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The narrative follows a man stationed in a man-made city on Pluto who struggles with distance from his pregnant wife after she falls and is injured. The industrial setting includes uranium smelters and a mechanogravitic lens that supplies sunlight to the settlement, and the story emphasizes the emotional strain of long interplanetary separation. Medical authorities advise him to stay, but he urgently pursues transport and finds an experimental spacecraft whose drive systems were damaged during high-risk trials. He undertakes repairs to the ship's alphatron despite the dangers of mechanogravitic resonance, aiming for a rapid, high-G return to be with his wife.