"All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?"
"Just so," said Aletha, smiling. "Be patient, Mr. Bordman!"
Her cousin said:
"We built the small grid on the top of the sand. And it tapped the ionosphere for power. No lack of power then! And we'd set it to heave up sand instead of ships. Not to heave it out into space, but to give it up to a mile a second vertical velocity. Then we turned it on."
"And we rode it down, that little grid," said one of the remaining Indians, grinning. "What a party! Manitou!"
Redfeather frowned at him and took up the narrative.
"It hurled the sand up from its center, as you said it would. The sand swept air with it. It made a whirlwind, bringing more sand from outside the grid into its field. It was a whirlwind with fifteen megakilowatts of power to drive it. Some of the sand went twenty miles high. Then it made a mushroom head and the winds up yonder blew it to the west. It came down a long way off, Mr. Bordman. We've made a new dune area ten miles down-wind. And the little grid sank as the sand went away from around it. We had to stop it three times, because it leaned. We had to dig under parts of it to get it straight up again. But it went down into the valley."
Bordman turned up the power to his heat-suit motors. He felt uncomfortably warm.
"In six days," said Ralph, almost ceremonially, "it had uncovered half the original grid we'd built. Then we were able to modify that to heave sand and to let it tap the ionosphere. We were able to use a good many times the power the little grid could apply to sand lifting. In two days more the landing-grid was clear. The valley bottom was clean. We shifted some hundreds of millions of tons of sand by landing-grid, and now it is possible to land the Warlock, and receive her supplies. The solar-power furnace is already turning out pigs for her loading. We wanted you to see what we have done. The colony is no longer in danger, and we shall have the grid completely finished for your inspection before the ship is ready to return."
Bordman said uncomfortably: