"How did I get here?" I demanded of the speaker.
"It was ordered—by the Masters of the Worlds—that you should be brought from your own home planet, called Earth in the System of the star called Sun. Do you remember Earth?"
And I did not know whether I remembered or not. Vague matters stirred deep in me, but I could not for certain say they were memories. I asked yet again:
"Who am I?"
The voice had a note of triumph. "You do not know that. It is as well, for this will be a birth and beginning of your destined leadership on Dondromogon."
"Destined—leadership—" I began to repeat, and fell silent. I had need to think. The voice was telling me that I had been snatched from worlds away, for a specified purpose here on whatever windswept planet Dondromogon might be. "Birth and beginning—destined leadership—" Fantastic! And yet, for all I could say to the contrary, unvarnishedly true.
"Dondromogon?" I mumbled. "The name is strange to me."
"It is a world the size of your native one," came words of information. "Around a star it spins, light-years away from the world of your birth. One face of Dondromogon ever looks to the light and heat, wherefore its metals run in glowing seas. The other face is ever away in cold darkness, with its air freezing into solid chunks. But because Dondromogon wavers on its axis, there are two lunes of its surface which from time to time shift from night to day. These are habitable."
My eyes were tight shut against the dust, but they saw in imagination such a planet—one-half incandescent, one-half pitchy black. From pole to pole on opposite sides ran the two twilight zones, widest at the equators like the outer rind of two slices of melon. Of course, such areas, between the hot and cold hemispheres, would be buffeted by mighty gales ... the voice was to be heard again:
"War is fought between the two strips of habitable ground. War, unceasing, bitter, with no quarter asked, given or expected. Dondromogon was found and settled long ago, by adventurers from afar. Now come invaders, to reap the benefits of discovery and toil." A pause. "You find that thought unpleasant? You wish to right that wrong?"