The Science Fiction Anthology. Andre Norton
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.