Title: The boomerang circuit
Author: Leinster, Murray
Language: English
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                         The Boomerang Circuit

                          By MURRAY LEINSTER

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                 Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]



                               CHAPTER I

                         _Damaged Transmitter_


Kim Rendell had almost forgotten that he was ever a matter-transmitter
technician. But then the matter-transmitter on Terranova ceased to
operate and they called on him.

It happened just like that. One instant the wavering, silvery film
seemed to stretch across the arch in the public square of the principal
but still small settlement on the first planet to be colonized in
the Second Galaxy. The film bulged, and momentarily seemed to form
the outline of a human figure as a totally-reflecting, pulsating
cocoon about a moving object. Then it broke like a bubble-film and a
walking figure stepped unconcernedly out. Instantly the silvery film
was formed again behind it and another shape developed on the film's
surface.

Only seconds before, these people and these objects had been on another
planet in another island universe, across unthinkable parsecs of space.
Now they were here. Bales and bundles and parcels of merchandise.
Huge containers of foodstuffs--the colony on Terranova was still not
completely self-sustaining--and drums of fuel for the space-ships busy
mapping the new galaxy for the use of men, and more people, and a huge
tank of viscous, opalescent plastic.

Then came a pretty girl, smiling brightly on her first appearance
on a new planet in a new universe, and crates of castings for more
space-ships, and a family group with a pet zorag on a leash behind
them, and a batch of cryptic pieces of machinery, and a man.

Then nothing. Without fuss, the silvery film ceased to be. One could
look completely through the archway which was the matter-transmitter.
One could see what was on the other side instead of a wavering,
pulsating reflection of objects nearby. The last man to come through
spoke unconcernedly over his shoulder, to someone he evidently believed
just behind, but who was actually now separated from him by the abyss
between island universes and some thousands of parsecs beyond.

Nobody paid any attention to matter-transmitters ordinarily. They had
been in use for ten thousand years. All the commerce of the First
Galaxy now moved through them. Space-ships had become obsolete, and the
little _Starshine_--which was the first handiwork of man to cross the
gulf to the Second Galaxy--had been a museum exhibit for nearly two
hundred years before Kim Rendell smashed out of the museum in it, with
Dona, and the two of them went roaming hopelessly among the ancient,
decaying civilizations of man's first home in quest of a world in which
they could live in freedom.

       *       *       *       *       *

It seemed a hopeless quest, at first. Every government was
absolute, and hence every ruler had become tyrannical. And the very
limitations of space-ships, which had caused their supplantation by
matter-transmitters, had seemed to doom their quest to futility.

But Kim had adapted the principle of the transmitter to the drive of
his ship, and with the increased speed and range they'd found freedom
on the prison world of Ades, where alone there was no tyranny. And
later Kim had crossed to this new galaxy, and set up a transmitter
here--the one which had just failed--and the exiled rebels and
recalcitrants of Ades had begun to move through to a new universe
where, they swore, men should be forever free.[1]

[Footnote 1: See "THE DISCIPLINARY CIRCUIT," _Thrilling Wonder
Stories_, Winter Issue, 1946.]

They planned to have Ades remain a receiving-depot for more criminals
and rebels who would increase the population of the new galaxy. There
should be a constant flow of them. Governments which could not be
overthrown existed everywhere. They were maintained by the device of
the disciplinary circuit which enabled a tyrant or a group of oligarchs
to administer intolerable torture to any individual they chose,
wherever he might hide upon a planet's surface.

Revolt was utterly impossible. But there were some who revolted,
nevertheless. And Ades had been a planet of hopeless exile to which
such sturdy rebels could be sent as to a fate more mysterious and hence
more terrible than death. On the whole, the new-comers were of the
stuff of pioneers. The principal drawback was that so few women were
rebels.

Events begun by the Empire of Sinab had solved even that problem of
a superabundance of males, by reversing it. The Sinabian Empire had
expanded by a policy of seemingly irresistible murder. By that policy,
modified fighting-beams swept over a planet which was to be added to
the empire, and in a single day slew every man and boy-child on it,
leaving the women unharmed. And as time passed and years went by, when
the women had grown numbed by their grief and then their despair that
their race must die--why, then male colonists from Sinab appeared, and
condescended to take the place of their victims.

They had planned to add Ades to their empire,[2] but the end was the
exile of the men of Sinab to a planet and a universe so remote that men
had not even conceived of such a distance before. And the widows of
murdered men--not sharing that exile--accepted the wiveless men of Ades
as their deliverers.

[Footnote 2: See "THE MANLESS WORLDS," _Thrilling Wonder Stories_,
February, 1947.]

From that time until now, it had seemed that only triumphs could lie
before the exiles. Duplicates of the _Starshine_ roamed among the new
and unnamed stars of the Second Galaxy. Infinite opportunities lay
ahead. Until now!

Now the matter-transmitter had ceased to operate. Five millions of
human beings in the Second Galaxy were isolated from the First. Ades
was the only planet in the home galaxy on which all men were criminals
by definition, and hence were friendly to the people of the new
settlements. Every single other planet--save the bewildered and almost
manless planets which had been subject to Sinab--was a tyranny of one
brutal variety or another.

Every other planet regarded the men of Ades as outlaws, rebels, and
criminals. The people of Terranova, therefore, were not only cut off
from the immigrants and supplies and the technical skills of Ades. They
were necessarily isolated from the rest of the human race. And it could
not be endured. And then, besides that, there were sixteen millions of
people left on Ades, cut off from the hope that Terranova represented.

Kim Rendell was called on immediately. The Colony Organizer of
Terranova, himself, went in person to confer and to bewail.

Kim Rendell was peacefully puttering with an unimportant small gadget
when the Colony Organizer arrived. The house was something of a gem of
polished plastic--Dona had designed it--and it stood on a hill with a
view which faced the morning sun and the rising twin moons of Terranova.

The atmosphere-flier descended, and Dona led the Organizer to the
workshop in which Kim puttered. The Organizer had had half an hour in
which to think of catastrophe. He was in a deplorable state when Kim
looked up from the thing with which he was tinkering.

"Enter and welcome," he said cheerfully in the formal greeting. "I'm
only amusing myself. But you look disturbed."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Colony Organizer bewailed the fact that there would be no more
supplies from Ades. No more colonists. Technical information, urgently
needed, could not be had. Supplies were called for for exploring
parties, and new building-machines were desperately in demand, and the
storage-reserves were depleted and could last only so long if no more
came through.

"But," said Kim blankly. "Why shouldn't they come through?"

"The matter-transmitter's stopped working!" The Colony Organizer wrung
his hands. "If they're still transmitting on Ades, think of the lives
and the precious material that's being lost!"

"They aren't transmitting," said Kim. "A transmitter and a receiver are
a unit. Both have to work for either one to operate--except in the very
special case of a transmitter-drive ship. But it's queer. I'll come
take a look."

He slipped into the conventional out-of-door garments. Dona had
listened. Now she said a word or two to Kim, her expression concerned.
Kim's expression darkened.

"That's what I'm afraid of," he told her. "A transmitter is too simple
to break down. They can get detuned, but we made the pair for Ades and
Terranova especially. Their tuning elements are set in solid plastite.
They couldn't get out of tune!"

He picked up a small box. He tucked it under his arm.

"I'll be back," he told Dona heavily. "But I suspect you'd better pack."

He went out to the grounded flier. The Colony Organizer took it up and
across the green-clad hills of Terranova. The vegetation of Terranova
is extraordinarily flexible, and the green stuff below the flier swayed
elaborately in the wind. The top of the forests bowed and bent in
the form of billows and waves. The effect was that of an ocean which
complacently remained upraised in hillocks and had no normal surface.
It was not easy to get used to such things.

"I'm terribly worried," said the Organizer anxiously. "There is a
tremendous shortage of textiles, and the ores we usually send back to
balance our account are piling up."

"You're badly worried, eh?" said Kim grimly.

"Of course! How can we keep our economic system now?"

Kim made an angry noise.

"I'm a lot more worried than you are," he snapped. "Nothing should
have stopped this particular pair of transmitters from working but the
destruction of one or the other! This box in my pocket might tell me
the answer, but I'm afraid to find out. I assure you that temporary
surpluses and shortages of ores and textiles are the least of the
things we have to worry about."

The little flier sped on, with the great, waving billows of the forest
beneath it. On one hillock there was a clearing with a group of four
plastic houses shining in the sunlight. They looked horribly lonely in
the sea of green, but the population on Terranova was spread thin. Far
over at the horizon there was another clearing. Sunlight glinted on
water. A pleasure-pool. There was a sizable village about it. Half a
dozen soarers spun and whirled lazily above. Kim said:

"The thing is that Ades and the planets left over after we handled
Sinab are the only places in the whole First Galaxy where there are
no disciplinary circuits. Ades is the only place where a man can
spit in the eye of another man and the two of them settle it between
themselves. There's a government of sorts, on Ades, as there is here,
but there's no ruler. Also there's nobody who can strut around and make
other men bow to him. A woman on Ades, and here, belongs to the man
she wants to belong to. She can't be seized by some lordling for his
own pleasure, and turned over to his guards and underlings when he's
through with her."

"That's true," said the Colony Organizer, who was still worried. "But
the transmitter--"

"Gossip of the admirable state of things on Ades has gone about," said
Kim hardly. "Some of our young men appointed themselves missionaries
and went roaming around the planets, spreading word that Ades wasn't
a bad place. That if you were exiled to Ades you were lucky. They
probably bragged that we whipped the Empire of Sinab in a fight."

       *       *       *       *       *

At this the mouth of the Organizer dropped open in astonishment.

"Of course, of course! The number of exiles arriving at Ades increased.
It was excellent. We need people for the Second Galaxy, and people who
earn exile are usually people with courage, willing to take risks for
the sake of hope."

"Don't you realize that such things have been dangerous? When people on
Markab Two began to hope?" Kim said impatiently. "When peasants on the
planets of Allioth began to imagine that things might be better? When
slaves on Utbeg began to tell each other in murmurs that there was a
place where people weren't slaves? Don't you see that such things would
alarm the rulers of such planets? How can people be held as slaves
unless you keep them in despair?"

The Colony Organizer corrected his course a trifle. Far away the walls
of the capital city of Terranova glinted in the sunlight.

