Herndon instantly pressed buttons under his phone-plate. He relayed the information to Riki, his sister, as if it were gospel. Massy remembered guiltily that it wasn't gospel. It was simply a trick recalled from his boyhood, when he was passionately interested in secret languages. His interest had faded when he realized he had no secrets to record or transmit.
Herndon turned from the phone-plate.
"Riki says she's already learned to recognize some groups," he reported, "but thanks for the advice. Now what?"
Massy sat down. He'd have liked some coffee, but he was being treated with such respect that the role of demigod was almost forced on him.
"It seems to me," he observed, "that the increased cold out here might not be local. Sunspots—"
Herndon jittered visibly. He silently handed over a sheet of paper with observation-figures on top and a graph below them which related the observations to each other. They were the daily, at-first-routine, measurements of the solar constant from Lani III. The graph-line almost ran off the paper at the bottom.
"To look at this," he admitted, "you'd think the sun was going out. Of course it can't be," he added hastily. "Not possibly! But there is an extraordinary number of sunspots. Maybe they'll clear. But meanwhile the amount of heat reaching us is dropping. As far as I know there's no parallel to it. Night temperatures are thirty degrees lower than they should be. Not only here, either, but at all the robot weather stations that have been spotted around the planet. They average forty below zero minimum, instead of ten. And—there is that terrific lot of sunspots...."