much,” said Aletha pleasantly.

She returned to her task.

There were crunching footsteps outside the hulk. Bordman winced a little. With insulated sandals, it[29] was normal for these colonists to move from one part of the colony to another in the open, even by daylight. He, Bordman, couldn’t take out-of-doors at night! His lips twisted bitterly.

Men came in. There were dark men with rippling muscles under glistening skin, and bronze Amerinds with coarse straight hair. Ralph Redfeather was with them. Dr. Chuka came in last of all.

“Here we are,” said Redfeather. “These are our foremen. Among us, I think we can answer any questions you want to ask.”

He made introductions. Bordman didn’t try to remember the names. Abeokuta and Northwind and Sutata and Tallgrass and T’ckka and Spottedhorse and Lewanika—— They were names which in combination would only be found in a very raw, new colony. But the men who crowded into the office were wholly at ease, in their own minds as well as in the presence of a senior Colonial Survey officer. They nodded as they were named, and the nearest shook hands. Bordman knew that he’d have liked their looks under other circumstances. But he was humiliated by the conditions on this planet. They were not. They were apparently only sentenced to death by them.

“I have to leave a report,” said Bordman curtly—and he was somehow astonished to know that he did expect to leave a report rather than make one; he accepted the hopelessness of the colony’s future—“on the degree-of-completion of the work here. But since there’s an emergency, I have also to leave a report on the measures taken to meet it.”

The report would be futile, of course. As futile as the coup-records Aletha was compiling, which would be read only after everybody on the planet was dead. But Bordman knew he’d write it. It was unthinkable that he shouldn’t.

“Redfeather tells me,” he added, again curtly, “that the power in storage can be used to cool the colony buildings—and therefore condense drinking water from the air—for just about six months. There is food for about six months. If one lets the buildings warm up a little, to stretch the fuel, there won’t be enough water to drink. Go on half rations to stretch the food, and there won’t be enough water to last and the power will give out anyhow. No profit there!”

There were nods. The matter had been thrashed out long before.

“There’s food in the Warlock overhead,” Bordman went on coldly, “but they can’t use the landing boat more than a few times. It can’t use ship fuel. No refrigeration to hold it stable. They couldn’t land more than a ton of supplies all told. There are five hundred of us here. No help there!”

He looked from one to another.

“So we live comfortably,” he told them with irony, “until our food and water and minimum night-comfort run out together. Anything we do to try to stretch anything is useless because of what happens to[30] something else. Redfeather tells me you accept the situation. What are you doing—since you accept it?”

Dr. Chuka said amiably:

“We’ve picked a storage place for our records, and our miners are blasting out space in which to put away the record of our actions to the last possible moment. It will be sandproof. Our mechanics are building a broadcast unit we’ll spare a tiny bit of fuel for. It will run twenty-odd years, broadcasting directions so it can be found regardless of how the terrain is changed by drifting sand.”

“And,” said Bordman, “the fact that nobody will be here to give directions.”

Chuka added benignly:

“We’re doing a great deal of singing, too. My people are ... ah ... religious. When we are ... ah ... no longer here ... there have been boastings that there’ll be a well-practiced choir ready to go to work in the next world.”

White teeth showed in grins. Bordman was almost envious of men who could grin at such a thought. But he went on grimly:

“And I understand that athletics have also been much practiced.”

Redfeather said:

“There’s been time for it. Climbing teams have counted coup on all the worst mountains within three hundred miles. There’s been a new record set for the javelin, adjusted for gravity constant, and Johnny Cornstalk did a hundred yards in eight point four seconds. Aletha has the records and has certified them.”

“Very useful!” said Bordman sardonically. Then he disliked himself for saying it even before the bronze-skinned men’s faces grew studiedly impassive.

Chuka waved his hand.

“Wait, Ralph! Lewanika’s nephew will beat that within a week!”

Bordman was ashamed again because Chuka had spoken to cover up his own ill-nature.

“I take it back!” he said irritably. “What I said was uncalled for. I shouldn’t have said it! But I came here to do a completion survey and what you’ve been giving me is material for an estimate of morale! It’s not my line! I’m a technician, first and foremost! We’re faced with a technical problem!”

Aletha spoke suddenly from behind him.

“But these are men, first and foremost, Mr. Bordman. And they’re faced with a very human problem—how to die well. They seem to be rather good at it, so far.”

Bordman ground his teeth. He was again humiliated. In his own fashion he was attempting the same thing. But just as he was genetically not qualified to endure the climate of this planet, he was not prepared for a fatalistic or pious acceptance of disaster. Amerind and African, alike, these men instinctively held to their own ideas of what the dignity of a man called upon him to do when he could not do anything but die. But Bordman’s idea of his human dignity required him to be still fighting: still scratching at the eyes of fate or[31] destiny when he was slain. It was in his blood or genes or the result of training. He simply could not, with self-respect, accept any physical situation as hopeless even when his mind assured him that it was.

“I agree,” he said coldly, “but still I have to think in technical terms. You might say that we are going to die because we cannot land the Warlock with food and equipment. We cannot land the Warlock because we have no landing grid. We have no landing grid because it and all the material to complete it is buried under millions of tons of sand. We cannot make a new light-supply-ship type of landing grid because we have no smelter to make beams, nor power to run it if we had, yet if we had the beams we could get the power to run the smelter we haven’t got to make the beams. And we have no smelter, hence no beams, no power, no prospect of food or help because we can’t land the Warlock. It is strictly a circular problem. Break it at any point and all of it is solved.”

One of the dark men muttered something under his breath to those near him. There were chuckles.

“Like Mr. Woodchuck,” explained the man, when Bordman’s eyes fell on him. “When I was a little boy there was a story like that.”

Bordman said icily:

“The problem of coolness and water and food is the same sort of problem. In six months we could raise food—if we had power to condense [32] moisture. We’ve chemicals for hydroponics—if we could keep the plants from roasting as they grew. Refrigeration and water and food are practically another circular problem.”

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