details.

"But you must have heard some guesses about what started the cracks in
the sky?" Dave suggested.

"Oh, indeed, that is common knowledge," Sersa Garm admitted. He changed
thumbs while he considered. "'Twas an experiment most noble, but through
mischance going sadly awry. A great Sather made the sun remain in one
place too long, and the heat became too great. It was like the Classic
experiment--"

"How hot is your sun?"

There was a long pause. Then Sather Germ shrugged. "'Tis a great
mystery. Suffice to say it has no true heat, but does send forth an
activating principle against the phlogiston layer, which being excited
grows vengeful against the air ... but you have not the training to
understand."

"Okay, so they didn't tell you, if they knew." Dave stared up at the
sun, trying to guess. The light looked about like what he was used to,
where the sky was still whole. North light still was like what a color
photographer would consider 5500° Kelvin, so the sun must be pretty hot.
Hot enough to melt anything he knew about. "What's the melting point of
this sky material?"

He never did manage to make Sather Garm understand what a melting point
was. But he found that one of the solutions tried had been the bleeding
of eleven certified virgins for seven days. When the blood was mixed
with dragonfeathers and frogsdown and melded with a genuine