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 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!

SANDRA DRAKE

"Holy St. Peter!" exploded McBride. Tommy winced in sympathy, because he knew what was coming. "Doc Holmann! My father studied electro-gravitics under him. He was an old fuddy-duddy then. The old drip owns that university, that's why he's still in the E. G. chair. I'll bet you a hunk of the lens itself that the old goat doesn't even know that we are now using magneto-gravitics in the front lens element. That's the stinker!"

"Is it so dangerous?" asked Tommy. "If she uses the usual methods of coming to Pluto, she'll be going well towards ten thousand miles per second by the time she passes the front surface."

"That's the trouble," groaned McBride. "Like all other space crates, her hull will be made of cupralum alloy, which is as paramagnetic as alnico is diamagnetic. She'll hit that magneto-gravitic warp that makes up the fore element, with that antimagnetic hull and it will be like a pane of glass being struck by a minute pellet of steel. She'll cause the collapse of the front element, and with the load-loss, the electro-gravitic elements of the aft element will fall out of alignment. Heaven only knows what'll happen. Well, we'll all know soon enough!"

"How long?" asked Tommy.

"Well, she left Terra Tuesday morning. She didn't say what time, but there's little sense in finding out right now. That hop would take sixty-eight hours at a standard 5-G from Sol. Say sixty-something, and let's see, this is about Thursday evening—Greenwich Time, but that screwball might give zonal time and have taken off from Hawaii or Sevastopol as the fancy hit her. I'd say sit tight and expect anything from attar of roses to total extinction within the next couple of hours. Also get on the lens network and tell the gang to oil up their trouble-wagons. Everything from spacesuits to hand generators. Oh Peter! I'm going to quit this ding-busted job and take up truck farming!"