Bordman flung his first bombs recklessly, because there would be more, and because he was desperately anxious to hang as many comet-tails as possible around the colony-planet before nightfall. He didn't want it to get any colder. And it didn't. In fact, there wasn't exactly any real nightfall on Lani III that night. The planet turned on its axis, to be sure. But around it, quite close by, there hung gigantic streamers of shining gas. At their beginning, those streamers bore a certain resemblance to the furry wild-animal tails that little boys like to have hanging down from hunting-caps. Only they shone. And as they developed they merged, so that there was an enormous shining curtain about Lani III, draperies of metal-mist to capture sunlight that would otherwise have been wasted, and to diffuse much of it on Lani II. At midnight there was only one spot in all the night sky where there was really darkness. That was overhead, directly outward from the planet, opposite from the sun. Gigantic shining streamers formed a wall, a tube, of comet-tail material, yet many times more dense and therefore more bright, which shielded the colony world against the dark and cold, and threw upon it a shining, warming brightness. Riki maintained stoutly that she could feel the warmth from the sky, but that was improbable. However, heat certainly did come from somewhere. The thermometer did not fall at all, that night. It rose. It was up to fifty below zero at dawn. During the day--they sent out twenty more bombs that second day--it was up to twenty degrees below zero. By the day after, there were competent computations from the home planet, and the concrete results of abstruse speculation, and the third day's bombs were placed with optimum spacing for heating purposes. By dawn of the fourth day the air was a balmy five degrees below zero, and the day after that there was a small running stream in the valley at midday. There was talk of stocking the stream with fish, on the morning the Survey ship came in. The great landing-grid gave out a deep-toned, vibrant, humming note, like the deepest possible note of the biggest organ that could be imagined. A speck appeared high up in a pale-blue sky with trimmings of golden gas clouds. The Survey ship came down and down and settled as a shining silver object in the very center of the gigantic red-painted landing-grid. Her skipper came to find Bordman. He was in Herndon's office. The skipper struggled to keep sheer blankness out of his expression. "What the hell?" he demanded. "This is the damnedest sight in the whole Galaxy, and they tell me you're responsible! There've been ringed planets before, and there've been comets and who knows what! But shining gas-pipes aimed at the sun, half a million miles across! And there are two of them--both the occupied planets!" Herndon explained why the curtains hung in space. There was a drop in the solar constant....