Circle of Confusion By WESLEY LONG Illustrated by Williams [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Pluto is a strange planet in many ways. Perhaps it may even be classed as a "man-made" planet, since if it were not for man and his works, Pluto might as well have never been. But Pluto was found abundant in uranium, and then came man to change the ultra-frigidity of Pluto's surface, and to endow Pluto with a breathable atmosphere by transporting great shiploads of the frozen gases found on Umbriel. Then man set up cities, and since the face of Pluto had never been scarred by any kind of intelligent life, the planners had a free and open hand. So uranium was mined near the region known on the Plutonian maps as _The Styx Valley_, but which, with characteristic lack of foresight, was across the Devil's Mountains from the River Styx. Across the Devil's Range went the uranium to Mephisto, where it was smelted down into pigs. It was then put on barges and floated down the River Styx to Hell, which lies across the River Styx from Sharon; both cities quartering on the Sulphur Sea. It was loaded onto the ships of space at Hell, and then raced across the void, sunward to the Inner System where it was used. But the names are but locationally appropriate. Hell is no fuming, torrid city. It is temperate with a perfect climate. Mephisto's only claim to the nether regions was the dancing flames of her smelting mills that danced on the night sky. The Devil's Range was a small ridge of less than fifteen thousand feet and it was more than amply supplied with passes and near-sea-level breaches. And the cities at the mouth of the River Styx lived in cheerful rivalry, their main source of jealousy being the lush produce that came from the hinterland behind each. And the River Styx itself was a garden-spot for yachting clubs; bathing beaches lined the mouth for fifteen miles inward and they were clear-watered and pearly sanded. 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.