by Earl
“Pluto!” breathed Myra Benning, catching her breath. Not many humans had seen the outermost planet of the Solar System so close. She turned to Shelton. “They’ve made Iapetus a moon of Pluto, at present. Is that what the aliens’ plans amounted to? Perhaps Lorg was just talking without meaning the rest.
“I wish I could think so!” murmured Shelton.
He stared up at the dark planet, somewhat larger than Earth. It was too far to see, but was the Torm civilization up there, on that bitter surface? Were there dozens, perhaps hundreds of cities built of plastics, unwarned, unlighted save dimly, the natural homes of the cold-blooded reptilian aliens who had come to take Iapetus away? And, more important, were there fleets of warships there, with highly developed cold force projectors, ready to be transported toward the Sun to swarm into the Solar System?
Shelton waited to see, in a fever of anxious impatience.
Nothing seemed to happen. The skies continued to revolve overhead for several hours. Pluto swung around majestically with the stars and finally sank again, as broodingly as it had arisen.
But not long after, the empty firmament slowed down and locked into place. They all tensed suddenly as the steady underground vibrations slowly increased.
SOON the throbbing became so violent that objects in the ship rattled against the metal walls. Even the teeth of the waiting four clicked, and their shoes beat a tattoo against the floor. Outside, the landscape seemed to dance. The stars became darting fireflies, whirling in small circles, as their vision stuttered.
“G-gr-eat J-jup-pi-ter!” exclaimed Traft. “Is Ia-pet-tus-s fl-y-ying ap-part?”
It almost seemed that way. Plainly some inconceivable force was being spawned within Iapetus. even greater than the energies that had driven it from Saturn. For one panic-stricken moment the thought came that perhaps the Great Machine had been strained beyond its limit, was now breaking down, to unleash its pent-up torrent of energy in one space-shattering explosion!
Each of the four, waiting breathlessly, felt as if sitting on top of a volcano.
But gradually the nerve-jangling vibration smoothed out into a steadier, though still powerful, rhythm. It felt now like the humming beat of a Gargantuan Diesel motor. The stars ceased their dizzying motion, yet the four Earth people sensed that the Great Machine below was laboring harder than it had before. Hope roused in Shelton that the machine had partially broken down, or was at least weakened. A machine constantly in need of repairs would hinder the aliens considerably.
They fell to waiting again, without knowing for what they were waiting. After an hour, Trafton stared fixedly at the stars, then jumped to his space sextant. He looked up, after taking tentative readings.
“That’s queer,” he observed. “We’re going past Pluto’s position, but in a straight line. We’ve left the orbit!”
They crowded at the “east” port, waiting for Pluto to appear. The wait grew to an hour—and the dark, brooding planet had not “risen,” as it should if they were going past it. In what crazy direction were they going, and where was Pluto?
Suspense charged the air, with no one daring to speak.
At last Hugh Benning broke the taut silence with a long, sibilant breath. The lines of his face deepened perceptibly as he spoke.
“Pluto isn’t there!” he said, almost inaudibly. “Pluto has been moved from its orbit!”
For a mad moment, Shelton almost felt like forcing Benning to take back those incredible words. It just couldn’t be! It was one thing to move a comparatively tiny body like Iapetus—dumfounding as that had been awhile before—but moving Pluto, a definite planet a hundred times larger and more massive. . . . How could one accept such a palpable impossibility?
Shelton kept staring out of the port, telling himself that with their motion, Pluto must eventually appear, receding. He turned finally, in hopeless dismay. It fit in, of course, with the increased beat of the Great Machine. Somehow, the Titanic gravitational forces had been made to drag the big planet from its orbit!
ACCEPTING that, his stunned mind tackled the looming enigma of why and where?
“Mark, he commanded the pilot, “find out where—in what general direction—we’re going.”
Traft nodded and raced for the pilot’s cupola. It would be a rather delicate measurement, with the basing planets so dim.