"And there are the twenty-one planets which fell into our laps when
we had to smash Sinab," said Kim. "Ades became the subject of dreams.
Peasants and commoners think of it yearningly, as a sort of paradise.
But kings and tyrants dream of it either as a nightmare which threatens
the tranquility of their realms, or else as a very pretty bit of loot
to be seized if possible. There are probably ten thousand royal courts
where ambitious men rack their brains for some plausible way to wipe
out Ades as a menace and take over our twenty-one planets for loot.
Ades is already full of spies, sent there in the guise of exiles.
There've been men found murdered after torture,--seized and tortured by
spies hoping to find out the secrets by which we whipped Sinab. There's
one bomb-crater on Ades already, where a bomb smuggled through the
transmitter was set off in an effort to wipe out all the brains on the
planet. It didn't, but it was bad."



                              CHAPTER II

                           _Enemy Sabotage_


Skilfully the Colony Organizer sent the flier into the long shallow
glide that would land it in the planet capital city. There were only
twenty thousand people in that city. It would rate as a village
anywhere except on Ades, but it was the largest settlement on Terranova.

"Then you think," said the harassed Organizer, "that some outrage has
been committed and the transmitter on Ades damaged--perhaps by another
bomb?"

"I hope it's no worse than that," said Kim. "I don't know what I fear,
but there are still sixteen million people on Ades, and some of them
are very decent folk. In a little while I'll know if it's nothing
important, or if it's bad. I could have found out back at home, but I
wanted to hold on to hope."

His lips were tightly compressed. The flier landed. The two men got out
and went along a yielding walk to the central square of the city.

Many persons had collected in the square, more people in that one spot
than Kim had seen together for many years. Now at least a thousand men
and women and children had gathered, and were standing motionless,
looking at the tall arch of the transmitter.

There would have been nothing extraordinary about the appearance of
the arch to a man from past ages. It would have seemed to be quite
commonplace--gracefully designed, to be sure, and with a smooth purity
of line which the ancient artists only aspired to, but still not at
all a remarkable object. But the throng of onlookers who stared at it,
did so because they could look through it. That had never before been
possible. It had been a matter-transmitter. Now it was only an arch.
The people stared.

Kim went in the technician's door at the base of the arch. The local
matter-technician greeted him with relief.

"I'm glad you have come, Kim Rendell," he said uneasily. "I can find
nothing wrong. Every circuit is correct. Every contact is sound. But it
simply does not work!"

"I'll see," said Kim. "I'm sure you are right, but I'll verify it. Yet
I'm afraid I'm only postponing a test I should have made before."

He went over the test-panel, trying the various circuits. All checked
up satisfactorily. He went behind the test-panel and switched a number
of leads. He returned to the front and worked the panel again. The
results were wildly at variance with the original readings, but Kim
regarded them with an angry acceptance.

"I reversed some leads, just in case a checking instrument was out
by the same amount as a circuit," he told the technician. "To be
frank about it, I made sure you hadn't knocked out the transmitter on
purpose. Such things have been done." Then he said grimly, "This one
is all right. The transmitter on Ades is out of action. It not only
doesn't work, but they haven't been able to fix it in--how long?"

"Two hours now," said the technician unhappily.

"Too long!" said Kim.

He unpacked his box. It was very small, a foot by a foot by a foot.
There was a cone-shaped hole in one end which diminished to a small
hole at the other end. Kim sweated a little.

"I should have tried this before," he said. "But I wanted to hope. With
all the First Galaxy fearing and hating Ades, somebody would think of a
way to do us damage, even without space-ships!"

He turned a tiny knob on the box, and looked through the hole. His
lips tautened. He began to make tests. His face grew more and more
drawn and sombre. At last he turned the little knob again, and nothing
happened. His face went quite white.

"What is it?" asked the Colony Organizer.

Kim sat down, looking rather sick.

"It's bad," he said. Then he gestured toward the box. "When we were
fighting Sinab, somebody worked out an idea for the remote control
of ships. Beam control would be too slow. At a few million miles,
the information the robot gathered would take seconds to get back
to the control-board, and more seconds would be needed for the
controlling signals to get back to the robot. In terms of light-years,
communications that way would be impossible."

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim glanced at the Organizer who signified by a nod that he understood.

"If it took a year each way, there'd be two years between the robot's
observation of something to be acted on," Kim continued. "And the
signal that would make it act. So this man proposed very tiny
matter-transmitters. One on the robot and one on the home planet. A
solid object would receive all the information the robot's instruments
gathered.

"The transmitter would send it back to the control-board at
transmitter-speed, and the board would impress orders on it and send
it to the robot again. It could shuttle across the width of a galaxy
a hundred times a second, and make robot-control at any distance
practical. A few of them were made, but not used. This is one of them.

"I had it for measuring the actual speed of transmitter-travel between
here and Ades. We thought the distance would be enough for a good
measurement. It wasn't. But this is a transmitter like the big one, and
it has a mate on Ades, and its mate is a hemisphere away from Ades'
main transmitter. And neither one works. Something's happened on Ades,
that involves both hemispheres. And the transmitters couldn't have been
knocked out by something that only killed people. It looks as if Ades
may have been destroyed."

There was an instant's uncomprehending silence. Then the realization
struck home. In all of human history no planet had ever been completely
destroyed. Dozens, even hundreds, had been devastated, before wars came
to an end by the discovery of a weapon too terrible to be used. Four
had been de-populated by that weapon, the fighting-beam. But never
before had it even been imagined that a planet could be wiped out of
existence.

"There are theoretic considerations," said Kim, dry-throated, "which
make a material weapon like atomic explosive unthinkable. There are
other considerations which make it certain that any immaterial weapon
that could destroy a planet would have infinite speed and therefore
infinite range. _If_ Ades has been destroyed, all the human race,
including us, must sooner or later be subject to those who control such
a weapon."

Kim Rendell paused and cleared his throat. "If they start off by
destroying the only world on which men are free, I don't think I like
it. Now I must go back home. I'd better get over to the First Galaxy in
the _Starshine_ and find out what's happened."

       *       *       *       *       *

The thousand million suns of the First Galaxy swam in space, attended
by their families of planets. Three hundred million worlds had
been populated by the human race. For thirty thousand years the
descendants of the people of Earth--that almost mythical first home of
humanity--had spread through the vastness of what once had seemed to
them the very cosmos itself.

In the older, long-settled planets, civilization rose to incredible
heights of luxury and of pride, and then took the long dive down into
decadence and futility while newer, fresher worlds still struggled
upward from the status of frontier settlements.

But at long last humanity's task in the First Galaxy was ended. The
last planet suitable for human occupancy had been mapped and colonized.
The race had reached the limit of its growth. It had reached,
too--or so it seemed--its highest possible point of development.
Matter-transmitters conveyed parcels and persons instantly and easily
from rim to rim of the galaxy.

Disciplinary circuits enforced the laws of planetary governments beyond
any hope of evasion or defiance. There were impregnable defenses
against attacks from space. There could be no war, there could be no
revolt, there could be no successful crime--save by those people who
controlled governments--and there could be no hope. So humanity settled
back toward barbarism.

Perhaps it was inevitable that conquest should again become possible,
revolt conceivable, and crime once more feasible even to individuals,
so that hope could return to men. And perhaps it was the most natural
thing imaginable that hope first sprang from the prison world of Ades.

       *       *       *       *       *

Whispers spread from planet to planet. Ades, to which all rebels and
nonconformists had been banished in hopeless exile, was no longer a
symbol for isolation and despair. Its citizens--if criminals could be
citizens anywhere--had revived the art of space-travel by means of
ships.

The rest of the galaxy had abandoned space-ships long ago as
antiquities. Matter-transmitters far surpassed them. But Ades had
revived them and fought a war with the Empire of Sinab, and won it,
and twenty-one planets with all their cities and machines had fallen
to them. But the men of Sinab had been sent to an unimaginable fate,
leaving wives and daughters behind. The fact that the women of the
Sinabian Empire were mostly the widows of men massacred for the
Empire's spread was not clearly told in the rumors which ran about
among the world.

If you became a criminal and were exiled to Ades, you were lucky. There
were not enough men on Ades to accomplish the high triumphs awaiting
them on every hand. There was hope for any man who dared to become a
rebel. Exile to Ades was the most fortunate of adventures instead of
the most dreadful of fates.

Those whispers were fascinating, but they were seditious. The oligarchs
and tyrants and despots and politicians who ruled their planets by the
threat of the disciplinary circuit, found this new state of affairs
deplorable. Populations grew restive. There was actually hope among the
common people, who could be subjected to unbearable torment by the mere
pressure of a button. And of course hope could not be permitted. Allow
the populace to hope, and it would aspire to justice. Grant it justice
and it might look for liberty! Something had to be done!

So something was done. Many things were done. Royal courts debated the
question, alike of the danger and of possible loot in the empire to
which Ades had fallen heir. And in consequence the despots had acted.

The _Starshine_ winked into existence near the sun which had been the
luminary of Ades. It was a small cold sun, and Ades had been its
only planet. The _Starshine_ had made the journey from Terranova in
four leaps, of which the first was the monstrous one from the Second
Galaxy to the First. Accuracy of aim could not be expected over such an
expanse.

The little ship had come out of its first leap near that preposterous
group of the blue-white suns of Dheen, whose complicated orbits about
each other still puzzled mathematicians. And Kim had come to the sector
of the galaxy he desired on his second leap, and to the star-cluster in
the third, and the fourth brought him to the small sun he looked for.

But space was empty about it. A sun without planets is a rarity so
strange that it is almost impossible. This sun had possessed Ades.
Nevertheless Kim searched for Ades. He found nothing. He searched for
debris of an exploded planet. He found nothing. He set cameras to
photograph all the cosmos about him, and drove the Starshine at highest
interplanetary speed for twelve hours. Then he looked at the plates.

In that twelve hours the space-ship had driven some hundreds of
thousands of miles. Even nearby stars at distances of light-years,
would not have their angles change appreciably, and so would show upon
the plates as definite, tiny dots. But any planet or any debris within
a thousand million miles would make a streak instead of a dot upon the
photographic plate.

There was nothing. Ades had vanished.

He aimed for the star Khiv and flashed to its vicinity. The banded
planet Khiv Five swam sedately in emptiness. Kim drove for it, at first
on mere overdrive, and then on the interplanetary drive used for rising
from and landing on the surface of worlds. He landed on Khiv Five.

Women looked at him strangely. A space-ship which landed on Khiv
Five--or anywhere else, for that matter--must certainly come from Ades,
but ships were not commonplace sights. Kim was no commonplace sight,
either. Six years before, the men on Khiv Five had died in one rotation
of the planet. Every man and boy was murdered by the killing-beams of
the now defunct Sinabian Empire. Now there were only women, save for
the very few men who had migrated to it in quest of wives, and had
remained to rear families.

