Placet Is a Crazy Place

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Even when you’re used to it, it gets you down sometimes. Like that morning—if you can call it a morning. Really, it was night. But we go by Earth time on Placet because Placet time would be as screwy as everything else on that goofy planet. I mean, you’d have a six-hour day and then a two-hour night and then a fifteen-hour day and a one-hour night and—well, you just couldn’t keep time on a planet that does a figure-eight orbit around two dissimilar suns, going like a bat out of hell around and between them, and the suns going around each other so fast and so comparatively close that Earth astronomers thought it was only one sun until the Blakeslee expedition landed here twenty years ago.

You see, the rotation of Placet isn’t any even fraction of the period of its orbit and there’s the Blakeslee Field in the middle between the suns—a field in which light rays slow down to a crawl and get left behind and if you’ve not read the Blakeslee reports on Placet, hold on to something, while I tell you this: Placet is the only known planet that can eclipse itself twice at the same time, run headlong into itself every forty hours, and then chase itself out of sight.

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