to ask them
questions, but that was impossible, so they studied the rather fuzzy
photographs of the inside of the ship--the base photographer had run
off several sets of extra prints--and poked helplessly at the things the
children had brought with them, and racked their brains to imagine how
such things work. The spinning thing atop the tripod made it quite
pleasant to be out-of-doors around the Gissell Bay base, though there
were forty-mile winds and thermometers read ten below zero two hundred
yards from the thing Hod had set up. The cooking-pot boiled merrily
without fuel, with an increasingly thick layer of frost on its outside.
The thing Soames had called a super-radar allowed a penguin rookery to
be watched in detail without disturbing the penguins, and Fran
obligingly loaned his pocket instrument--the one that cut metal like
butter--to the physicists of the staff.

He had to show them how to use it, though. It was a flat metal case
about the size of a pocket cigarette lighter. It had two very simple
controls, and a highly ingenious gimmick which kept it from turning
itself on by accident.

In an oblique fashion, it was a heat-pump. One control turned it on and
intensified or diminished its effect. The other controlled the area it
worked on. In any material but iron, it made heat flow together toward
the center of its projected field. Pointed at a metal bar, the heat from
both ends flowed to the center, where the pocket device was aimed. The
center became intensely hot. The rest went intensely cold. In seconds a
bronze bar turned red-hot along a line a hundredth of an inch thick.
Then it melted, a layer the thickness of tissue-paper turned liquid and
one could pull the bar apart or slide it sidewise to separate it. But
one needed to hold the bar in thick gloves, because liquid air could
drip off if one were not careful. And it did not work on iron or steel.

Soames took Fran with Mal and Hod, to the improvised schoolroom where
Gail labored to give Zani a minimum vocabulary of English words. Rex
went happily along with the others.

Zani greeted the dog rapturously. She got down on the floor with him and
tussled with him, her face beaming.

Soames' mouth dropped open. The other children hadn't known there was
such a thing as a dog. They'd had to learn to play with Rex. But Zani
knew about dogs and how to play with them on sight.

"I suppose," said Gail, not knowing of Soames' astonishment, "Zani will
help m