Shelton eyed the Sun gauge. Its measurement of the strength of sunlight was a rough scale by which to judge advance to or recession from the Sun. The needle was going down! Shelton refused to think what that meant until Traft came down again.
“We’re receding directly from the Sun!” he reported with false calmness.
“The velocity is already about a thousand miles a second!”
Shelton met the shock of this revelation with a savage curse. Myra Benning put a hand to her throat and froze in that attitude. Hugh Benning bobbed his head, with a queer, twisted smile on his face. Traft kneaded one band in the other, aimlessly.
That was where, stupefying as it was, but now why? Shelton finally ran to the radio, the others following as though afraid to be alone.
“Shelton calling Lorg!” he barked into the microphone, determined to swallow his pride and ask pointblank questions.
There was some delay, but finally the Alien Superior’s visage rounded into the opti-screen.
“I am very busy at present,” he snapped. “My attention is needed with the moving of Pluto. What do you want?”
“You’re moving Pluto away from the Sun,” Shelton snapped back. “Why? And exactly where?”
“I told you I wanted planets,” retorted the alien. “I am bringing Pluto to my home world!”
Shelton’s sharp gasp was explosive. Shock piled on shock!
“Your home world!” he echoed weakly. “Out there?” He waved a hand vaguely toward the regions beyond Pluto’s former orbit. “Do you mean there’s a tenth planet out this way? It has never been detected by Earth astronomers!”
“No, there is no tenth planet!” informed the alien, without elaborating. He seemed to be enjoying their surprise.
“Then where is your home world?” demanded Shelton. “The nearest star would take years to reach, even at your best speeds. Your home world can’t be out there. It—it’s impossible!”
“You like that word ‘impossible.’ ” Lorg grinned, and shrugged. “Well, then, my world is the Impossible World, but it’s out there! I’ll contact you later—and explain.”
Shelton snapped the radio stud with such force that his fingers were bruised.
“Am I going crazy?” he half moaned. He looked wildly at the others. “Tell me, where do we find worlds, planets? Around suns, of course! And where are the suns? The nearest is four light-years away. And he talks of an impossible world, his home world, out there! Planets don’t fly around free in space; they’re formed from suns, bound to suns. It—”
He broke off, realizing he had let go of his nerves. “Sorry!” he muttered. “Doesn’t help any to blow up. I’ll have to follow my own advice—to accept facts. We’re moving away from the Sun, and to Lorg’s alleged home world. That’s that!”
BLANK-FACED, dazed, they gazed out toward the Sun, their Sun, dimming perceptibly back of them. The events of the past day had blunted their minds. A satellite yanked out of its eon-long orbit, motivated to Pluto like a great ship; Pluto tugged out of its orbit, and now being pushed out into the abyss of outer space! It was more than the mind of man had ever before been called upon to witness and accept.
They ate mechanically, then discovered they had been awake for many hours. Wearily, they slept.
When they awoke, they hardly dared look out of the ports. But an unwilling fascination drew them. The sight stabbed every nerve with icy needles. Around them was the true chasm of the empty void; chilling, abysmal. The Sun had been relegated to the rank of a true star, though an exceedingly bright one. Even at Pluto’s orbit, sunlight was of the intensity of five hundred full moons on Earth. But here, the Sun’s beams had becom
e starlight, feebler than Jupiter’s smallest moon!
There was a terrifying grandeur to the scene. Theirs were perhaps the first earthly eyes to look back at the Solar System from such a remote viewpoint.
Traft’s camera clicked, recording the bizarre perspective on micro-film. Most of the planets were invisible; one with the Sun. Jupiter could be distinguished, a slight distance out; and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, like tiny pinpricks in the black fabric of space.
But where was Pluto? It should be visible too. Shelton started, remembering. Pluto wasn’t there where it should be. It was being towed away, out into the sunless void. But where? To what impossible destination?
Finally the anxiously awaited call came from the Alien Superior, who alone could tell the answers to the plaguing question.
“You still think it is impossible for my home world to be out here somewhere?” Lorg inquired amusedly.
