Donald A. Wollheim

“ Now, for the first time, they heard the creatures make a noise—a sort of humming and buzzing like angered bees.
"They see us now," muttered Haines. "I don't like it."
"The Sun-tap builders did it," said Burl. "They must have booby-trapped the place against intruders. The globe that got Boulton must have set off some sort of vibration that enrages these creatures. And it looks as if we're the victims."
As they reached their jeep, the encircling mass of Martians moved forward. The humming rose to a higher pitch, and then the mob, with the berserk ferocity of a swarm of bees, lunged toward them. ”

“ In one viewer, Burl glimpsed the black of outer space, and in another, the wide grayish-green bowl of the Earth spreading out below. In a third he saw the blazing disc of the Sun.
"Did everything go all right?" he asked quietly of Clyde.
The redhead looked up at him and smiled. "Better than we might have expected for a first flight," he said.
"We're latching on to the Sun's grip now. We're falling toward the Sun; not just falling, but pulling ourselves faster toward it, so that we can keep up a normal gravity pressure. We're soon going to be going faster than any rocket has ever gone. ”

“ The Martians made way for the jeep with unconcern. Never had they seen creatures as large as themselves that were not of their own kind on hive business. Hence, none such could exist. This was a world totally without individualism, a civilization without a spoken language, without names, without banners. Wherever or however the mass knowledge was located or transmitted, no individual of another species could ever hope to know. It would be forever as remote from human explorers as the farthest star on the farthest galaxy.
They drove to where the Sun-tap masts rose from the ground. ”

“ As he looked around quickly to select his next means of escape, barking Plutonians erupted from each opening. Burl backed up against the wall, knowing that this time he was trapped.
A blaze of sparks broke over his head as a blast banged across the room. The red-eyed, scrabbling figures charged, their chinless mouths opening to emit barking calls of bestial anger. One aimed a rodlike contrivance at him, and there was another flare of light. ”

“ Now Burl found himself momentarily unhampered, and rapidly he opened exhibit after exhibit. The battle became wilder and fiercer, as star-being after star-being joined in.
The Plutonians swung away in all directions with their wands. Their barking voices were drowned out by a rising chorus of sounds—roaring, inhuman voices, calling curses in languages of worlds that lay many light-years distant—wild, birdlike calls from a winged being whose intelligent eyes and wide brow belied the ferocity of its beaked and taloned attack. ”

“ For he had realized, as he sat in the fast plane transporting him home, that the Earth was itself a planet among planets, and that this might possibly prove to be his last visit to the town where he had been born. He had pondered, as he had gazed out of the ship's windows, just what it could mean to depart from this world and travel among the uncharted reaches of empty and hostile space ... to set foot upon planets where no human foot had ever touched and to meet unguessable perils. ”

“ Nobody knows how the ants and bees formed their complex societies—there are none among them with any larger brains than the rest, and they do not talk. But somehow ants and bees communicate and somehow they act as a mass. Figure it on a world-wide scale, driven by the threat of their world drying up, and these creatures built up a mechanical civilization to meet it. But it also accounts for why they have never flown, not through the air and not through space, why they haven't attempted radio communication with Earth, and why they don't understand what the Sun-tap station is doing to them. ”

“ Burl assumed that the dimness was due to volcanic dust, or some unseen high cloud far away. And, indeed, as the expedition came to life, and the day began in earnest, nobody paid any attention to the fact that the Sun was not quite so warm as it should have been.
The Denning expedition, questing among the untracked and forgotten byways of the lost Inca ruins in the vast, jagged mountains of inland Peru, was not alone in failing to notice the subtle channeling away of the Sun's warmth and brilliance. They were, in this respect, one with virtually the entire population of Earth. ”

“ Above and around them the white clouds still blanketed everything. But now Burl thought he saw a pale glow. Gradually the white faded away into wisps and shreds, and in a flash the ship broke out of the clouds.
They hung beneath a grayish-white sky. Below them, scarcely a half mile of visibility in misty, thin air, they saw the surface of Venus. They were over water. An ocean stretched below them as far as the eye could see, with neither a rock nor an island. Venus was a water world! ”

“ Above it, they caught a flicker from the forest of masts and the glint from a dumbbell ship. They moved silently forward, carrying the rocket launcher on their backs and a small load of shells and several hand bombs. These made heavy baggage, but the distance was not far, and the purpose great.
Burl felt like an ant about to creep into a human house. But he reflected that no ant ever had such dangerous intentions. An ant enters a house to steal a crumb of food. But if an ant had intelligence and evil intentions, it could cripple such a house. ”

“ This is the start of a fantastic adventure that eventually takes Burl, a high-school senior, on the first circumnavigation of the solar system. On planet after planet, he and the crew of the Magellan, a gleaming, powerful, and virtually untested spaceship, discover the weird trappings of a brilliantly-designed Sun-tap station. Each planetfall brings unexpected hazards, as the ship draws closer and closer to solving the mystery of the theft. ”

“ Indeed, the planet seemed blighted. "It's the Sun-tap," Burl decided. "We should have realized what it would do."
"Remember Earth the week it was working? The temperature fell several degrees, began to damage crops? Remember how it snowed in places where snow had never fallen in July? Remember the predictions of disaster for crops, of danger from winter snows if the drop continued?"
Russ went on in his careful, explanatory way. "And for Mars it has continued. Mars was always colder than Earth; life there must have been far more precariously balanced. ”

