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.