[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Pluto is a strange planet in many ways. Perhaps it may even be classed
as a "man-made" planet, since if it were not for man and his works,
Pluto might as well have never been. But Pluto was found abundant
in uranium, and then came man to change the ultra-frigidity of
Pluto's surface, and to endow Pluto with a breathable atmosphere by
transporting great shiploads of the frozen gases found on Umbriel. Then
man set up cities, and since the face of Pluto had never been scarred
by any kind of intelligent life, the planners had a free and open hand.
So uranium was mined near the region known on the Plutonian maps as
_The Styx Valley_, but which, with characteristic lack of foresight,
was across the Devil's Mountains from the River Styx. Across the
Devil's Range went the uranium to Mephisto, where it was smelted down
into pigs. It was then put on barges and floated down the River Styx
to Hell, which lies across the River Styx from Sharon; both cities
quartering on the Sulphur Sea.
It was loaded onto the ships of space at Hell, and then raced across
the void, sunward to the Inner System where it was used.
But the names are but locationally appropriate. Hell is no fuming,
torrid city. It is temperate with a perfect climate. Mephisto's only
claim to the nether regions was the dancing flames of her smelting
mills that danced on the night sky. The Devil's Range was a small ridge
of less than fifteen thousand feet and it was more than amply supplied
with passes and near-sea-level breaches.
And the cities at the mouth of the River Styx lived in cheerful
rivalry, their main source of jealousy being the lush produce that
came from the hinterland behind each. And the River Styx itself was a
garden-spot for yachting clubs; bathing beaches lined the mouth for
fifteen miles inward and they were clear-watered and pearly sanded.
Pluto had been a man-made paradise for a number of years, only because
Man, the Adaptable, found it economically expedient to make it so.
No, it was not done with mirrors.
It was done with a lens!
The sun should have been a piddling little disk of ineffective yellow.
Its warmth should have been negligible, just as it had been for a
million years before the coming of man. Pluto had been ordained to be
cold and forbidding, but it was not.
The sun was a huge, irregular disk of flaming yellow that had peculiar,
symmetrical streamers flowing off; twelve of the main ones and a
constantly opening and closing twenty-four minor streamers that flowed
outward from the duodecagonal pattern of Sol. These streamers rotated,
and looked for all the world like the pattern made by rotating two
gratings above one another.
Sol, from Pluto, was as big as a washtub, because of a series of
man-made stations in space halfway between Sol and Pluto. These
stations warped space by the maintenance of subelectronic charges that
produced a subetheric gradient which bent the usable radiations of
Sol into a focus. The fact that they were points in space instead of
mighty, million mile rings of metal to carry the space-warping charge
made the focus of Sol irregular instead of circular, but it served its
purpose and men grew used to the scintillating sun.
Certainly, it cost like the very devil, but uranium is not plentiful
anywhere else, and men found it economically sound--
* * * * *
John McBride cocked his feet on his desk at Station 1, and began to
read his mail. At the fifth memo, he jumped, startled by what was on
the page before him, and his feet hit the floor with a resounding
crash. Angrily, he punched a buzzer, and a younger man entered.
"Yes sir?" he asked. "What's wrong, Mr. McBride?" he finished noting
McBride's startled expression.
"Tommy, take a 'gram and slam it out of here on the rush. Some fool
dame is going to try to fly through the lens!"
"Oh, no!"
"Yes! Can't get Terra on the phone, confound it, so fire a 'gram, but
quick! Tell her that the restrictions are still in force, and that we
aren't fooling! Also that it is illegal, dangerous, and foolhardy and
that we absolutely forbid her to try!"
"Yes sir!" answered Tommy and left immediately. The ticking of the
teletype machine in the outer office came faintly to John's ears, but
the knowledge of the message's departure did not ease the tension.
Ten minutes later an answer came back:
HAVE RECEIVED PERMISSION FROM TRIPLANET COUNCIL TO FLY FROM TERRA
TO PLUTO THROUGH AXIS OF LENS. PERMISSION GRANTED BECAUSE OF
STATEMENT OF NO DANGER EXPRESSED BY DOCTOR HOLMANN OF THE
DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRO-GRAVITIC PHENOMENA. SAVE YOUR ELECTRICITY,
I LEFT TERRA ON TUESDAY MORNING!