grinned. “I know we’re stuck, Ralph,” he [37] said amiably, “but it’s nice stuff to go in the records. Too bad we don’t keep coup-records like you Indians!” [37] Aletha’s cousin—Project Engineer—said crisply: “Go away! Who made your solar mirror? It was more than an assist! You get set to cast beams for us! Girders! I’m going to get a lifeboat aloft and away to Trent! Build a minimum size landing grid! Build a fire under somebody so they’ll send us a colony ship with supplies! If there’s no new sandstorm to bury the radiation refrigerators Bordman brought to mind, we can keep alive with hydroponics until a ship can arrive with something useful!” Chuka stared. “You don’t mean we might actually live through this! Really?” Aletha regarded the two of them with impartial irony. “Dr. Chuka,” she said gently, “you accomplished the impossible. Ralph, here, is planning to attempt the preposterous. Does it occur to you that Mr. Bordman is nagging himself to achieve the inconceivable? It is inconceivable, even to him, but he’s trying to do it!” “What’s he trying to do?” demanded Chuka, wary but amused. “He’s trying,” said Aletha, “to prove to himself that he’s the best man on this planet. Because he’s physically least capable of living here! His vanity’s hurt. Don’t underestimate him!” “He the best man here?” demanded Chuka blankly. “In his way he’s all right. The refrigeration proves that! But he can’t walk out-of-doors without a heat-suit!” Ralph Redfeather said dryly, without ceasing his feverish work: “Nonsense, Aletha. He has courage. I give him that. But he couldn’t walk a beam twelve hundred feet up. In his own way, yes. He’s capable. But the best man——” “I’m sure,” agreed Aletha, ”that he couldn’t sing as well as the worst of your singing crew, Dr. Chuka, and any Amerind could outrun him. Even I could! But he’s got something we haven’t got, just as we have qualities he hasn’t. We’re secure in our competences. We know what we can do, and that we can do it better than any—” her eyes twinkled—“paleface. But he doubts himself. All the time and in every way. And that’s why he may be the best man on this planet! I’ll bet he does prove it!”
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