The population of Khiv Five was overwhelmingly female.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim found his way to the governing center of the capital city. Dona
walked with him through the city streets. There were women everywhere.
They turned to stare at Kim. They looked at Dona with veiled eyes.

Long years on an exclusively feminine world does strange things to
psychology. There were women wearing the badges of mourning for
husbands dead more than half a decade.

In a sense it was a dramatization of their loss, because all women,
everywhere, take a melancholy pleasure in the display of their
unhappiness. But in part to boast of grief for a lost husband was an
excuse for not having captured one of the few men who had arrived since
the mass murder. As a matter of fact, Kim did not see a single man in
the capital city of Khiv Five, but its streets swarmed with women.

He asked for the head of the planet government, and at long last found
an untidy woman at a desk. He asked what was known of Ades.

"I was on Terranova," he explained. "The matter-transmitter went off
and it did not come back on. I came back by space-ship to find out
about it, and went to where Ades should have been. I'm Kim Rendell, and
I used to be a matter-transmitter technician. I thought I might repair
the one on Ades if it needed repairing. But I could find no planet
circling Ades' sun."

The woman regarded him with what was almost hostility.

"Kim Rendell," she said. "I've heard of you. You are a very famous man.
But we women on Khiv Five can do without men!"

"No doubt," Kim said patiently. "But has there been any word of Ades?"

"We are not interested in Ades," she said angrily. "We can do without
Ades."

"But I'm interested in Ades," said Kim. "And after all, it was Ades
which punished the murderers of the men of Khiv Five. A certain amount
of gratitude is indicated."

"Gratitude!" said the untidy woman harshly. "We'd have been grateful if
you men of Ades had turned those Sinabians over to us! We'd have killed
them every one--slowly!"

"But the point is," said Kim, "that something has happened to Ades. It
might happen to Khiv Five. If we can find out what it was, we'll take
steps so it won't happen again."

"Just leave us alone!" said the untidy woman fiercely. "We can get
along without men or Ades or anything else. Go away!"



                              CHAPTER III

                           _Dangerous Trip_


Dona plucked at Kim's arm. He turned, seething, and went out. Outside
he vented his bitterness.

"I thought men were crazy!" he said. "If she's the head of the planet
government, I pity the planet."

"She could talk to another woman quite rationally," Dona said with
satisfaction. "But she's had to persuade herself that she hates me, and
you had me with you, and I'm prettier than she is, Kim, and I have you.
So she couldn't talk to you."

"But she's unreasonable," Kim said stubbornly.

"We'll go back to the ship," said Dona brightly. "I'll lock you in it
and then go find out what we want to know."

She smiled comfortably all the way back to the _Starshine_. But the
staring women made Kim acutely uncomfortable. When he was safely inside
the ship, he wiped perspiration from his forehead.

"I wouldn't want to live on this planet!" he said feverishly.

"I wouldn't want you to," said Dona. "Stay inside, darling. You'd
better not even show yourself at a vision-port."

"Heaven forbid!" said Kim.

Dona went out. Kim paced up and down the living quarters of the ship.
There was something in the back of his mind that would not quite come
out. The disappearance of Ades was impossible. Men had conquered one
galaxy and now started on a second, but never yet had they destroyed
a planet. Never yet had they even moved one. But nevertheless, only
thirty-six hours ago the planet Ades had revolved about its sun and
men and women had strolled into its matter-transmitter with no hint of
danger, and between two seconds something had happened.

Even had the planet been shattered into dust, its remnants should have
been discoverable. And surely a device which could destroy a planet
would have had some preliminary testings and the galaxy would have
heard of its existence! This thing that had happened was inconceivable!
On the basis of the photographs, Ades had not only been destroyed, but
the quintillions of tons of its substance had been removed so far that
sunlight shining upon them did not light them enough for photography.
Which simply could not be.

Kim wrestled with the problem while Dona went about in the world of
women. There was something odd about her in the eyes of women of Khiv
Five. Their faces were unlike the faces of the women of a normal world.
On a world with men and women, all women wear masks. Their thoughts are
unreadable. But where there are no men, masks are useless. The women of
Khiv Five saw plainly that Dona was unlike them, but they were willing
to talk to her.

She came back to the _Starshine_ as Kim reached a state of complete
bewilderment. Ades could not have been destroyed. But it had vanished.
Even if shattered, its fragments could not have been moved so far
or so fast that they could no longer be detected. But they were
undiscoverable. The thing was impossible on any scale of power
conceivable for humans to use. But it had happened.

So Kim paced back and forth and bit his nails until Dona returned.

"We can take off, Kim," she said quietly.

She locked the inner airlock door as if shutting out something. She
twisted the fastening extra tight. Her face was pale.

"What about Ades?" asked Kim.

"They had matter-transmission to it from here, too," said Dona. "You
remember, the original transmitter on Ades was one-way only. It would
receive but not send. Some new ones were built after the war with
Sinabia, though. And this planet's communication with Ades cut off just
when ours did, thirty-six hours ago. None of the other twenty planets
has communication with it either. Something happened, and on the
instant everything stopped."

"What caused it?" Kim asked, but Dona paid no attention.

"Take off, Kim," she said. "Men are marching out of the
matter-transmitter. Marching, I said, Kim! Armed men, marching as
soldiers, with machine-mounted heavy weapons. Somebody knows Ades can't
protect its own any more, and invaders must be crowding in for the
spoils. I'm--afraid, Kim, that Ades has been destroyed and our planets
are part of a tyrant's empire now."

       *       *       *       *       *

Later, the _Starshine_ swooped down from the blue toward the
matter-transmitter on Khiv Five. Serried ranks of marching figures
were tramping out of the transmitter's silvery, wavering film. In
strict geometric rows they marched, looking neither to the right nor to
the left. They were a glittering stream, moving rhythmically in unison,
proceeding to join an already-arrived mass of armed men already drawn
up in impressive array.

Racing toward the high arch of the transmitter with air screaming about
the _Starshine's_ hull, Kim saw grimly that the figures were soldiers,
as Dona had said. He had never before seen a soldier in actual life,
but pictures and histories had made them familiar enough.

These were figures out of the unthinkably remote past. They wore
helmets of polished metal. They glittered with shining orichalc and
chromium. The bright small flashes of faceted corundum--synthetic
sapphire in all the shades from blue-white to ruby--shone from their
identical costumes and equipment. They were barbarous in their
splendor, and strange in the precision and unison of their movements,
which was like nothing so much as the antics of girl precision dancers,
without the extravagance of the dancers' gestures.

The _Starshine_ dipped lower. It shot along a canyon-like open way
between buildings. The matter-transmitter was upon a hill within the
city and the ship was now lower than the transmitter and the heads of
the soldiers who still tramped out of the archway in a scintillating
stream.

Kim raged. Soldiers were an absurdity on top of a catastrophe.
Something had erased the planet Ades from its orbit around a lonely
sun. That bespoke science and intelligence beyond anything dreamed
of hitherto. But soldiers marching like dancing-girls, bedecked with
jewels and polished metal like the women of the pleasure-world of Dite--

This military display was pure childishness!

"Our pressure-wave'll topple them," said Kim savagely. "At least we'll
smash the transmitter."

There was a monstrous roaring noise. The _Starshine_, which had flashed
through intergalactic space at speeds no science was yet able to
measure, roared between tall buildings in atmosphere. Wind whirled and
howled past its hull. It dived forward toward the soldiers.

There was one instant when the ship was barely yards above the gaping
faces of startled, barbarously accoutered troopers. The following
spreading pressure-wave of the ship's faster-than-sound movement
spread out on every side like a three-dimensional wake. It toppled
the soldiers as it hit. They went down in unison, in a wildly-waving,
light-flashing tangle of waving arms and legs and savage weapons.

But Kim saw, too, squat and bell-mouthed instruments on wheels, in the
act of swinging to bear upon him. One bore on the _Starshine_. It was
impossible to stop or swerve the ship. There was yet another fraction
of a second of kaleidoscopic confusion, of momentary glimpses of
incredibly antique and childish pomp.

And then anguish struck.

It was the hellish torment of a fighting-beam, more concentrated
and more horrible than any other agony known to mankind. For the
infinitesimal fraction of an instant Kim experienced it to the full.
Then there was nothingness.

[Illustration: Kim experienced a torture more concentrated then any
other agony known to mankind.]

There was no sound. There was no planet. There was no sunlight on tall
and stately structures built by men long murdered from the skies. The
vision-ports showed remote and peaceful suns and all the tranquil glory
of interstellar space. The _Starshine_ floated in emptiness.

It was, of course, the result of that very small device that Kim
had built into the _Starshine_ before even the invention of the
transmitter-drive. It was a relay which flung on faster-than-light
drive the instant fighting-beams struck any living body in the ship.
The _Starshine_ had been thrown into full interstellar drive while
still in atmosphere.

It had plunged upward--along the line of its aiming--through the air.
The result of its passage to Khiv Five could only be guessed at, but
in even the unthinkably minute part of a second it remained in air, the
ship's outside temperatures had risen two hundred degrees. Moving at
multiples of the speed of light, it must have created an instantaneous
flash of literally stellar heat by the mere compression of air before
it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim was sick and shaken by the agony which would have killed him had it
lasted as long as the hundredth of a second. But Dona stared at him.

"Kim--what--Oh!"

She ran to him. The beam had not touched her. So close to the
projector, it had been narrow, no more than a yard across. It had
struck Kim and missed Dona.

"Oh, my poor Kim!"

He grimaced.

"Forget it," he said, breathing hard. "We've both had it before, but
not as bad as this. It was a mobile fighting-beam projector. I imagine
they'll think we burned up in a flash of lightning. I hope there were
X-rays for them to enjoy."

For a long time Kim Rendell sat still, with his eyes closed. The dosage
of the fighting-beam had been greater than they had ever experienced
together, though. It left him weak and sick.

"Funny," he said presently. "Barbarous enough to have soldiers with
decorative uniforms and shiny dingle-dangles on them, and modern enough
to have fighting-beam projectors, and a weapon that's wiped Ades out of
space. We've got to find out who they are, Dona, and where they came
from. They're something quite new."

"I wonder," said Dona. But she still looked at Kim with troubled eyes.

"Eh?"

"If it's new," said Dona. "If it's a weapon. Even if--if Ades is
destroyed."

Kim stared at her.

"Now, what do you mean by that?"

