Super-Neutron

"Super-Neutron" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov, originally published in the September 1941 issue of Astonishing Stories, and included in the 1972 collection The Early Asimov. Asimov originally intended the story to be the first in a series, but was unable to come up with any further story ideas.

Plot summary

In the year 2144, a group of four friends who call themselves the Honorable Society of Ananias meet for lunch once a month, during which one of the members tells a story. The story must be a complex and fantastic lie, but one which sounds like the truth. The other three members are free to heckle and attack the supposed veracity of the tale.

At the seventeenth meeting, Gilbert Hayes, a guest, requests that he be allowed to tell a story. His tale is that, fifteen years before, as an astronomer, he discovered that a planet with no gravitational field had entered the Solar System from the region of the south celestial pole and remained undiscovered by other astronomers. Hayes compares the planet to a "super-neutron", and he claims that it is heading for the Sun and will strike in just over an hour, destroying the Sun the way a neutron causes a uranium nucleus to fission.