The ride to the colony was torment. Aletha rode behind her cousin on the saddle blanket, and apparently suffered little if at all. But Bordman could only ride in the ground car's cargo space, along with the sack of mail from the ship. The ground was unbelievably rough and the jolting intolerable. The heat was literally murderous. In the metal cargo space, the temperature reached a hundred and sixty degrees in the sunshine—and given enough time, food will cook in no more heat than that. Of course a man has been known to enter an oven and stay there while a roast was cooked, and to come out alive. But the oven wasn't throwing him violently about or bringing sun heated—blue-white-sun heated—metal to press his heat-suit about him. The suit did make survival possible, but that was all. The contents of its canteens gave out just before arrival, and for a short time Bordman had only sweat for his suit to work with. It kept him alive by forced ventilation, but he arrived in a state of collapse. He drank the iced salt water they gave him and went to bed. He'd get back his strength with a proper sodium level in his blood. But he slept for twelve hours straight.
When he got up, he was physically normal again, but abysmally ashamed. It did no good to remind himself that Xosa II was rated minimum-comfort class D—a blue-white sun and a mean temperature of one hundred ten degrees. Africans could do steel construction work in the open, protected only by insulating shoes and gloves. But Bordman could not venture out-of-doors except in a heat-suit. He could not stay long then. It was not a weakness. It was a matter of genetics. But he was ashamed.
Aletha nodded to him when he found the Project Engineer's office. It occupied one of the hulls in which colony-establishment materials had been lowered by rocket power. There were forty of the hulls, and they had been emptied and arranged for inter-communication, so that an individual could change his quarters and ordinary associates from time to time and colony-fever—frantic irritation with one's companions—was minimized.
Aletha sat at a desk, busily making notes from a loose-leaf volume before her. The wall behind the desk was fairly lined with similar volumes.
"I made a spectacle of myself!" said Bordman.
"Not at all!" Aletha assured him. "It could happen to anybody. I wouldn't do too well on Timbuk."
There was no answer to that. Timbuk was essentially a jungle planet, barely emerging from the carboniferous stage. Its colonists thrived because their ancestors had lived on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea, on Earth. But Anglos did not find its climate healthful, nor would many other races. Amerinds died there quicker than most.
"Ralph's on the way here now," added Aletha. "He and Dr. Chuka were out picking a place to leave the records. The sand-dunes here are terrible, you know. When an explorer ship does come to find out what's happened to us, these buildings could be covered up completely. Any place could be. It isn't easy to pick a record cache that's quite sure to be found."
"When," said Bordman, "there's nobody left alive to point it out. Is that it?"
"That's it," agreed Aletha. "It's pretty bad all around. I didn't plan to die just yet."