"I don't quite know," admitted Dona. "I say things, and you turn them
over in your head, and something quite new comes out. I told you a
story about a dust-grain, once, and you made the transmitter-drive that
took us to Ades in the first place and made everything else possible
afterward."

"_Hmmm_," said Kim meditatively. "If it's new. If it's a weapon. If
Ades is destroyed. Why did you think of those three things?"

"You said no planet had ever been destroyed," she told him. "If
anybody could think of a way to do such a thing, you could. And when
Sinab had to be fought, and there weren't any weapons, you worked out
a way to conquer them with things that certainly weren't weapons.
Just broadcasters of the disciplinary-circuit field. So I wondered if
what they used was a weapon. Of course if it wasn't a weapon, it was
probably something that had been used before for some other purpose,
and it wouldn't be new."

"I've got to think about that," said Kim. He cogitated for a moment.
"Yes, I definitely have to think about that."

Then he stood up.

"We'll try to identify these gentry first. Then we'll go to another of
the twenty-one planets."



                              CHAPTER IV

                          _Despots Take Over_


He took his observations and swung the little ship about. He adjusted
the radiation-switch to throw off the transmitter-drive on near
approach to a sun. He aimed for the star Thom. Its fourth planet had
been subjugated to the Empire of Sinab ten years before, and freed by
the men of Sinab six years since.

The _Starshine_ winked into being some twenty million miles from it,
and two hundred million from the star. Kim looked annoyed, and then
glanced at the relay and adjusted it again. He pointed the _Starshine_
close to the planet's disk. He pressed the transmitter-drive button.
Instantly the ship was within mere thousands of miles of the planet.

"Nice!" Kim was pleased. "Saves a lot of overdrive juggling. Those
horrible fighter-beams seem to make one think more clearly. Dona, get
us down to the night-side while I try to work something out. Don't
ground. Just drop into atmosphere enough to pick up any broadcasts."

She took his place at the controls. He got out his writing-materials
and a stylus and began busily to sketch and to calculate. Dona drove
the ship to atmosphere on the dark side of Thom Four, not too far from
the sunset's rim. In the earlier night hours, on a given continent, the
broadcasts should be greater in number.

Communicator-bands murmured in soprano. Thom Four was more than
ninety-five per cent female, too. Kim worked on. After a long time
a speaker suddenly emitted a blast of martial music. Until now the
broadcast programs had gone unheeded by both Kim and Dona, because
from each wave-band only women's voices had come out, and only women's
music. The sound of brazen horns was something new. Dona smiled at Kim
and turned up the volume.

A man's voice said pompously:

"To the People of Thom Four, greeting!

"Whereas His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and
noble lineage, has heard with distress of the misfortunes of the people
of the planet Thom Four, of the injuries they have suffered at the
hands of enemies, and of their present distressful state, and;

"Whereas, His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and
noble lineage, is moved to extend his protection to all well-disposed
persons in need of a gallant and potent protector;

"Therefore His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and
noble lineage, has commanded his loyal and courageous troops to occupy
the said planet Thom Four, to defend it against all enemies whatsoever,
and to extend to its people all the benefits of his reign.

"Given at his Palace of Gornith, on the second day of the tenth month
of the sixteenth year of his reign, and signed by His Most Gracious
Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage."

The voice stopped. There was another blare of martial music. The
broadcast ended. Ten minutes later, on another wavelength, the same
proclamation was repeated. That broadcast stopped too. Five minutes
later came still another broadcast. And so on and so on. At long last
there was but a single wavelength coming into the communicators. It was
a broadcast of a drama with only female characters, and in which there
was no reference to the fact that the human race normally includes two
sexes. It was highly emotional and it was very strange indeed.

Then a pompous male voice read the silly proclamation and the broadcast
cut off.

"The question," said Kim, "is whether I'd better try to catch a soldier
and make him tell us where Gornith is and what planet is ruled by Elim
the Fortieth of high and noble lineage. I think I'd better find out."

"Darling," said Dona, "I'm not afraid of soldiers bothering you, but
I certainly won't let you venture out on a planet full of women. And
there's something else."

"What?"

"There are twenty-one planets which Ades used to protect. What
planetary ruler could send troops to occupy twenty-one other planets?
Do you think this King Elim the Fortieth has tried to seize all of
them, or do you think he arranged a coöperative steal with the rulers
of other planets, and an arrangement for them all to help protect each
other? Hadn't we better make sure?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim looked up at her from the desk where he worked.

"You're an uncomfortably brainy woman, Dona," he said drily. "Do you
think you could find Sinab? Sinab Two was the capital planet of the
empire we had to take over."

Dona looked carefully on a star-chart. Kim went back to his task.
He had drawn, very carefully, an electronic circuit. Now he began
to simplify it. He frowned from time to time, though, and by his
expression was thinking of something else than the meticulous placing
of symbols on paper.

It was symptomatic of his confidence in Dona, though, that he remained
absorbed while she worked the ship. Presently there were mutterings in
the speakers. Dona had navigated to another solar system and entered
the atmosphere of another planet.

"Listen, Kim!" she said suddenly.

From a communicator blared a heavy male voice.

"People of Sinab Two!" the voice said. "You are freed from the tyranny
of the criminals of Ades.

"From this time forth, Sinab Two is under the protection of the Dynast
of Tabor, whose mercy to the meek, justice to the just, and wrath
toward the evil-doer is known among all men.

"People of Sinab Two! The soldiers now pouring in to defend you are to
be received submissively. You will honor all requisitions for food,
lodgings, and supplies. Such persons as have hitherto exercised public
office will surrender their authority to the officials appointed by the
Dynast to replace them.

"For your protection, absolute obedience is essential. Persons seeking
to prevent the protection of Sinab Two by the troops of the Dynast of
Tabor will be summarily dealt with. They can expect no mercy.

"People of Sinab Two! You are freed from the tyranny of the criminals
of Ades!"

"So Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage, has a competitor,"
Kim said grimly. "The Dynast of Tabor, eh? But there are twenty-one
planets that used to belong to Sinab. I'm afraid we'll have to check
further."

They did. While Kim scowlingly labored over the drawing of a new
device, Dona drove the _Starshine_ to six worlds in succession. And
four of the six worlds had been taken over by the Sardathian League,
by King Ulbert of Arth, by the Emperor and Council of the Republic
of Sind--which was a remarkable item--and by the Imperator of Donet.
On the last two worlds there was confusion. On one the population
was sternly told by one set of voices that it now owed allegiance to
Queen Amritha of Megar, and by another set that King Jan of Pirn would
shortly throw out the Megarian invaders and protect them forever. On
the sixth planet there were four armies proclaiming the exclusive
nobility of their intentions.

"That's enough, Dona," Kim said in a tired voice. "Ades vanished or was
destroyed, and instantly thereafter gracious majesties and dynasts and
imperators and such vultures pounced on the planets we'd freed. But I'd
like to know how they made sure it was safe to pounce!"

Dona punched buttons on the _Starshine's_ control-board. The ship
lifted. The great black mass which was the night-side of the last
planet faded behind and the _Starshine_ drove on into space. And Dona
turned back to Kim from her post at the controls.

"Now what?"

Kim stared at nothing, his features somber.

"It's bad," he said sourly. "There's the gang on Terranova. They're
fair game if they land on any planet in the whole First Galaxy--and
Terranova isn't self-sustaining yet. They'll starve if they stay
isolated. There are the people on Ades. Sixteen millions of them. Not
a big population for a planet, but a lot of people to be murdered so a
few princelings can feast on the leavings of Sinab's empire.

"There are all the people who'd started to dream because Ades had come
to mean hope. And there are all the people in generations to come who'd
like to dream of hope and now won't be able to, and there are all the
nasty little surprise-attacks and treacheries which will be carried out
by matter-transmitters, now that these gentry of high and noble lineage
have been able to snatch some loot for themselves. It's pretty much of
a mess, Dona."

       *       *       *       *       *

Dona gave an impatient toss of her head. "You're not responsible for
it, Kim," she protested.

"Maybe I should simply concentrate on finding a solution for Terranova,
eh? Let decency as something to fight for go by the board and be
strictly practical?"

"You shouldn't try to take all the problems of two galaxies on your
shoulders," said Dona.

Kim shook his head impatiently.

"Look!" he said in vexation. "There's some way out of the mess! I just
contrived a way to make a very desirable change in all the governments
of the First Galaxy, given time. It was one of those problems that seem
too big to handle, but it worked out very easily. But I absolutely
can't think of the ghost of an idea of how to find a friendly world for
Terranova!"

Dona waited.

"It occurs to me that I haven't slept for forty hours," Kim said. "I
doubt that you've done any better. I think we should go to bed. There's
one puzzle on which all the rest is based, and it's got me. What the
devil happened to Ades? There's a whole planet, seven thousand miles in
diameter, vanished as if it had never been. Maybe after some sleep I'll
be able to work it out. Let's go to sleep!"

The space-ship _Starshine_ drove on through emptiness at mere
interplanetary speed, its meteor-repellers ceaselessly searching space
for any sign of danger. But there was no danger. In the midst of space,
between the stars, there was safety. Only where men were was there
death.

The ship swam in the void, no lights showing in any of its ports.

Then, in the midst of the darkness inside, Kim sat up in his bunk.

"But hang it, Ades _couldn't_ be destroyed," he cried, in exasperation.



                               CHAPTER V

                          _Industrial World_


Planet Spicus Five was an industrial world. According to the prevailing
opinion in the best circles, its prosperity was due to an ample
and adequate supply of raw materials, plus a skilled and thrifty
population. There were sixteen matter-transmitters on the planet, and
their silvery films were never still.

From abecedaria for infants to zyolites (synthetic) for industrial use,
its products ran in endless streams to the transmitters, and the other
products and raw materials obtained in exchange came out in streams no
less continuous. The industrial area covered a continent of sprawling
rectangular buildings designed for the ultimate of efficiency, with
living-areas for the workmen spreading out between.

The _Starshine_ descended through morning sunlight. Kim, newly shaved
and rested, forgot to yawn as he stared through the vision-ports at the
endless vista of structures made with a deliberate lack of grace. From
a hundred-mile height they could be seen everywhere to north and south,
to the eastward where it was already close to midday, and to where
shadows beyond the dawn hid them. Even from that altitude they were no
mere specks between the cloud-masses. They were definite shapes, each
one a unit.

The ship went down and down and down. Kim felt uncomfortable and
realized why. He spoke drily.

