Circle of Confusion
By WESLEY LONG
Illustrated by Williams
[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 classedas 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 abundantin uranium, and then came man to change the ultra-frigidity ofPluto's surface, and to endow Pluto with a breathable atmosphere bytransporting great shiploads of the frozen gases found on Umbriel. Thenman set up cities, and since the face of Pluto had never been scarredby 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 asThe Styx Valley, but which, with characteristic lack of foresight,was across the Devil's Mountains from the River Styx. Across theDevil's Range went the uranium to Mephisto, where it was smelted downinto pigs. It was then put on barges and floated down the River Styxto Hell, which lies across the River Styx from Sharon; both citiesquartering on the Sulphur Sea.
It was loaded onto the ships of space at Hell, and then raced acrossthe 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 onlyclaim to the nether regions was the dancing flames of her smeltingmills that danced on the night sky. The Devil's Range was a small ridgeof less than fifteen thousand feet and it was more than amply suppliedwith passes and near-sea-level breaches.
And the cities at the mouth of the River Styx lived in cheerfulrivalry, their main source of jealousy being the lush produce thatcame from the hinterland behind each. And the River Styx itself was agarden-spot for yachting clubs; bathing beaches lined the mouth forfifteen miles inward and they were clear-watered and pearly sanded.
Pluto had been a man-made paradise for a number of years, only becauseMan, 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 amillion years before the coming of man. Pluto had been ordained to becold 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 aconstantly opening and closing twenty-four minor streamers that flowedoutward from the duodecagonal pattern of Sol. These streamers rotated,and looked for all the world like the pattern made by rotating twogratings above one another.
Sol, from Pluto, was as big as a washtub, because of a series ofman-made stations in space halfway between Sol and Pluto. Thesestations warped space by the maintenance of subelectronic charges thatproduced a subetheric gradient which bent the usable radiations ofSol into a focus. The fact that they were points in space instead ofmighty, million mile rings of metal to carry the space-warping chargemade the focus of Sol irregular instead of circular, but it served itspurpose and men grew used to the scintillating sun.
Certainly, it cost like the very devil, but uranium is not plentifulanywhere else, and men found it economically sound—
John McBride cocked his feet on his desk at Station 1, and began toread his mail. At the fifth memo, he jumped, startled