Most human problems are circular and fall apart when a single trivial part of them is solved. There used to be enmity between races because they were different, and they tended to be different because they were enemies, so there was enmity.... The big problem of interstellar flight was that nothing could travel faster than light, and nothing could travel faster than light because mass increased with speed, and mass increased with speed—obviously!—because ships remained in the same time slot, and ships remained in the same time slot long after a one-second shift was possible because nobody realized that it meant traveling faster than light. And even before there was interstellar travel, there was practically no interplanetary commerce because it took so much fuel to take off and land. It took more fuel to carry the fuel to take off and land, and more still to carry the fuel for that, until somebody used power on the ground for heave-off instead of take-off, and again on the ground for landing. And then interplanetary ships carried cargos. On Xosa II there was an emergency because a sandstorm had buried the almost-completed landing-grid under some megatons of sand, and it couldn't be completed because there was only storage power because it wasn't completed, because there was only storage power because—
It took three weeks for the problem to be seen as the ultimately simple thing it really was. Bordman had called it a circular problem, but he hadn't seen its true circularity. It was actually—like all circular problems—inherently an unstable set of conditions. It began to fall apart simply because he saw that mere refrigeration would break its solidity.
In one week there were ten acres of desert covered with silicone-wool felt in great strips. By day a reflective surface was uppermost, and at sundown caterwheel trucks hooked on to towlines and neatly pulled it over on its back, to expose gridded black-body surfaces to the starlight. The gridding was precisely designed so that winds blowing across it did not make eddies in the grid squares. The chilled air in those pockets remained undisturbed, and there was no conduction of heat downward by eddy-currents, while there was admirable radiation of heat out to space. This was in the manner of the night sides of all planets, only somewhat more efficient.
In two weeks there was a water yield of three thousand gallons per night, and in three weeks more there were similar grids over the colony houses and a vast roofed cooling shed for pre-chilling 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. 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. Presently there were little rolls of molten metal and slag trickling—and separating as they trickled—hesitantly down the cliffside. 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 spec-book for Xosa II, and 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 on the second desk, where Aletha sat with her perpetual loose-leaf volumes before her. The metal smoked and began to char the desk-top. He picked it up again and tossed it from one gloved hand to the other.
"There y'are, Ralph!" he boasted. "You Indians go after your coups! Match this coup for me! Without fuel and minus all equipment except of our own making—I credit an assist on the mirror, but that's all—we're set to load the first ship that comes in for cargo! Now what are you going to do for the record? I think we've wiped your eye for you!"
Ralph hardly looked up. His eyes were very bright. Bordman had shown him and he was copying figures and formulae from a section of the definition book of the Colonial Survey. The book started with the specifications for antibiotic growth equipment for colonies with problems in local bacteria. It ended with definitions of the required strength of material and the designs stipulated for cages in zoos for motile fauna, sub-divided into flying, marine, and solid ground creatures: sub-sub-divided into carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores, with the special specifications for enclosures to contain abyssal creatures requiring extreme pressures, and the equipment for maintaining a healthfully re-poisoned atmosphere for creatures from methane planets.