"I don't suppose we'll ever land on any new planet without being
ready to wince from a fighting-beam and find ourselves snatched to
hell-and-gone away."

Dona did not answer. She gazed at the industrial plants as they swelled
in size with the _Starshine's_ descent. Buildings two miles to a side
were commonplace. Great rectangles three and even four miles long
showed here and there. And there were at least half a dozen buildings,
plainly factory units, which were more than ten miles in extent
on each of their ground dimensions. When the _Starshine_ was below
the clouds, Dona focussed the electron telescope on one of them and
gestured to call Kim's attention to the sight.

This factory building enclosed great quadrangles, with gigantic
courtyards to allow--perhaps--of light. And within the courtyards were
dwelling-units for workmen. The telescope showed them plainly. Workmen
in factories like this would have no need and little opportunity ever
to go beyond the limits of their place of employment. The factory in
which they labored would confront them on every hand, at every instant
of their life from birth until death.

"That's something I don't like, without even asking questions about
it," said Kim.

He took the controls. The _Starshine_ dived. He remembered to flick on
the communicators. A droning filled the interior of the space-ship.
Dona looked puzzled and tuned in. A male voice mumbled swiftly and
without intonation through a long series of numerals and initial
letters. It paused. Another voice said tensely, "_Tip._" The first
voice droned again. The second voice said, "_Tip._" The first voice
droned.

Dona looked blank. She turned up another wavelength. A voice barked
hysterically. The words ran so swiftly together that they were almost
indistinguishable, but certain syllables came out in patterns.

"It's something about commerce," said Kim. "Arranging for some material
to be routed on a matter-transmitter."

None of the wavelengths carried music. All carried voices, and all
babbled swiftly, without expression, with a nerve-racking haste.

The _Starshine_ landed before a gigantic building. An armed guard stood
before it at a gateway. Kim trudged across to him. He came back.

"He's stupid," he said shortly. "He knows what to guard, and the
name of the plant, and where a workman may go to be received into
employment. That's all. We'll try again."

The _Starshine_ rose and moved. She was designed for movement in space,
with parsecs of distance on every hand. She was unhandy when used as
now for an atmosphere-flier. She descended within a factory quadrangle.
There was no one about. Literally no one. The dwelling-units were
occupied, to be sure, but no one moved anywhere.

When Kim opened the airlock there was a dull, grumbling rumble in
the air. It came from the many-storied building which surrounded this
courtyard and stretched away for miles.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim and Dona stood blankly in the airlock door. The air had no odor
at all. There was no dust. There was not a single particle of growing
stuff anywhere. To people who had lived on Terranova, it was incredible.

Then bells rang. Hundreds and thousands of bells. They rang stridently
in all the rooms and corridors of all the dwelling-units which reached
away as far as the eye could follow them. It was a ghastly sound,
because every bell was in exactly the same tone and made exactly the
same tintinnabulation.

Then there was a stirring in the houses. Folk moved within them.
Figures passed inside the windows. Now and again, briefly, faces
peered out. But none lingered to stare at what must have been the
unprecedented sight of a space-ship resting in the courtyard.

After a little figures appeared in the doors. Men and women swarmed
out and streamed toward openings in the factory building. Their heads
turned to gaze at the ship, but they did not even slacken speed in
their haste toward the sound of industry.

Kim hailed them. They looked at him blankly and hurried on. He caught
hold of a man.

"Where will I find the leader?" he asked sharply. "The boss! The
government! The king or whatever you have! Where?"

The man struggled.

"I be late," he protested unhappily. "I work. I be late!"

"Where's the government?" Kim repeated more sharply still. "The king or
nobles or whoever makes the laws or whatever the devil--"

"I be late!" panted the man.

He twisted out of Kim's grasp and ran to join the swarming folk now
approaching the great building.

They hurried inside. The quadrangle was again empty. Kim scowled. Then
other workers came out of the factory and plodded wearily toward the
dwelling-units. Kim waylaid a man and shot questions at him. His speech
was slurred with fatigue. Dona could not understand him at all. But
he gazed at the _Starshine_, and groped heavily for answers to Kim's
questions, and at the end trudged exhaustedly into a doorway.

Kim came into the ship, scowling. He seated himself at the
control-board. The ship lifted once more. He headed toward the curve of
the plant's bulging form.

"What did you learn, Kim?"

"This is the work continent," said Kim shortly. "The factories and the
workmen are here. The owners live in a place of their own. I have to
talk to one of the more important merchants. I need information."

Time passed and the ship went on over the rim of the planet. Orbital
speed was impossible. The _Starshine_ stayed almost within atmosphere
and moved eastward at no more than fifteen hundred miles an hour.

"Here it is," said Kim, at last.

The ship settled down once more. There was a thin, hazy overcast here,
and clear vision came suddenly as they dropped below it. And the
coast and the land before them brought an exclamation from Dona. The
shoreline was magnificent, all beautiful bold cliffs with rolling hills
behind them. There were mountains on farther yet and splendid vistas
everywhere. But more than the land or the natural setting, it was what
men had done which caused Dona to exclaim.

The whole terrain was landscaped like a garden. As far as the eye could
reach--and the _Starshine_ still flew high--every hillside and every
plain had been made into artificial but marvelous gardens. There were
houses here and there. Some were huge and gracefully spreading, or
airily soaring upward, or simple with the simplicity of gems and yet
magnificent beyond compare. There was ostentation here, to be sure, but
there was surely no tawdriness. There was no city in sight. There was
not even a grouping of houses, yet many of the houses were large enough
to shelter communities.

"I--see," said Kim. "The workmen live near the factories or in their
compounds. The owners have their homes safely away from the ugly part
of commerce. They've a small-sized continent of country homes, Dona,
and undoubtedly it is very pleasant to live here. Whom shall we deal
with?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Dona shook her head. Kim picked a magnificent residence at random. He
slanted the _Starshine_ down. Presently it landed lightly upon smooth
lawn of incredible perfection, before a home that Dona regarded with
shining eyes.

"It's--lovely!" she said breathlessly.

"It is," agreed Kim.

He sat still, looking.

"It even has a feeling all its own," he said. "The palace of a king or
a tyrant always has something of arrogance about it. It's designed to
impress the onlooker. A pleasure-palace is always tawdry. It's designed
to flatter the man who enters it. These houses are solid. They're
the homes of men who are thinking of generations to follow them and,
meanwhile, only of themselves. I've heard of the merchant princes of
Spicus Five, and I'm prejudiced. I don't like those factories with the
workmen's homes inside. But--I like this house. Do you want to come
with me?"

Dona looked at the house--yearningly. At the view all about, every tree
and every stone so placed as to constitute perfection. The effect was
not that of a finicky æstheticism, but of authentic beauty and dignity.
But after a moment Dona shook her head.

"I don't think I'd better," she said slowly. "I'm a woman, and I'd
want one like it. I'll stay in the ship and look at the view. You've a
communicator?"

Kim nodded. He opened the airlock door and stepped out. He walked
toward the great building.

Dona watched his figure grow small in its progress toward the mansion.
She watched him approach the ceremonial entrance. She saw a figure in
formalized rich clothing appear in that doorway and bow to him. Kim
spoke, with gestures. The richly clothed servant bowed for him to go
first into the house. Kim entered and the door closed.

Dona looked at her surroundings. Dignity and tranquility and beauty
were here. Children growing up in such an environment would be very
happy and would feel utterly safe. Wide, smooth, close-cropped lawns,
with ancient trees and flowering shrubs stretched away to the horizons.
There was the gleam of statuary here and there--rarely. A long way off
she could see the glitter of water, and beside it a graceful colonnade,
and she knew that it was a pleasure-pool.

Once she saw two boys staring at the space-ship. There was no trace of
fear in their manner. But a richly-dressed servant--much more carefully
garbed than the boys--led up two of the slim riding-sards of Phanis,
and the boys mounted and their steeds started off with that sinuous
smooth swiftness which only sards possess in all the first galaxy.

Time passed, and shadows lengthened. Finally Dona realized how many
hours had elapsed since Kim's departure. She was beginning to grow
uneasy when the door opened again and Kim came out followed by four
richly clad servants. Those servants carried bundles. Kim's voice came
over the communicator.

"Close the inner airlock door, Dona, and don't open it until I say so."

Dona obeyed. She watched uneasily. The four servants placed their
parcels inside the airlock at a gesture from Kim. Then there was an
instant of odd tension. Dona could not see the servants, but she saw
Kim smiling mirthlessly at them. He made no move to enter. He spoke
sharply and she heard them file out of the airlock. Dona could see them
again.

Kim stepped into the space-ship and closed the door.

"Take her up, Dona--fast!"

The _Starshine_ shot upward, with the four servants craning their necks
to look at it. It was out of sight of the ground in seconds. It was out
of the atmosphere before Kim came into the control-room from the lock.

"Quite a civilization," he said. "You'd have liked that house Dona.
There's a staff of several hundred servants, and it is beautiful
inside. The man who owns it is also master of one of the bigger
industrial plants. He doesn't go to the plant, of course. He has his
offices at home, with a corps of secretaries and a television-screen
for interviews with his underlings. Quite a chap."

"Were those four men servants?" Dona asked.

"No, they were guards," said Kim drily. "There are no proletarians
around that place, and none are permitted. Guards stand watch night and
day. I'd told my friend that the _Starshine_ was packed with lethal
gadgets with which Ades had won at least one war, and he's in the
munitions business, so I wasn't going to let his guards get inside.
They wanted to, badly, insisting they had to put their parcels in the
proper place. He'd have paid them lavishly if they could have captured
a ship like the _Starshine_."

He laughed a little.

"I was lucky to pick a munition maker. There aren't many wars in the
ordinary course of events, but he turns out weapons for palace guards,
mobile fighting-beam projectors, and so on. All the equipment for a
planet ruler who wants a fancy army for parades or a force with a punch
to fight off any sneak attack via matter-transmitter. That's what your
average ruler is afraid of, and what he keeps an army to defend himself
against. Of course the disciplinary circuit takes care of his subjects."



                              CHAPTER VI

                           _Vanished World_


Ahead of them loomed the sun, Spicus, many millions of miles away,
while beneath them lay the planet, Spicus Five, a vast hemisphere which
was rapidly shrinking into the distance. Kim moved over beside Dona and
stared reflectively at the instrument board.

"I got frightened, Kim," the girl said. "You were gone so long."

