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ouched before. They shot outward, faster and faster, eating up the infinite emptiness of space, driving the vast stretch that divided Pluto from its neighbors.
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.
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. And they say it seems to be the same mass as Earth a solid world whose surface gravity would be the same as our own planet's."
Russ nodded. "It's an odd one, all right. There's now even some belief that it's not a true planet, but one that was once a satellite of Neptune. Its orbit is peculiar; it apparently may cut into that of Neptune. In fact, everything hints at Pluto not being a true child of our Sun. It may be a world captured from afar a lonely wanderer cast off from some other star, captured by the Sun after millions of years of drifting lightless through space."
Beyond them, in their vision, lay only the stars of outer space, the void that did not belong to our system. And then, finally, they found Pluto a tiny point of light shining among the blazing stars. They saw the disc, dimly rejected in the light of the far-away Sun.
Even as they were taking their first long look at the dark planet, the general