TUNNEL IN THE SKY by ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

The town was stobor-tight now. An adobe wall too high and sheer for any but the giant lions covered the upstream side and the bank, and any lion silly enough to jump it landed on a bed of stakes too wide now for even their mighty leapsthe awning under which Rod lolled was the hide of one that had made that mistake. The wall was pierced by stobor traps, narrow tunnels just big enough for the vicious little beasts and which gave into deep pits, where they could chew on each other like Kilkenny cats which they did.

It might have been easier to divert them around the town, but Rod wanted to kill them; he would not be content until their planet was rid of those vermin.

In the meantime the town was safe. Stobor continued to deserve the nickname “dopy joe” except during the dry season and then they did not become dangerous until the annual berserk migration the last of which had passed without loss of blood; the colony’s defenses worked, now that they understood what to defend against. Rod had required mothers and children to sit out the stampede in the cave; the rest sat up two nights and stayed on guard. . . but no blade was wet.

Rod thought sleepily that the next thing they needed was paper; Grant had been right. . . even a village was hard to run without writing paper. Besides, they must avoid losing the habit of writing. He wanted to follow up Grant’s notion of recording every bit of knowledge the gang possessed. Take logarithms logarithms might not be used for generations, but when it came time to log a couple of rhythms, then. . . he went to sleep.

“You busy, Chief?”

Rod looked up at Arthur Nielsen. “Just sleeping a practice I heartily recommend on a warm Sabbath afternoon. What’s up, Art? Are Shorty and Doug pushing the bellows alone?”

“No. Confounded plug came out and we lost our fire. The furnace is ruined.” Nielsen sat down wearily. He was hot, very red in the face, and looked discouraged. He had a bad burn on a forearm but did not seem to know it. “Rod, what are we doing wrong? Riddle me that.”

“Talk to one of the brains. If you didn’t know more about it than I do, we’d swap jobs.”

“I wasn’t really asking. I know two things that are wrong. We can’t build a big enough installation and we don’t have coal. Rod, we’ve got to have coal; for cast iron or steel we need coal. Charcoal won’t do for anything but spongy wrought iron.”

“What do you expect to accomplish overnight, Art? Miracles? You are years ahead of what anybody could ask. You’ve turned out metal, whether it’s wrought iron or uranium. Since you made that spit for the barbecue pit, Margery thinks you are a genius.”

“Yes, yes, we’ve made ironbut it ought to be lots better and more of it. This ore is wonderful . . . the real Lake Superior hematite. Nobody’s seen such ore in commercial quantity on Terra in centuries. You ought to be able to breathe on it and make steel. And I could, too, if I had coal. We’ve got clay, we’ve got limestone, we’ve got this lovely ore but I can’t get a hot enough fire.”

Rod was not fretted; the colony was getting metal as fast as needed. But Waxie was upset. “Want to knock off and search for coal?”

“Uh . . . no, I don’t. I want to rebuild that furnace.” Nielsen gave a bitter description of the furnace’s origin, habits, and destination.

“Who knows most about geology?”

“Uh, I suppose I do.”

“Who knows next most?”

“Why, Doug I guess.

“Let’s send him out with a couple of boys to find coal. You can have Mick in his place on the bellows no, wait a minute. How about Bruce?”

“Bruce? He won’t work.”

“Work him. If you work him so hard he runs away and forgets to come back, we won’t miss him. Take him, Art, as a favor to me.

“Well . . . . okay, if you say so.

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