Ted thumped the hard, cold ground with his shoe. “How can we work this?” he asked. “It’s hard as stone, and it must be awfully cold.”
His father pulled some long steel spikes out of the mass of equipment. Then he took out a sledge hammer. He hammered the spikes at intervals in the ground along the sides of the dome. Then he attached an electrical circuit to each of them and the whole to a generator.
As the generator purred in operation, he said, “Infrared heat rays are being sent out by the spikes into the ground, warming it. After supper the ground will be thawed out so that we can till it.”
When they returned to the garden area after their last meal of the day, they found that the ground could be worked easily. Electric tools made the job quick and efficient. Fertilizer and soil conditioner were worked into the ground after the surface had been loosened up for several feet down.
“Did you say we could plant seeds tomorrow?” Jill asked, when they were through.
“That’s right,” her father replied. “The chemicals we have put in the ground are almost miraculous in the speed with which they work in the soil. They can literally do the job overnight.”
Jill and Ted went to bed tired and untroubled that night. But not Randy. Before Ted dropped off, he heard Randy tossing restlessly in the bunk below. Ted caught some of the words muttered by the boy: “Father ... miss you ... ever come back to me?”
They had been kept so busy during those first days in their new home that Ted had almost forgotten that Randy wasn’t his brother. Randy seemed to have taken to the family very well, Ted thought, but he realized no foster parents could take the place of his real father. As Ted fell asleep, he was thinking what an unhappy day it was going to be for all of them when Randy found out that his father was never going to return.
