This planetary system was relatively close to Sarr. Another fact. The precautions taken by Drai and his people to conceal that fact might or might not be considered reasonable for a near-legal commercial enterprise, but were certainly natural for anything as blatantly criminal as drug-running.
Planet Three was cold — to put it feebly — and the drug in question could not stand normal temperatures. That was a link of rather uncertain strength, reinforced slightly by Drai’s tacit admission that “tofacco” was a vegetable product.
Think as he would, he could recall no other information which could be of the slightest use to Rade. Ken was mildly annoyed at the narcotics chief anyway for involving him in such a matter, and was certainly more willing than a professional policeman would have been to go back to the purely astronomical and ecological problem that was facing him.
How about his pesky Planet Three? Certainly it was inhabited — a fantastic enough fact in itself. Certainly it was not well known; no vision transmitter and no manned ship had ever gotten through its atmosphere. That seemed a little queer, now that Ken considered the matter again. Granted the fearful cold, and the fact that an atmosphere would conduct heat away as space could not, he still found it hard to believe that a competent engineer could not design apparatus capable of the descent. Feth was supposed to be a mechanic rather than an engineer, of course; but still it seemed very much as though the organization were singularly lacking in scientific resource. The very fact that Ken himself had been hired made that fact even more evident.
Perhaps he was not so far from Rade’s problem after all. Certainly any regular interstellar trading organization could and always did have its own ecological staff — no such concern could last without one, considering the rather weird situations apt to arise when, for example, metal-rich Sarr traded with the amphibious chemistry wizards of Rehagh. Yet he, Sallman Ken, a general science dabbler, was all that Laj Drai could get! It was not strange; it was unbelievable. He wondered how Drai had made the fact seem reasonable even for a moment.
Well, if he found out nothing they would probably not bother him. He could and would investigate Planet Three as completely as he could, go home, and turn his information over to Rade — let the narcotics man do what he wanted with it. Planet Three was more interesting.
How to land on the blasted planet? He could see keeping large ships out of its atmosphere, after the trouble with the natives of the flat, bluish areas. Still, torpedoes had been running the gauntlet without loss for twenty years, and the only detectable flatlander activity had been radar beams in the last two or three. Those were easily fooled by quarter wave coatings, as Drai had said. No, the only real objections were the frightful natural conditions of the world.
Well, a standard suit of engineer’s armor would let a Sarrian work in a lake of molten aluminium for quite a while. There, of course, the temperature difference was less than it would be on the Planet of Ice; but the conductivity of the metal must be greater than that of the planet’s atmosphere, and might make up the difference. Even if it did not, the armor could be given extra heating coils or insulation or both. Why had this never been tried? He would have to ask Feth or Laj Drai.
Then, granting for the moment that a landing could not be made even this way, why was television impossible? Ken refused to believe that the thin glass of a television tube could not be cooled down sufficiently to match the world’s conditions without shattering, even if the electrical parts had to be kept hot. Surely the difference could be no greater than in the ancient incandescent bulbs!
He would have to put both these points up to Feth. He was heading purposefully back toward the shop with this plan in mind, when he encountered Drai, who greeted him as though there had been no suspicious thoughts in his own brain that day.