"I was bargaining," Kim answered. "I told him I came from Ades. I'd
a space-ship, so he could believe that. Then I told him what had
happened. Selling munitions, he should have known about it beforehand,
and I think he did. He doubted that I'd come from Ades as quickly as
I said, though, until I recited the names of some of the gracious
majesties who are making a grab of planets. Then he was sure. So he
wanted to strike a bargain with me for Terranova. He'd supply it with
arms, he said, in exchange for a star-cluster of his own in the Second
Galaxy. If I'd set up a private matter-transmitter for him...."

Kim laughed without mirth.

"He could colonize a couple of planets himself, and make a syndicate
to handle the rest. He saw himself changing his status from that of a
merchant princeling to that of a landed proprietor with half a dozen
planets as private estates, and probably a crown to wear on week-ends
and when he retired from business on Spicus Five. There are precedents,
I gather."

"But Kim!" protested Dona. "What did you do?"

"I did one thing that's been needed for a long time," said Kim grimly.
"It seems to me that I do everything backwards. I should have attended
to the matter of Ades first, but I had a chance and took it. I think I
put something in motion that will ultimately smash up the whole cursed
system that's made slaves of every human being but those on Ades and
Terranova--the disciplinary circuit. Back on Ades we've talked about
the need to free the people of this galaxy. It's always seemed too big
a job. But I think it's started now. It will be a profitable business,
and my friend who wanted to bargain for some planets in the Second
Galaxy will make a pretty penny of the beginning, and it will carry on
of itself."

The planet below and behind was now only a globe. It soon dwindled into
a tiny ball. Kim touched Dona on the shoulder.

"I'll take over," he said. "We've got work to do, Dona."

Dona stood up and stamped her foot.

"Kim! You're misunderstanding me on purpose! What about Ades? Did you
find out what happened to it?"

Kim began the process of sighting the _Starshine's_ nose upon a single,
distant, minute speck of light which seemingly could not be told from a
million other points of light, all of which were suns.

"I think I found out something," he told her. "I thought a merchant
planet would be the place to hear all the gossip of the galaxy. My
friend back yonder put his research organization to work finding out
what I wanted to know. What they dug up looks plausible. Right now I'm
going to get even for it. That's a necessity! After that, we'll see.
There were sixteen million people on Ades. We'll try to do something
about them. They aren't likely to be all dead--yet."

The sun of Ades swam in emptiness. For uncountable billions of years
it had floated serenely with its single planet circling it in the
companionability of bodies separated only by millions of miles, when
their next nearest neighbors are light-years away. A sun with one
planet is a great rarity.

A sun with no satellites--save for giant pulsing Cephids and
close-coupled double suns--is almost unknown. But for billions upon
billions of years that sun and Ades had kept each other company. Then
men had appeared. For a thousand years great space-ships had grimly
trundled back and forth to unload their cargoes of criminals upon the
chilly small world.

Ades was chosen as a prison planet from the beginning. Later
matter-transmitters made the journeys of space-craft useless. For
six, seven, eight thousand years there was no traffic but the one-way
traffic of its especially contrived transmitter, which would receive
criminals from all the galaxy but would return none or any news of them
to the worlds outside.

       *       *       *       *       *

During all that time a lonely guard-ship hung drearily about, watching
lest someone try to rescue a man doomed to hopeless exile, and return
him to happier scenes. And finally the guard-ship had gone away,
because the space-ways were no longer used by anybody, and there were
no ships in the void save those of the Patrol itself. Accordingly the
Patrol was disbanded.

For hundreds of years nothing happened at all. And then Kim Rendell
came in the _Starshine_, and shortly thereafter tiny ships began to
take off from Ades, and they fought valorously on distant star-systems,
and at last a squadron of war-craft came to subjugate Ades for the
beastly Empire of Sinab. Finally there was a battle in the bright
beams of the lonely sun itself. And after that, for a time, little
space-ships swam up from the planet and darted away, and darted back,
and darted away, and back.

But never before had there been any such situation as now. The sun,
which had kept company with Ades for so long, now shone in lonely
splendor, amid emptiness, devoid of its companion. And that emptiness
was bewildering to a small ship--sister to the _Starshine_--which
flicked suddenly into being nearby.

The ship had come back from a journey among the virgin stars of the
Second Galaxy with honorable scars upon its hull and a zestful young
crew who wished to boast of their journeying. They had come back to
Ades--so they thought--direct, not even stopping at Terranova. And
there was no Ades.

The little ship flashed here and there about the bereft sun in
bewilderment. It searched desperately for a planet some seven thousand
miles in diameter, which had apparently been misplaced. And as it
hunted, a second ship whisked into sight from faster-than-light drive.
The detectors of the two ships told them of each other's presence, and
they met and hung in space together. Then they searched in unison, but
in vain. At long last they set out in company for one of the planets of
the former Sinabian Empire, on which there must be some news of what
had happened to Ades.

On transmitter-drive they inevitably separated and one was much closer
to the chosen planet when they came out of stressed space. One drove
down into atmosphere while the other was still thousands of miles away.

The leading ship went down at landing-speed, toward a city. The other
ship watched by electron telescope and prepared to duplicate its
course. But the man of the second ship saw--and there could be no doubt
about it--that suddenly the landing ship vanished from its place as if
it had gone into intergalactic drive in atmosphere. There was a flash
of intolerable, unbearable light. And then there was an explosion of
such monstrous violence that half of the planet's capital city vanished
or was laid in ruins.

The crew of second ship were stunned. But the second ship went slowly
and cautiously down into atmosphere, and its communicators picked up
voices issuing stern warnings that troops must be welcomed by all
citizens, and that absolute obedience must be given to all men wearing
the uniform of His Magnificence the Despot of Lith. And then there was
babbling confusion and contradictory shoutings, and a hoarse voice
ordered all soldiers of His Magnificence to keep a ceaseless watch
upon the sky, because a ship had come down from overhead, and when the
fighting-beams struck it--to kill its crew--it appeared to have fired
some devastating projectile which had destroyed half a great city. All
ships seen in the sky were to be shot down instantly. His Magnificence,
the Despot of Lith, would avenge the outrage.

The lonely surviving ship went dazedly away from the planet which once
had been friendly to the men of Ades. It went back to Ades' sun, and
searched despairingly once again, and then fled to the Second Galaxy
and Terranova, to tell of what it had seen.

That was an event of some importance. At least all of one planet had
been rocked to its core from the detonation of a space-ship which
flashed into collision with it at uncountable multiples of the speed of
light, and was thereby raised to the temperature of a hot sun's very
heart. And besides, there was agitation and suspicion and threats and
diplomatic chaos among the planetary governments who had joined to loot
the dependencies of Ades, once Ades was eliminated from the scene.

       *       *       *       *       *

But a vastly, an enormously more significant event took place on a
planet very far away, at almost the same instant. The planet was Donet
Three, the only habitable planet of its system. It was a monstrous,
sprawling world, visibly flattened by the speed of its rotation and
actually habitable only by the fact that its rotation partly balanced
out its high gravity.

The _Starshine_ approached over a polar region and descended to
touch atmosphere. Then, while Dona looked curiously through the
electron telescope at monstrous ice-mountains below, Kim donned a
space-suit, went into the airlock, and dropped a small object out of
the door. He closed the door, returned to the control-room, and took
the _Starshine_ out to space again.

That was the most significant single action, in view of its ultimate
meaning, that had been performed in the First Galaxy in ten thousand
years. And yet, in a sense, it was purely a matter of form. It was not
necessary for Kim to do it. He had arranged for the same effect to be
produced, in time yet to come, upon every one of the three hundred
million inhabited planets of the First Galaxy. The thing was automatic;
implicit in the very nature of the tyrannical governments sustained by
the disciplinary circuit.

Kim had simply dropped a small metal case to the surface of Donet
Three. It was very strong--practically unbreakable. It contained an
extremely simple electronic circuit. It fell through the frigid air of
the flattened pole of Donet Three, and it struck the side of a sloping
ice-mountain, and bounced and slid down to a valley and buried itself
in snow, and only instants later, the small hole left by its fall was
filled in and covered up completely by snow riding on a hundred-mile
gale. It was undiscoverable. It was irretrievable. No device of man
could detect or recover it. Kim himself could not have told where it
fell.

Kim then sighted the _Starshine_ on another distant target, and found
the planet Arth, and dropped a small metal object into the depths of
the humid and festering jungles along its equator. Human beings could
live only in the polar regions of Arth. Then he visited a certain
planet in the solar system of Tabor and a small metal case went
twisting through deep water down to the seabed of its greatest ocean.

He dropped another on the shifting desert sands which cover one-third
of Sind where an Emperor and Council rule in the name of a non-existent
republic, and yet another on a planet of Megar, where an otherwise
unidentified Queen Amritha held imperial power, and others....

He dropped one small metal case, secured from a merchant-prince on
Spicus Five, on each of the planets whose troops had moved into the
planets left defenseless by the vanishment of Ades.

"I wanted to do that myself, because what we've got to do next is
dangerous and we may get killed," he told Dona drily. "But now we're
sure that men won't stay slaves forever and now we can try to do
something about Ades. I'm afraid our chances are pretty slim."



                              CHAPTER VII

                       _One Chance in a Million_


In spite of his pessimism, Kim settled down to the fine calculations
required for a voyage to a blue-white dwarf star not readily
distinguished from others. Most inhabited planets, of course, circled
sol-type suns. Light much different from that in which the race had
developed was apt to have produced vegetation inimical to humanity,
and useful vegetation did not thrive. And of course sol-type stars are
most readily spotted by space navigators. As he checked his course with
star-charts, Dona spoke softly.

"Thanks, Kim."

"For what?"

"For not wanting to put me in safety when you're going to do something
dangerous. I wouldn't let you, but thanks for not trying."

"_Mmmmh!_" said Kim. "You're too useful."

He lined up his course and pressed the transmitter-drive stud on the
control-panel. Space danced a momentary saraband,--and there was a
blue-white dwarf two hundred million miles away, showing barely a
planet-sized disk, but pouring out a pitiless white glare that hurt the
eyes.

"That's it," said Kim. "That's the sun Alis. There should be four
planets, but we're looking for Number One. It goes out beyond Two at
aphelion, so we have to check the orbit--if we can find it--before we
can be sure. No--we should be able to tell by the rotation. Very slow."

"And what are you going to do with it?" demanded Dona.

There were bright spots in emptiness which the electron telescope
instantly declared to be planets. Kim set up cameras for pictures.

"Alis One is the only really uninhabitable planet in the galaxy that's
inhabited," he observed painstakingly. "It belongs to Pharos Three. I
understand it's the personal property of the king. It has no atmosphere
in spite of an extremely high specific gravity and a reasonable mass.
But the plutonium mines have been worked for five thousand years."

