"Donald E. Wollheim - The Secret of the ninth Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wollheim Donald A)

possibility that Pluto may once have been briefly held as a satellite of
Neptune. And following that line of thought, the possibility also has been
suggested that Neptune's larger moon, Triton, may once have been a companion of
Pluto which failed to break away from Neptune's grip!
I think that the first men to land on Pluto are going to make some very
astonishing discoveries. But I am also sure that they will never go there in
rockets. They will have to make the immense trip by some more powerful means--
like the anti-gravitational drive.
D.A.W.
CHAPTER ONE-- Special Delivery-- by Guided Missile
ON THE morning that the theft of the solar system's sunlight began, Burl Denning
woke up in his sleeping bag in the Andes, feeling again the exhilaration of the
keen, rarefied, mountain air. He glanced at the still sleeping forms of his


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father and the other members of the Denning expedition, and sat up, enjoying the
first rays of the early morning.
The Llamas were already awake, moving restlessly back and forth on their padded
feet, waiting for their tender to arise and unleash them. The mules were
standing patiently as ever, staring quietly into the distant misty panorama of
the mountains.
It was, thought Burl, a dim day, but this he supposed was due to the earliness
of the morning. As the Sun rose, it would rapidly bring the temperatures up, and
its unshielded rays would force them to cover up as they climbed along the high
mountain passes.
The sky was cloudless as usual. 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.
In New York, in San Francisco, in Philadelphia and Kansas City, people going
about their day's chores simply assumed that there must be clouds somewhere--
the temperature only slightly less than normal for a July day. A few men shaded
their eyes and looked about, noticing that the heat was not too intense-- and
thought it a blessing.
In some places in Europe, there were clouds and a little rain, and the dimness
was ascribed to this. It was raining in much of Asia, and there were scattered
afternoon showers throughout Latin America, which were standard for the season.
There was a flurry of snow in Melbourne and a cold blow in Santiago de Chile.
The men in the weather bureaus noted on their day's charts that temperatures
were a few degrees lower than had been predicted, but that was nothing unusual.
Weather was still not entirely predictable, even with the advances of
meteorology that were to be expected of the latter years of the twentieth
century.