“Planets come with Suns,” Shelton doggedly insisted. “The nearest star in this direction is Sirius, almost nine light-years away.” Something clicked in his mind, something about Sirius. “A dark sun—that’s the only possibility!” He finished with a sharp, quivering breath.
Lorg, preparing to throw this bombshell, looked almost angered that Shelton had guessed the answers.
“Yes.” He nodded. “There are dark suns as well as bright ones. Suns that have burned out, or dimmed to a low red heat. Your astronomers do not know how many of such invisible dead suns exist between and among the burning stars. Such a dark sun would be undetectable by your earthly telescopes, unsuspected. That is my home world—a dark sun comparatively close to your bright Sun, with one planet!”
A dark sun, out in the great gulf between Sol and its surrounding stars! A more staggering conception could hardly be advanced. Yet in a way it was almost a simple answer.
“WHERE is the dark sun?” he jerked out. “How far?”
“About ten billion miles out from Pluto’s orbit,” stated Lorg. “Therefore, about fifteen billion miles from the Sun. It is, in fact, a companion star to the Sun—a dark companion. They form a binary, revolving about a common center of gravity. Many stars have dark companions. Even your scientists know that. Sirius, for instance. And it is likely that the Sirians, if the star has inhabitants, do not know of their companion dark sun, just as you Earthlings have not suspected.”
“A binary—our Sun!” murmured Shelton, finding it a queer thought. “But their motion around a common center. . . . Shouldn’t that be detectable to our astronomers in the positions of the stars?”
“Not unless parallax measurements were taken over the appropriate eighty-year period.” Lorg seemed to sneer. “Your stargazers missed that. And they missed a still bigger clue—the extremely eccentric orbit of Pluto, which at one point crossed Neptune’s. They kept looking for a mythical tenth planet. Why could they not conceive of a dead, but gigantic, sun exerting its gravitational influence scarcely much further? However, that clue is gone now—Pluto’s orbit!”
There was satisfied maliciousness in the alien’s tones.
Shelton saw it with breath-taking clarity now. The pieces of the mad jig-saw puzzle were falling together rationally.
“And you are taking Pluto to your sun,” he said, “to be one of your planets?”
Lorg nodded. “Our sun has only the one natural planet. We Torms are a growing, ambitious race. We need worlds in which to expand. What better than to take them from our neighboring System, which has them to spare?”
The Earth people could only stare, hearing the diabolic world-stealing plan of the aliens laid bare. Lorg and his people were thieves out of the void, come to loot the Solar System of its planets! The realization was staggering.
Lorg raised a hand at the storm of outraged protest that was ready to burst from his listeners.
“Let me tell the whole story, briefly,” he said.
He settled back in his seat, as though to enjoy the exposition of these mind-staggering things that would amaze his audience.
CHAPTER XVII
World of the Dark Sun
“A MILLIONS of years ago,” Lorg began with a grand flourish, “a double star, a binary, plunged at Sol, then a single star without planets. As your Lyttleton Theory states, in part, one of these suns grazed Sol, so that it ejected a mass of its burning material. The attraction of the other sun drew this out into a long tongue that finally split into fragments—molten balls becoming the planets.
“This second sun then careened on into space, as our cosmogenists have reconstructed that cosmic tryst. But its companion was torn from its binary attraction, because after the collision, the first sun’s velocity had been reduced. This sun then became Sol’s double, retreating to fifteen billion miles. In passing the molten planets, it clutched the last one for itself, becoming our lone planet, Torm. We call our sun ‘Tor’.”
Lorg paused and made a motion as though sweeping billions of years aside, then resumed.
“So much for that. In due time life appeared on Torm, when it had cooled; warm life such as yours, for Tor was then a hot sun. Intelligence evolved, in close to human form. Evolution is repetitious, because of the analogous mutation through the constant cosmic-rays.
