g. They tried to find a language the children could understand.
They failed. Then when the children spoke slowly and carefully, they
searched at least for familiar root-sounds. They found nothing. But
certainly the children felt themselves surrounded by people who wished
them well.

* * * * *

The base photographer developed and printed Soames' pictures. The design
of the ship was clear and the children before it gave it scale. The
interior pictures were not so good, wrongly focused. Still, there was
plenty to substantiate Soames' report.

Aside from the pictures there were the things the children had selected
to be brought. There was a cooking-pot. Its substance conducted heat in
one direction only. Heat could enter its outside surface, but not leave
it. Heat could leave its inside surface, but not enter it. Consequently,
when the lid was on, the outer surface absorbed heat from the air around
it and the inner surface released it, and the contents of the pot boiled
merrily without fuel, while the outside became coated with frost.

Some of the physicists went about in a state of shock, trying to figure
out how it happened. Others, starry-eyed, pointed out that if the
cooking-pot had been a pipe, it could be submerged under a running
river, yield live steam by cooling off the water that flowed past it,
and that water would regain normal river temperature in the course of a
few miles of sunlit flow. In such a case, what price coal and petroleum?
In fact, what price atomic power?

The small tripod went up outside the base's main building. Instantly the
spinner began to turn, the wind ceased. In minutes the air ceased to be
biting. In tens of minutes it was warm. Meteorologists, refusing to
believe their senses, explored the boundaries of the calm area. They
came back, frost-bitten, swearing that there was a drop of eighty
degrees beyond the calm area, and a rise of temperature beyond the cold
belt. The tripod-spinner was a different application of the principle of
the cooking-pot. Somehow the spinning thing made an area that heat could
enter but not leave, and wind could not blow through. If the device
could be reversed, deserts would become temperate zones. As it was, the
Arctic and Antarctic could be made to bloom. The gadget was an
out-of-doors heat-pump.

There was the box with the plastic sheet in it. One of the boys, very
composed, operated it. On request, he opened it up. There w