"John Norman - Gor 01- Tarnsman of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

"Frankly," said my father, "I believe the ship was remotely controlled from the Sardar Mountains,
as are said to be all the Voyages of Acquisition."

"Of Acquisition?"

"Yes," said my father. "And long ago I made the same strange journey. As have others."

"But for what end, to what purpose?" I demanded.

"Each perhaps for a different end, for each perhaps a different purpose," he said.

My father then spoke to me of the world on which I found myself. He said, from what he could learn
from the Initiates, who claimed to serve as the intermediaries of Priest-Kings to men, ,that the
planet Gor had originally been a satellite of a distant sun, in one of the fantastically remote
Blue Galaxies. It was moved by the science of the Priest-Kings several times in its history,
seeking again and again a new star. I regarded this story as improbable, at least in part, for
several reasons, primarily having to do with the sheer spatial improbabilities of such a
migration, which, even at a speed approximating light, would have taken billions of years.
Moreover, in moving through space, without a sun for photosynthesis and warmth, all life would
surely have been destroyed.

If the planet had been moved at all, and I knew enough to understand that this was empirically
possible,

it must have been brought into our system from a closer star. Perhaps it had once been a satellite
of Alpha Centauri, but, even so, the distances still seemed almost unimaginable. Theoretically, I
did admit that the planet might have been moved without destroying its life, but the engineering
magnitude of such a feat staggered the imagination. Perhaps life might have been suspended
temporarily or hidden beneath the planet's surface with sufficient sustenance and oxygen for the
incredible journey. In effect, the planet would have functioned as a gigantic sealed spacecraft.

There was another possibility I mentioned to my father-perhaps the planet had been in our system
all the time, but had been undiscovered, unlikely though that might be, given the thousands of
years of study of the skies by men, from the shambling creatures of the Neander Valley to the
brilliant intellects of Mount Wilson and Palomar. To my surprise, this absurd hypothesis was
welcomed by my father.

"That," he said with animation, "is the Theory of the Sun Shield." He added, "That is why I like
to think of the planet as the Counter-Earth, not only because of its resemblance to our native
world, but because, as a matter of fact, it is placed as a counterpoise to the Earth. It has the


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same plane of orbit and maintains its orbit in such a way as always to keep The Central Fire
between it and its planetary sister, our Earth, even though this necessitates occasional
adjustments in its speed of revolution."