"Evacuation to the Arctic is the only possible answer! Some people can be saved! Some! I'll take a boat and equipment and go on ahead and get some sort of refuge ready." There was dead silence. The brown dog, who had followed Hardwick from the outer terrace, now yawned loudly. Hardwick reached over and absent-mindedly scratched his ears. Young Barnes swallowed. "Beg pardon, sir," he said awkwardly. "But what's the weather forecast?" "Continued fair," said Sandringham pleasantly. "That's why I had Hardwick and Werner come down. Three heads are better than one. I've gambled their lives on their brains." Hardwick continued thoughtfully to scratch the brown dog's ears. Werner licked his lips. Young Barnes looked from one to another of them. Then he looked back at the Sector Chief. "Sir," he said awkwardly. "I ... I think the odds are pretty good. Mr. Hardwick, sir--He'll manage!" Then he flushed hotly at his own presumption in saying something consoling to a Sector Chief. It was comparable to telling him how to top off his vacuum-suit tanks. But the Sector Chief nodded in grave approval and turned to Hardwick to hear what he had to say. III The leeward side of the island went very gently into the water. From a boat offshore--say, a couple of miles out--the shoreline looked low and flat and peaceful. There were houses in view, and there were boats afloat. But they were much smaller than those that had been towing a twenty-mile-long oil-slick out to sea. These boats did not ply back and forth. Most of them seemed anchored. On some of them there was activity. Men went overboard, without splashing, and things came up from the ocean bottom and were dumped inside their hulls, and then baskets went back down into the water. At long intervals--quite long intervals--men emerged from underwater and sat on the sides of the boats and smoked with an effect of leisure. There was sunshine, and the land was green, and a seeming of vast tranquillity hung over the whole seascape. But the small Survey-personnel recreation-boat moved in toward the shore, and the look of things changed. At a mile, a mass of green that had seemed to be trees growing down to the water's edge became a thicket of tumbled trunks and overset branches where a tree-thicket had collapsed. At half a mile the water was opaque. There were things floating in it--the roof of a house; the leaves of an ornamental shrub, with nearby its roots showing at the surface, washed clean. A child's toy bobbed past the boat. It looked horribly pathetic. There were the exotic planes and angles of three wooden steps, floating in the ripples of the great ocean. "Ignoring the imminent explosion of the fuel store," said Hardwick dryly, "we need to find out something about what has to be done to the soil to stop its creeping. I hope you remembered, lieutenant, to ask a great many useless questions."