Moments later, Jane Crowley's description was being radio'd to every martial checkpoint in the city of Northport.
It was very hot and sultry on the tarry streets of Northport. It had been an exotic city, really exotic, Jane thought. You could tell by the out-of-this world architecture, but oddly—with nothing but the uniformed figures of the interstellar rescue organization to be seen on the streets—Northport lost most of its charm. For the charm of any alien place, of any exotic world, lies in its people. Jane had once made a broadcast to that effect, and it had been very well received. It would be nothing though, absolutely nothing, compared to what Jane almost had in her grasp now. A final interview with the die-hards, with the Mandmoorans who refused to leave their planet because they had faith in the sun which would soon, in hardly more than hours, destroy them.
The docks were crowded, littered with the worldly belongings of a few score Mandmoorans who had changed their mind and had paddled over from the island. A squad of soldiers was busy processing them and the Mandmoorans, big muscular purple-skinned men with shocks of stiff lemon-yellow hair and smaller women, brittle-looking women with strange, wasp-waisted figures, glanced up frequently at the sky. Their sun, a faintly bluish white star, seemed somehow swollen. It actually seemed larger to Jane than it had been when she had landed several hours ago. Probably, she told herself, that's imagination. On the other hand, the Mandmoorans would certainly have been able to see a change in solar size by this time. For the Mandmooranian sun had doubled its apparent size in the past ten days, Jane had been told at the P.I. office.
The only result so far was the sweltering heat on Mandmoora. The heat, though, was not lethal. There had been hot summers before, the die-hard sun-worshippers had said. So they had told Jane at the P.I.O. The natives said nothing, could be made to say nothing, about the swollen appearance of the sun they worshipped.
In twenty hours their last chance for rescue would be gone. In thirty hours, Mandmoora's sun would go nova, bursting to a million times its former luminosity in micro-seconds, sending out a shell of intensely hot gases which, when it reached Mandmoora, would instantly destroy all life on the planet. Including three thousand sun-worshippers waiting devoutly for their deity to prove the interstellar interlopers wrong....
"Hey, Miss!" someone cried suddenly. It was an Army corporal running toward her, bulling his way through a knot of Mandmooran refugees. "You're Jane Crowley, ain't you?" He was only a dozen strides away now, and shouting. "Because I got orders to...."
Jane didn't hear the rest of it. She turned and ran down the length of the deserted quay adjacent to the one strewn with Mandmooran belongings. She reached the end of the quay and whirled. The corporal was trotting confidently toward her, in no great hurry now. For she had trapped herself on the quay. She was very angry with herself. A fine newshen you are, she thought. First chance you have, you let yourself get caught. A fine....
Something gave her a raucous razzing, something out over the water. She whirled and faced it. A runabout whizzed in across the blue water toward her. Someone was waving.
She waved back frantically, suddenly recognizing him. It was Sid Masters. She had met Sid on the ship which had taken both of them to Mandmoora. Sid was with the electronics outfit setting up camera equipment on Mandmoora, equipment which would transmit through subspace the pictures of a sun going nova seen from the surface of its only inhabited planet. She had struck up a quick friendship with Sid on the space-liner.