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"'A Pail of Air'" is a science fiction short story by Fritz Leiber which aired on the radio show ''X Minus One'' in March 1956.
It is narrated by a boy living on Earth after it has been torn from the Sun's gravity and captured by a passing "dark star". The loss of solar heating has caused the Earth's atmosphere to freeze into thick layers of "snow". The boy's father had worked with a group of other scientists to construct a large shelter, but the earthquakes accompanying the disaster had destroyed it and killed the others. He managed to construct a smaller, makeshift shelter called the "Nest" for his family, where they maintain a breathable atmosphere by periodically retrieving pails of frozen oxygen to thaw over a fire. They have survived in this way for a number of years. At the end, they are found by a search party from a large group of survivors at Los Alamos, where they were using nuclear power to provide heat and had begun using rockets to go out in search of other survivors (radio being ineffective at long range without an ionosphere). They reveal that other groups of humans had survived at Argonne, Brookhaven, Harwell and Tanna Tuva, and that plans were being made to establish uranium mining colonies at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.

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See also

★ rogue planet

External links

★ A Pail of Air