ed cooling-shed for pre-chilling of air to be used
by the refrigeration systems themselves. The fuel-store--stored
power--was thereupon stretched to three times its former calculated
usefulness. The situation was no longer a simple and neat equation of
despair.

Then something else happened. One of Dr. Chuka's assistants was curious
about a certain mineral. He used the solar furnace that had made the
silicone wool to smelt it. And Dr. Chuka saw him. And after one blank
moment he bellowed laughter and went to see Ralph Redfeather. Whereupon
Amerind steel-workers sawed apart a robot hull that was no longer a fuel
tank because its fuel was gone, and they built a demountable solar
mirror some sixty feet across--which African mechanics deftly
powered--and suddenly there was a spot of incandescence even brighter
than the sun of Xosa II, down on the planet's surface. It played upon a
mineral cliff, and monstrous smells developed and even the African
mining-technicians put on goggles because of the brightness, and
presently there were threads of molten metal and slag trickling--and
separating as they trickled--hesitantly down the cliff-side.

And Dr. Chuka beamed and slapped his sweating thighs, and Bordman went
out in a caterwheel truck, wearing a heat-suit, to watch it for all of
twenty minutes. When he got back to the Project Engineer's office he
gulped iced salt water and dug out the books he'd brought down from the
ship. There was the specbook for Xosa II, and there were the other
volumes of definitions issued by the Colonial Survey. They were
definitions of the exact meanings of terms used in briefer
specifications, for items of equipment sometimes ordered by the Colony
Office.

* * * * *

When Chuka came into the office, presently, he carried the first crude
pig of Xosa II iron in his gloved hand. He gloated. Bordman was then
absent, and Ralph Redfeather worked feverishly at his desk.

"Where's Bordman?" demanded Chuka in that resonant bass voice of his.
"I'm ready to report for degree-of-completion credit that the mining
properties on Xosa II are prepared as of today to deliver pig iron,
cobalt, zirconium and beryllium in commercial quantities! We require one
day's notice to begin delivery of metal other than iron at the moment,
because we're short of equipment, but we can furnish chromium and
manganese on two days' notice--the deposits are farther away."

He dumped the pig of metal