irst man on the
fleet to show imagination, other men had gathered around. They were now
absorbed.

"I think," said Hoddan, "that we can make an electronic field that'll
soften the cementite between the crystals of steel, without heating up
anything else. If it works, we can make die-forgings and die-stampings
with plastic dies! And then that useless junk you've got can be
rebuilt--"

They listened gravely, nodding as he talked. They did not quite
understand everything, but they had the habit of believing him now. He
needed this and that in the huge cargo spaces of the ship the leader had
formerly used.

"Hm-m-m," said Hoddan. "How about duplicating these machines and sending
them over?"

They looked estimatingly at the tool-shop equipment. It could be made to
duplicate itself--

The new machine shop, in the ancient ark of space, made another machine
shop for another ship. In the other ship that tool shop would make
another for another ship, which in turn....

By then Hoddan had a cold-metal die-stamper in operation. It was very
large. It drew on the big ship's drive unit for power. One put a rough
mass of steel in place between plastic dies. One turned on the power.
For the tenth of a second--no longer--the steel was soft as putty. Then
it stiffened and was warm. But in that tenth of a second it had been
shaped with precision.

It took two days to duplicate the jungle-plow Hoddan had first been
shown, in new sound metal. But after the first one worked triumphantly,
they made forty of each part at a time and turned out jungle-plow
equipment enough for the subjugation of all Thetis' forests.

There were other enterprises on hand, of course. A mechanic who
stuttered horribly had an idea. He could not explain it or diagram it.
So he made it. It was an electric motor very far ahead of those in the
machines of Colin. Hoddan waked from a cat nap with a diagram in his
head. He drew it, half-asleep, and later looked and found that his
unconscious mind had designed a power-supply system which made Walden's
look rather primitive--

* * * * *

During the first six days Hoddan did not sleep to speak of, and after
that he merely cat-napped when he could. But he finally agreed with the
emigrants' leader--now no longer fierce, but fiercely triumphant--that
he thought they could go on. And he would ask a favor. He propped his
eyelids open with his fingers and wrote the letter to his grandfath