"But all our instruments have indicated that Saturn is cold!" Stevens interrupted.
"Its surface temperature, as read from afar, would be low," conceded Barkovis, "but the actual surface of the planet is extremely hot, and is highly volcanic. Practically none of its heat is radiated because of the great density and depth of its atmosphere, which extends for many hundreds of your kilometers. It required many thousands of lives and many years of time to build and install those automatic power plants, but once they were in operation, we were assured of power for many tens of thousands of years to come."
"Our system of power transmission is more or less like yours, but we haven't anything like your range. Suppose you'd be willing to teach me the computation of your fields?"
"Yes, we shall be glad to give you the formulae. Being an older race, it is perhaps natural that we should have developed certain refinements as yet unknown to you. But I am, I perceived, detaining you from your time of rest—goodbye," and Barkovis was wafted back toward his mirrored globe.
"What do you make of this chemical solution blood of theirs, Steve?" asked Nadia, watching the placidly floating form of the Titanian captain.
"Not much. I may have mentioned before that there are one or two, or perhaps even three men who are better chemists than I am. I gathered that it is something like a polyhydric alcohol and something like a substituted hydrocarbon, and yet different from either in that it contains flourin in loose combination. I think it is something that our Tellurian chemists haven't got yet; but they've got so many organic compounds now that they may have synthesized it, at that. You see, Titan's atmosphere isn't nearly as dense as ours, but what there is of it is pure dynamite. Ours is a little oxygen, mixed with a lot of inert ingredients. Theirs is oxygen, heavily laced with flourin. It's reactive, no fooling! However, something pretty violent must be necessary to carry on body reactions at such a temperature as theirs."
"Probably; but I know even less about that kind of thing than you do. Funny, isn't it, the way he thinks 'water' when he means ice, and always thinks of our real water as being molten?"
"Reasonable enough when you think about it. Temperature differences are logarithmic, you know, not arithmetic—the effective difference between his body temperature and ours is perhaps even greater than that between ours and that of melted iron. We never think of iron as being a liquid, you know."
"That's right, too. Well, good night, Steve dear."
"'Bye, little queen of space—see you at breakfast," and the Forlorn Hope became dark and silent.