"It can't scald anybody, can it?" asked Barnes uneasily.
"Not," said Hardwick, "when it's had to come up through forty feet of soil. It's been pretty well cooled off in taking up some extra moisture. It spread pretty well, didn't it?"
The Sector Chief's office had tall windows—doors, really—that looked out upon green lawn and many trees. Now a downpour of rain beat down outside. Wind whipped at the trees. There was tumult and roaring and the vibration of gusts of hurricane force. Even the building in which the Sector Chief's office was, vibrated slightly in the wind.
The Sector Chief beamed. The brown dog came in uneasily, looked around the room, and walked in leisurely fashion toward Hardwick. He settled with a sigh beside Hardwick's chair.
"What I want to know," said Werner tensely, "is, won't this rain put back all the water the ship-fuel boiled away?"
Hardwick said uncomfortably: "Two inches of rain would be a heavy fall, Sandringham tells me. It's the lack of heavy rains that made the civilians start irrigating. When you figure the energy-content of ship-fuel, Werner—an appreciable fraction of the energy in atomic explosive—it's sort of deceptive. Turn it into thermal units and it gets to be enlightening. We turned loose, underground, enough heat to boil away two feet of soil-water under the island's whole surface."
Werner said sharply:
"What'll happen when that heat passes up through the soil? It'll kill the vegetation, won't it?"
"No," said Hardwick mildly. "Because there was two feet of water to be turned to steam. The bottom layer of the soil was raised to the temperature of steam at a few pounds pressure. No more. The heat's already escaped. In the steam."