
Marcius Kemble, once a ruthless ruler who seized Mars and coveted Saturn’s moons, finds himself stranded on Pluto’s frozen wasteland after Earth’s planetary coalition forced his downfall. Alone beneath a thin, plastic helmet, he vents his fury at the distant planets, especially the world that betrayed him, while his mind teeters between rage, desperation, and a maddening laugh that echoes across the barren landscape.
Beneath Pluto’s icy surface, an enigmatic native race—tri‑shaped, cold‑born beings—monitor his frantic thoughts through a strange radio‑like device. Their spindly forms and crystalline bodies hint at a civilization far removed from humanity, yet they are keenly aware of the ex‑dictator’s turmoil. As Marcius wrestles with the voices in his head, the alien observers weigh his intentions, setting the stage for a clash of wills between a fallen tyrant and a civilization that has never known his kind of power.
Language
en
Duration
~16 minutes (16K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2021-01-11
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
A little-known pulp-era science fiction writer, remembered for a handful of imaginative magazine stories from the early 1950s. His fiction returned again and again to space travel, strange planets, and the unsettling effect of the unknown on ordinary people.
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