“But then”—his voice softened a little—“Tor, an older sun than Sol, began to cool. A struggling civilization fought against increasing darkness and cold, losing. Intelligence was eclipsed on Torm, for ages. But Nature is resourceful. Mutation finally produced a cold-blooded species, inured to the dark life—our present species!”
The Alien Superior’s eyes glowed.
“The latent spark of intellect burst into flame again. At about this time, in Sol’s system, intelligence arose again, on Earth. The first uprise, on Mars, had passed into decadence. Thus our two civilizations, Torm and Earth, grew up almost side by side. Yours, much like our ancient warm-age one, with metals and heat industries. Ours, today, a cold-age one, with plastics and low temperature methods.
“Your civilization had not suspected ours, for you could not see our dark sun. But we saw your blazing proximity from the first. When we had conquered gravity and sent space ships to explore the Solar System, we frankly envied your big family of planets, where we had only one! The thought germinated, grew, blossomed—”
Lorg’s lips twisted significantly, then he continued on a different tack.
“We sent colonists to Pluto, Neptune and Uranus. But we could not go any closer to the Sun, with its terrific heat—not until we found the great natural hollows within Iapetus. We established a colony there. That was a century ago, at just the time you Earth people initiated interplanetary travel.”
Lorg’s voice rose on a more vital note. “At this time, I became the Superior of all our colonizing activities. Yes, I am more than a hundred years old. We are long-lived, as are all cold-blooded creatures. I foretold, seeing your Empire-building, that eventually there would be friction between our races, when you reached Uranus and outward. You would claim those planets, establish jurisdiction over our colonies, and we would be no better off than before.”
LORG straightened importantly.
“I laid plans before the rulers of Torm. Work was begun, installing the Great Machine within Iapetus. It took us a century—a hundred years of driving scientific research, hard labor, sacrifice and danger. I saw that at the end it would be a race against your earthly expansion, before you had too firm a grip on the planets we wanted. Particularly”—the alien looked hard at Shelton—“with the application of your admirable bio-conditioning process. We must get the planets away quickly, we decided!”
The Earth people were listening in a taut silence. Was this all a mad, impossible dream? That all these tremendous, unsuspected events had been going on, building up to a crashing climax, for a century? Shelton shook his head, remembering the famous soliloquy: “There are more things in heaven—”
The alien, went on, dovetailing the more recent occurrences.
“I had hoped not to have our presence in your Syst
em discovered until the Great Machine had been completed. Some of your exploration ships, landing on the outer planets where our colonies existed, were—eliminated. We did not fear discovery on Iapetus, being underground. But quite by accident, recently, the survey ship of which you know landed next to one of our cave entrances. The men peered in. Startled, my guards there blunderingly used the cold force.”
Lorg looked at Traft and Benning. “Later, when that giant man there shone his flashlight, looking for the small man, my guard fled, taking the man you call Benning along. Hearing of this, I knew there would be investigation. Work was rushed on the Great Machine. Only a few more days and it would be ready.”
He looked at Shelton. “You came into the picture, Dr. Rodney Shelton. From what I know of earthly affairs, your ship, approaching Saturn, spelled investigation on Iapetus. I sent a ship to attack, to put you into suspended animation and bring you here as prisoners. But the Ranger ship intervened. Events seemed about to get out of hand, for me.
“I decided not to attack you on the surface of Iapetus with our ships, for fear you would radio for help immediately. Instead I planned a trap. You fell into it, were captured. Your later clever escape and message to Earth of our presence came perilously close to upsetting my plans, but not quite—by a margin of only hours!”
Lorg finished gloatingly. “The rest you know. Our hundred-year plan, for which we have labored with fanatic zeal, approaches its fulfilment. Torm will have sister planets, and our race will expand!”
Shelton had been standing rigidly, listening with every fiber of his being to the amazing recital. But it was no time now for squirrel-cage ruminations. One burning thought usurped his brain: “Find out all you can!” Every little item of information would be useful in the looming clash between Earth and Torm forces.
“How many planets,” he asked deliberately, “do you plan to take as you’ve taken Pluto?”