“ The latest viewpoint on this planet, whose size and weight seem quite like those of Earth, is that it may not be a true child of the Sun, but an outsider captured as it roamed the trackless realms of galactic space. Its orbit is highly eccentric and rather lopsided, taking it as far away from the Sun as four and a half billion miles and as close to the Sun as two and three-quarter billion miles, thereby cutting inside the orbit of Neptune itself. ”

“ Finally they turned their steps up a sloping ramp, mounting one floor and then another, and another. They were tired, but curiously exhilarated. They felt that they were about to strike at the heart of the foe, and that his days were numbered at last.
They emerged on a higher level, lighted more brightly than the others. Here they saw globes that glowed with the same intensity as those in the Sun-tap stations had. They moved carefully now, keeping out of sight, and several times they saw shadows in the distance or heard the thump of something moving. ”

“ Heat meant death and doom to every living frigi-plasmic thing on Neptune. Desperately, they increased their warfare, but the heat sapped their strength, destroying them, until now they knew it was but a matter of time before the Neptunians, beast and vegetable alike, would vanish totally.
"So that's it," breathed Burl. "That's where the Sun-tap energy is going. The Plutonians want Neptune because it's near their old moon, and they have to warm it up to live on it. Of course! And Neptune's too far from the Sun to explode when it novas, it will just get comfortable for the Plutonians!" ”

“ The blast on Oberon was tiny compared to the one which had devastated Iapetus, but it still left a deep indentation in the surface for future space fliers to see.
They left it and the Uranian orbit behind them and headed outward once again. Behind them now lay the worlds of the Sun's family, while far off to one side lay the tiny light of Neptune. Ahead, between them and the vast gulf of interstellar space, lay only the dark, mysterious ninth planet, the enigmatic world named after the lord of the underworld, Pluto. ”

“ The Magellan slowly skimmed over the surface of Oberon. They found whole forests of this glassy frigid vegetation, but not much evidence of any animal life larger than the creature the two explorers had seen.
Over the Sun-tap station—a ringed layout like the others, whose cluster of masts caught the emanations of the distant Sun on the one hand and directed them outward to the still unseen planet Pluto on the other—the ship halted. It drew up fifty miles, pointed its tail and blasted forth a rocket-driven, tactical atomic bomb. ”

“ As for Earth, it could not be seen. So close to the tiny Sun it lay that only their sharpest telescopes could bring it out. Even Jupiter showed up only as a thin, tiny crescent near the solar point of light.
"Pluto's a mysterious world," said Burl as he and Russ scanned the heavens for a first glimpse of it. "The accounts in your astronomy books give very little real information on it—but what they give is strange. They say it's the only planet beyond Mars that is a small solid world like the inner ones. It seems to be the same size as Earth—not at all like the big outer worlds. ”

“ If the Sun-tapping on Mars is not stopped, all life there will die out, and it will be a permanently dead world forever."
The news spread throughout the crew and there was a feeling of anger and urgency. Nobody knew what lived on Mars, yet the subject of Mars and Martians had always intrigued the imaginations of people on Earth. Now, to hear that the unknown enemy had nearly slain a neighboring world brought home vividly just what would also have been the fate of Earth.
The day finally came when the big spaceship slid into an orbit about the ruddy planet. ”

“ Burl was studying the surface. "Seems to me that much of the dark side has a gleam to it. Something reflects the stars; I see little glints of light, shifting and blinking."
"I can guess what that is," said Russ. "It must be covered, at least in the central portions, with a sea of frozen gases. What atmosphere Mercury had long ago must have congealed there."
The ship moved along toward the twilight edge, then began circling the planet along that intermediate belt, where the Sun could be seen peeking over the horizon in eternal dawn. ”

“ The Sun, already small, dwindled steadily. It was still the brightest star in their sky—of all the stars, it alone retained a disclike shape, and the faint flicker of its coronal flames could occasionally be made out—but it no longer dominated the heavens. To find the Sun, they now had to look for it as they would for any other star. ”

“ Burl nodded. "But that means that in relation to Earth we are ourselves upside down right now!"
"Of course," said Clyde. "But in space, everything is strictly relative. We are no longer on Earth. We are a separate body in space, falling through space toward the Sun."
"Why the Sun?" asked Burl. "I thought our first objective was to be the planet Venus?"
"It was too hard to get a fix on Venus from so near the Earth. Instead, we latched on to the Sun to pull us inward. When we are near to Venus' orbit, we'll reverse and pull in on Venus," was the astronomer's answer. ”

“ The Neptunians, leaping with excitement, did not bother to activate the inner door, which would have meant closing the outer door. Instead, they attacked it with heavy ice axes. The strange tools, chilled to a hardness unthinkable on Earth, bit into the fragile plastic.
After a few hard blows, the plastic split, and there was a small explosion as the air within the temple burst through. A gale of escaping gases roared through the little chamber, ripping the rest of the door to shards and hurling the Neptunians right and left. ”

“ Russ took him aside. "We're not going to make our connection with Venus," he said. "Our generators didn't operate exactly as we had hoped. We haven't been able to slow down enough, the pull of the Sun is stronger than the power we can raise to stop it at our present speed. We're going to shoot past Venus' orbit way ahead of the planet, and we're still heading sunward at a faster rate than we figured on."
"You mean—we're falling into the Sun!" gasped Burl. ”