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No

preparations were made -- there was nothing to prepare for. And priceless

months were wasted.
     
     
The sun wasn't going to become a nova, or anything like that. It was only

going to burn a little brighter for a while, like an open fire suddenly

collapsing on itself and shooting out spurts of flaming hydrogen.

Astronomers on distant worlds, if there were any, would have to be

advanced indeed before they would change Sol's brightness index as a

result of any observations they might be making.
     
     
It was such a tiny change, astronomically speaking, which the sun was

going to make that one could understand why cults like the Sunlovers

started. The first I heard of this group, it was a thousand strong. When

I checked on the figure it was three million. A week later there were

over a hundred million members of an international Sunlovers' Association.
     
     
What the Sunlovers were going to do was just get used to the change before

it came. They flowed to the tropics. They found the hottest spots on Earth.

The SunA embraced sun bathing, primitivism, nudism, Egyptology, swimming,

anything remotely connected with the sun. The SunAs, as they called

themselves (pronounced Sunays), soon had a routine in which clothes were

ceremoniously torn to pieces and the body was offered to the sun.
     
     
Well. But don't let's be hard on the SunAs. Fully ninety-five per cent

of them were sane, sensible people -- it was only the extremists who

carried out those stunts like walking through fires and burning ice

factories and giving birth to children out in the blazing sun and

publicly branding their breasts with the SunA sign by sunrays focused

though giant magnifying glasses.
     
     
Most of the SunAs were people who thought that if they took the step of

converting their environment from, say, fur-clad Alaska to bathing-suited

Bermuda they would have gone part of the way to being ready for the

admittedly tiny increase in radiated solar energy. They didn't get up

before dawn to pay their respects to the sun; or if they did, it was

out of politeness, not to the Sun God, but to the more fervid SunAs

around them.
     
     
What the SunAs couldn't or wouldn't understand was that astronomical

temperatures, even solar-system temperatures, ranged from -273° C.

to 20,000° C., and humanity was only comfortable between 10° and 30°.

Certainly people could exist at below-zero and above-blood-heat temperatures.

But while nobody wanted to claim accuracy to a degree or two, there was

unquestionably going to be no place left on the surface of Earth where

water would remain liquid.
     
     
Then there were the Trogs, who weren't so much going to get used to the

new conditions as run away from them. Basically, if the aim of all the

Trog societies must be reduced to its simplest terms, they were going to

dig holes in the ground. Oh, certainly some of the Trogs were scientists

genuinely planning on survival in a 250°-500° C. world. They were working

on a basis of shelter, to equalize temperatures; refrigeration, to convert

the energy of heat to the task of keeping a few cubic feet cool; hydroponics,

for food and water -- all the obvious things. The only thing was, it was like

trying to move a mountain with a wooden spade. It wasn't going to work.

Undoubtedly some Trogs were going to live longer than anyone else when the

heat really came on, but that was all -- minutes, hours, or days. There

just wasn't time to find out how to make a bubble which one could never

leave in a 300° C. world and keep it at what had once been normal Earth

temperature. Our science was a caveman technology -- we knew about

lighting fires and staying warm, but our only solution when there was

too much heat was to go somewhere else.
     
     
Yes, it was a pity we worked on wrong premises for so long. Until well on

in July there was still room for doubt; but then two things were shown

conclusively. One was that life would cease on Earth