"What?"
"Take good care of yourself. Will you?"
IV
Therefore Senior Officer Werner, of the Colonial Survey, received his instructions from Sandringham. Hardwick never knew the details of the instructions Werner got. They were possibly persuasive, or they may have been menacing. But Werner ceased to argue for the movement of any fraction of the island's population to the arctic ice cap, and instead made frequent eloquent addresses to the planetary population on the scientific means by which their lives were to be saved. Between the addresses, perhaps, he sweated cold sweat when a tree sedately tilted in what had seemed solid soil, or a building settled perceptibly while he looked at it, or when ... say ... a section of the island's soil bulged upward.
Publicly, he headed citizens' committees, and grandly gave instructions, and spoke in unintelligible and, therefore, extremely scientific terms when desperately earnest men asked for explanations. But he was perfectly clear in what he wanted them to do.
He wanted drill-holes in the arable soil down to the depth at which the holes began to close up of themselves. He wanted those holes not more than a hundred feet apart, in lines which slanted at forty-five degrees to the gradient of the bedrock.
Sandringham checked his speeches, at the rate of four a day. Once he had Hardwick called away from where he supervised extremely improbable operations. Hardwick was smeared with the island's grayish mud when he looked into the phone-plate to take the call.
"Hardwick," said Sandringham curtly, "Werner's saying those holes you want are to be lines at forty-five degrees to the gradient."
"That ... I'd like a little more," said Hardwick. "A little less, rather. If they slanted three miles across the grade for every two downhill, it would be better. I'd like to put a lot more lines of holes. But there's the element of time."