"Plutonium mines with that half-life?" Dona said skeptically. "You must
be joking!"

"No," said Kim. "It's a very heavy planet, loaded with uranium and
stuff from bismuth on out. It has an extremely eccentric orbit. As
I told you, at aphelion it's beyond the orbit of Pharos Two. At
perihelion, when it's nearest to its sun, it just barely misses Roche's
Limit--the limit of nearness a satellite can come to its primary
without being torn apart by tidal strains. And at its nearest to its
sun, it's bombarded with everything a sun can fling out into space from
its millions of tons of disintegrating atoms. Alpha rays, beta rays,
gamma particles, neutrons, and everything else pour onto its surface
as if it were being bombarded by a cyclotron with a beam the size of a
planet's surface. You see what happens?"

Dona looked startled.

"But Kim, every particle of the whole surface would become terrifically
radioactive. It would kill a man to land on it!"

"According to my merchant-prince friend on Spicus Five, it did kill the
first men to set foot on it. But the point is that its heavy elements
have been bombarded, and most of its uranium has gone on over to
plutonium and americium and curium. In ancient days, when it went out
on the long sweep away from its sun, it cooled off enough for men to
land on it at its farthest-out point. With shielded space-suits they
were able to mine its substance for four to five months before heat and
rising induced radio-activity drove them off again. Then they'd wait
for it to cool off once more on its next trip around.

"They went to it with space-ships, and the last space-line in the First
Galaxy ran plutonium and americium and the other radio-actives to a
matter-transmitter from which they could be distributed all over the
galaxy. But it wasn't very efficient. They could only mine for four or
five months every four years. All their equipment was melted and ruined
when they were able to land again. A few hundred years ago, however,
they solved the problem."

       *       *       *       *       *

Dona stared out the vision-ports. There were two planets which might be
the one in question. But there were only three in sight.

"How did they solve it?" Dona asked.

"Somebody invented a shield," said Kim, as drily as before. "It
was a force-field. It has the property of a magnetic field on a
conductor with a current in it, except that it acts on mass as such. A
current-carrying conductor in a magnetic field tends to move at right
angles both to the current and the field. This force-field acts as if
mass were an electric charge.

"Anything having mass, entering the field, tries to move sidewise.
The faster it moves, the stronger the sidewise impulse. Neutrons,
gamma particles, met rays and even electrons have mass. So has light.
Everything moving that hits the shielding field moves sidewise to
its original course. Radiation from the sun isn't reflected. It's
deflected, at right angles.

"So, with the shield up men can stay on the planet when it is less
than three diameters from its sun. No heat reaches it. No neutrons. No
radiations at all. It doesn't heat up. And that's the answer. For three
months in every four-year revolution, they have to keep the shield up
all the time. For three months more they keep it up intermittently,
flashing it on for fractions of a second at a time, just enough to
temper the amount of heat they get.

"They live on great platforms of uranium glass, domed in. When they
go out mining they wear shielded space-suits and work in shielded
machines. The whole trick was worked out about five hundred years ago,
they say, and the last space-line went out of existence, because they
could use a matter-transmitter for all but six of our months of that
planet's year."

[Illustration: "They live on domed platforms of uranium glass and, when
they go out to mine ore, they work in shielded space-suits."]

"And did you find out how it's done?" asked Dona.

"Hardly," said Kim. "The planet belongs to the king of Pharos Three.
Even five hundred years ago the governments of all the planets were
quite tight corporations. Naturally Pharos wouldn't let the secret get
out. There are other planets so close to their primaries that they're
radioactive. If the secret were to be disclosed there'd be competition.
There'd be other plutonium mines in operation. So he's managed to keep
it to himself. But we've got to find out the trick."

There was silence. Kim began to check over the pictures the cameras had
taken and developed. He shook his head. Then he stared at a photograph
which showed the blue-white dwarf itself. His face looked suddenly very
drawn and tired.

"Kim," said Dona presently. "It's stupid of me, but I don't see how
you're going to learn the secret."

Kim put the picture on the enlarger, for examination in a greater size.

"They made the shield to keep things out," he said wearily. "Radiation,
charged particles, neutrons--everything. The planet simply can't be
reached, not even by matter-transmitters, when the shield is up. But by
the same token nothing can leave the planet either. It can't even be
spotted from space, because the light of the sun isn't reflected. It's
deflected to a right-angled course. You might pick it up if it formed
a right-angled triangle with you and the sun, or you might spot it in
transit across the sun's disk. But that's all."

"Yes."

"The shield was a special job," said Kim. "For a special purpose.
It was not a weapon. But there were all those planets that could be
grabbed if only Ades were knocked out. So why shouldn't King Pharos
sneak a force-field generator on to Ades? When the field went on, Ades
would be invisible and unreachable from outside. And the outside would
be unreachable from it. Space-ships couldn't get through the field.
Matter-transmitters couldn't operate through it. If a few technicians
were sneaked to Ades as supposed exiles and promised adequate reward,
don't you think they'd hide out somewhere and turn on that field, and
leave it on until the folk on Ades had starved or gone mad?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Horrified, Dona stared at him. She went pale.

"Oh--horrible! The sky would be black--always! Never a glimmer of
light. No stars. No moons. No sun. The plants would die and rot, and
the people would grow bleached and pale, and finally they'd starve."

"All but the little gang hidden away in a well-provisioned hideout,"
said Kim grimly. "I think that's what's happened to Ades, or is
happening. And this is the solar system where the little trick was
worked out. I'd hoped simply to raid the generator and find out how it
worked, which would be dangerous enough. Look!"

He pointed to the projected image of the sun. There was a tiny dot
against its surface. It was almost, it seemed, bathed in the tentacular
arms of flaming gases flung up from the sun's surface.

"There's the planet," said Kim. "At its closest to the sun! With the
shield up, so that nothing can reach its surface. Nothing! And that
includes space-ships such as this. And at that distance, Dona, the
hard radiation from the sun would go right through the _Starshine_ and
kill us in seconds before we could get within millions of miles of the
planet. If there's any place in the universe that's unapproachable,
there it is. It may be anything up to three months before the shield
goes down even for fractions of a second at a time. And my guess is
that the people on Ades won't last that long. They've had days in which
to grow hopeless already. Want to gamble?"

Dona looked at him. He regarded her steadily.

"Whatever you say, Kim."

"Sixteen million lives on Ades, besides other aspects of the
situation," said Kim. "The odds against us are probably about the same,
sixteen million to one. That makes it a fair bet. We'll try."

He got up and began to tinker with the radiation-operated relay which
turned off the transmitter-drive. Presently he looked up.

"I'm glad I married you, Dona," he said gruffly.

As the _Starshine_ moved closer in, the feeling in the control-room
grew tense. The little ship had advanced to within twenty millions of
miles of the blue-white sun, and even at that distance there was a
detectable X-ray intensity.

Kim had turned on a Geiger counter, and it was silent simply because
there was no measurable interval between its discharges. A neutron
detector showed an indication very close to the danger mark. But Kim
had the _Starshine's_ nose pointed to the intolerably glaring sun.

The electron telescope showed the sun's surface filling all its field,
and because the illumination had been turned so low, raging sun-storms
could be seen on the star's disk. Against it, the black silhouette of
the planet was clear. It was small. Kim estimated its diameter at no
more than six thousand miles. The _Starshine's_ gyros hummed softly and
the field of the telescope swayed until the planet was centered exactly.

There was a little sweat on Kim's forehead.

"I--don't mind taking the chance myself, Dona," he said, dry-throated.
"But I hate to think of you.... If we miss, we'll flash into the sun."

"And never know it," said Dona, smiling. "It'll be all over in the
skillionth of a second--if we miss. But we won't."

"We're aiming for the disk of the planet," he reminded her. "We have
to go in on transmitter-speed to cut the time of our exposure to hard
radiation. That speed will make the time of exposure effectively zero.
But we have to move at a huge multiple of the speed of light, and we
have to stop short of that planet. It may not be possible!"

"Do you want me to press the button, Kim?" Dona said softly.

He took a deep breath.

"I'll do it. Thanks, Dona."

He put his finger on the stud that would throw the ship into
transmitter-drive, aimed straight at the disk of planet against the
inferno of sun beyond. There was nothing more certain than that to
miss the planet would fling them instantly into the sun. And there was
nothing more absurd than to expect to come out of transmitter-drive
within any given number of millions of miles, much less within a few
thousands. But--

Kim pressed the stud.

Instantly there was blackness before them. A monstrous, absolute
blackness filled half the firmament. It was the force-field-shielded
planet, blotting out its sun and half the stars of the galaxy. Kim had
made a bull's-eye on a target relatively the size of a dinnerplate
at eleven hundred yards. More than that, he had stopped short of his
target, equivalent to stopping a bullet three inches short of that
plate.

He said in a queer voice:

"The--relay worked--even backward, Dona."



                             CHAPTER VIII

                            _Dark Barrier_


For a time Kim sat still and sweat poured out on his skin. Because
their chances had seemed slight indeed. To stop a space-ship at
transmitter-speed was impossible with manual means, anyhow. It could
cross a galaxy in the tenth of a millisecond. So Kim had devised a
radiation-operated relay which threw off the drive when the total
radiation reaching a sensitive plate in the bow had reached an
adjustable total.

If in an ordinary flight the _Starshine_ headed into a sun--unlikely as
such an occurrence was--the increased light striking the relay-plate
would throw off the drive before harm came. But this time they had
needed to approach fatally close to a star. So Kim had reversed the
operation of the relay. It would throw off the drive when the amount of
light reaching it dropped below a certain minimum. That could happen
only if the ship came up behind the planet, so the sun was blacked out
by the world's shadowed night-side.

It had happened. The glare was cut off. The transmitter-drive followed.
The _Starshine_ floated within a bare few million miles--perhaps less
than one million--of a blue-white dwarf star, and the two humans in the
ship were alive because they had between them and the sun's atomic
furnaces, a planet some six thousand miles in diameter.

"We don't know how our velocity matches this thing," said Kim after an
instant. "We could be drifting toward the edge of the shadow. You watch
the stars all around. Make sure I head directly for that blackness.
When we touch, I'll see what I can find out."

He reversed the ship's direction. He let the _Starshine_ float down
backward. The mass of unsubstantial darkness seemed to swell. It
engulfed more and more of the cosmos....

