![]() "I believe," he told a special emergency committee appointed by the President, "the bird has come to hatch the brood of young it deposited God knows how many centuries ago about that incubating warmth which is our sun. I saw the mother bird stretch forth its giant beak and help its fledgling rid itself of a peeling, needless shell stood horrified to watch the younger bird emerge and flap its new, uncertain wings, drying them in the burning rays of the star which had been its incubator. I watched the grisly emergence of that small, wet, scrawny thing-raw simulacrum of its monstrous parent-from the egg in which it had lain for whatever incalculable era was the gestation period of a creature vast as space and as old as time. I saw the first thin splitting of Mercury's shell, and the curious fluid ichor which seeped from a dying world. And so, apparently, the bird decided too, for after a fruitless search it winged its way outward from the sun to approach the closest of its brood still remaining intact. Vulcan had disappeared perhaps it had fallen into the sun. Some watchers of the sky had seen this as late as the Eighteenth Century, and had called it Vulcan. Astronomers believed, said Abramson, that at one time there had been another planet circling between Mercury and the sun. For something it could not find because it was no longer there. The bird heads in towards the sun, in search of the lost planet Vulcan:īriefly, as if searching for something, it flew in a wide circle in an orbit between Mercury and the sun.Ībramson believed it was looking for something. "And at that distance-" he spoke with a painful deliberation-"at that incredible distance, I saw a bird!" A body almost four thousand millions of miles from Earth. The telescope was directed toward Pluto, farthermost planet of our solar system. "A bird?" I felt like smiling, but the look in his eyes did not encourage mirth. ![]() The story begins with the narrator, a newspaper reporter, interviewing an astronomer who has seen something very strange in his telescope: It was a favorite of Harlan Ellison, who is quoted at the end of this post. The story you described is the other one, Nelson S. In Williamson's story planets and moons are observed hatching, but no "mother bird" is seen flying in from interstellar space in fact (as the title indicates) our sun is the "mother bird", the bird-like hatchlings are baby stars. There are (at least) two stories in the planets-are-the-eggs-of-giant-space-birds microgenre: "Born of the Sun" by Jack Williamson and "And Lo! The Bird" by Nelson S.
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