The sun was dying. About its sullen shadow-streaked red globe thousands of miniature artificial worlds clustered like a swarm of night-chilled midges. So thickly did they hug the great globe of dulling flame that it seemed Sol had acquired an outer husk of interlocked asteroids and moonlets. Of all the planets and their satellites only Earth remained—a shrunken and changed planet. And Earth too had shifted its orbit until it now swung but a few million miles from its molten primary. In the huge