A long, long time later, there was a strange sensation in the feel of
things. Dona gave a little cry.

"Kim! I feel queer! So queer!"

Kim moved heavily. His body resisted any attempt at motion, and yet
he felt a horrible tension within him, as if every molecule were
attempting to fly apart from every other molecule. The controls of the
ship moved sluggishly. Each part of each device seemed to have a vast
inertia. But the controls did yield. The drive did come on. A little
later the sensation ended. But both Kim and Dona felt utterly exhausted.

"It--was getting dark, too," said Dona. She trembled.

"When we tried to move," said Kim, "our arms had a tendency to move at
right angles to the way we wanted them to, at all the possible right
angles at once. That was the edge of the shield, Dona. Now we'll see
what we've got."

He uncovered the recording cabinet. There had been no need to set up
instruments especially for the analysis of the field. They had been a
part of the _Starshine's_ original design for exploration. Now Kim read
the records.

"Cosmic-ray intensity went down," he reported, studying the tapes.
"The dielectric constant of space changed. It just soared up. The
relationship of mass to inertia. That particular gadget never recorded
anything significant before, Dona. In theory it should have detected
space-warps. Actually, it never amounted to anything but a quantitative
measure of gravitation on a planet one landed on. But it went wild in
that field! And here! Look!"

He exultantly held out a paper recording.

"Glance at that, Dona! See? A magnetometer to record the strength of
the magnetic field on a new planet. It recorded the ship's own field in
the absence of any other. And the ship's field dropped to zero! Do you
see? Do you?"

"I'm afraid not," admitted Dona. But she smiled at the expression on
Kim's face.

"It's the answer!" said Kim zestfully. "Still I don't know how that
blasted field is made, but I know now how it works. Neutrons have no
magnetic field, but this thing turns them aside. Alpha and beta and
gamma radiation do have magnetic fields, but this thing turns them
aside, too. And the point is that it neutralizes their magnetic fields,
because otherwise it couldn't start to turn them aside. So if we make
a magnetic field too strong for the field to counter, it won't be able
to turn aside anything in that magnetic area. The maximum force-field
strength needed for the planet is simply equal to the top magnetic
field the sun may project so far. If we can bury the _Starshine_ in
magnetic flux that the force-field can't handle--"

       *       *       *       *       *

He grinned. He hugged her.

"And there's a loop around the _Starshine's_ hull for space-radio use,"
he cried. "I'll run a really big current through that loop and we'll
try again. We should be able to put quite a lot of juice through a
six-turn loop and get a flux-density that will curl your hair!"

He set to work, beaming. It took him less than half an hour to set up a
series-wound generator in the airlock, couple in a thermo-cell to the
loop, so it would cool the generator as the current flowed and thereby
reduce its internal resistance.

"Now!" he said. "We'll try once more. The more juice that goes through
the outfit, the colder the generator will get and the less its
resistance will be, and the more current it will make and the stronger
the magnetic field will be."

He flipped a switch. There was a tiny humming noise. A meter-needle
swayed over, and stayed.

The _Starshine_ ventured into the black globe below.

Nothing happened. Nothing happened at all.

"The stars are blotted out, Kim," Dona at last said uneasily.

"But you feel all right, don't you?" He grinned like an ape in his
delight.

"Why, yes."

"I feel unusually good," said Kim happily.

The vision-screens were utterly blank. The ports opened upon absolute
blackness--blackness so dead and absorbent that it seemed more than
merely lack of light. It seemed like something horrible pressing
against the ports and trying to thrust itself in.

And, suddenly, a screen glowed faintly, and then another....

Then there was a greenish glow in the ports, and Dona looked out and
down.

Above was that blackness, complete and absolute. But below, seen with
utter clarity, because of the absence of atmosphere, lay a world.
Nothing grew upon it. Nothing moved. It was raw, naked rock with
an unholy luminescence. Here and there the glow was brighter where
mineral deposits contained more highly active material. The surface was
tortured and twisted, in swirled strained writhings of formerly melted
rock.

They looked. They saw no sign of human life nor any sign that humans
had ever been there. But after all, even five thousand years of mining
on a globe six thousand miles through would not involve the disturbance
of more than a fraction of its surface.

"We did it," said Kim. "The shield can be broken through by anything
with a strong enough magnetic field. We won't disturb the local
inhabitants. They undoubtedly have orders to kill anybody who
incredibly manages to intrude. We can't afford to take a chance. We've
got to get back to Ades!"

He pointed the _Starshine_ straight up. He drove her, slowly, at the
ceiling of impenetrable black. He worked upon the transmitter-drive
relay. He adjusted it to throw the _Starshine_ into transmitter-speed
the instant normal starlight appeared ahead.

The ship swam slowly upward. Suddenly there was a momentary impression
of reeling, dancing stars. Kim swung the bow about.

"Now for Ades!" he said gleefully. "Did you know, Dona, that once upon
a time the word Ades meant hell?"

The stars reeled again....

They found Ades. Knowing how, now, it was not too difficult. There were
two positions from which it could be detected. One was a position in
which it was on a line between the _Starshine_ and the sun. The other
was a position in which the invisible planet, the space-ship, and the
sun formed the three points of a right-angled triangle with Ades in the
ninety-degree corner.

Kim sent the little ship in a great circle beyond the planet's normal
orbit, watching for it to appear where such an imaginary triangle
would be formed. The deflected light of the sun would spread out in
a circular flat thin plane, and somewhere about the circuit the
_Starshine_ had to run through it. It would be a momentary sight only,
and it would not be bright; it would be utterly unlike the steady
radiance of a normal planet. Such flashes, if seen before, would have
been dismissed as illusions or as reflections from within the ship.
Even so, it was a long, long time before Dona called out quickly.

"There!" she said, and pointed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim swung the _Starshine_ back. He saw the dim, diffused spectre of
sun's reflection. They drove for it, and presently a minute dark space
appeared. It grew against the background of a radiant galaxy, and
presently was a huge blackness, and the _Starshine's_ space-radio loop
was once more filled with a highly improbable electrical amperage by
the supercooled generator in the airlock.

The ship ventured cautiously into the black.

And later there were lonely, unspeakably desolate little lights of the
lost world down below.

Kim drove for them with a reckless exultation. He landed in the very
center of a despairing small settlement which had believed itself dead
and damned--or at any rate doomed. He shouted out his coming, and Dona
cried out the news that the end of darkness was near, and men came
surging toward her to listen. But it was Dona who explained, her eyes
shining in the light of the torches men held up toward her.

Kim had gone back into the ship and was using the communicators to
rouse out the mayors of every municipality, and to say he had just
reached the planet from Terranova--there was no time to tell of
adventures in between--and he needed atmosphere-fliers to gather around
him at once, with armed men in them, for urgent business connected with
the restoration of a normal state of affairs.

They came swiftly, flittering down out of the blackness overhead, to
land in the lights of huge bonfires built by Kim's orders. And Kim,
on the communicators, asked for other bonfires everywhere, to help in
navigation, and then he went out to be greeted by the bellowing Mayor
of Steadheim.

"What's this?" he roared. "No sunlight! No stars! No
matter-transmitter! No ships! Our ships took off and never came back!
What the devil happened to the universe?"

Kim grinned at him.

"The universe is all right. It's Ades. Somewhere on the planet there's
a generator throwing out a force-field. It will have plenty of power,
that generator. Maybe I can pick it up with the instruments of the
_Starshine_. But we'll be sure to find it with magnetic compasses.
What we want is for everyone to flick their compasses and note the
time of swing. We want to find the place where the swings get slower
and slower. When we find a place where the compasses point steadily,
without a flicker--not even up and down--we'll be at the generator. And
everybody put on navigation-lights or there'll be crashes!"

He lifted the _Starshine_ and by communicator kept track of the
search. Toward the polar regions was the logical hiding-place for the
generator, because there the chilly climate of Ades became frigid and
there were no inhabitants. But it was a long search. Hours went by
before a signal came from a quarter-way around the globe.

Then the _Starshine_ drove through darkness--but cautiously--with
atmosphere-fliers all about. And there was an area where the planet's
magnetic field grew weaker and weaker, and then a space in which there
was no magnetic field. But in the darkness they could find no sign of a
depot!



                              CHAPTER IX

                           _Gadget of Hope_


Grimly Kim set the _Starshine_ on the ground, in the very center of the
dark area, and started the generator in the airlock. When it worked at
its utmost, and nothing happened, Kim threw in the leads of the ship's
full engine-power. There was a surging of all the terrific energy the
ship's engines could give. Then the radio-loop went white-hot and
melted, with a sputtering arc as the circuit broke.

Abruptly the stars appeared overhead, and simultaneously came the
leaping flame of a rumbling explosion. Then followed the flare of fuel
burning savagely in the night. The _Starshine's_ full power had burned
out the force-field generator, an instant before the loop melted to
uselessness.

[Illustration: Abruptly the stars appeared overhead and Kim and Dona
heard the rumble of an explosion.]

Kim was with the men who ran toward the scene of the explosion, and he
would have tried to stop the killing of the other men who ran out of
underground burrows, but the victims would not have it. They expected
to be killed, and they fought wildly. All died.

Later Kim inspected the shattered apparatus which now lay in pieces,
but he thought it could be reconstructed and perhaps in time understood.

"Night's nearly over," he announced to those who prowled through the
wreckage. "It shouldn't be much more than an hour until dawn. If I
hadn't seen sunlight for a week or more, I think, I'd go for a look at
the sunrise."

In seconds the first atmosphere-flier took off. In minutes the last of
them were gone. They flew like great black birds beneath the starlight,
headed for the east to greet a sun they had not expected to see again.

But the Mayor of Steadheim stayed behind.

"Hah!" he said, growling. "It's over my head. I don't know what
happened and I never expect to understand. How are my sons in the new
galaxy?"

"Fine when last we heard," said Dona, smiling. "Come into the ship."

He tramped into the living space of the _Starshine_. He eased himself
into a seat.

"Now tell me what's gone on, and what's happened, and why!" he
commanded dictatorially.

Kim told him, as well as he could. The Mayor of Steadheim fumed.

"Took over the twenty-one planets, eh?" he sputtered. "We'll attend to
that. We'll take a few ships, go over there, and punish 'em."

"I suspect they've pulled out," said Kim. "If they haven't, they will.
And soon! The Gracious Majesties and Magnificents, and the other
planetary rulers who essayed some easy conquests, have other need for
their soldiers now. Plenty of need!"

"Eh, what?" cried the mayor. "What's the matter? Those rulers have got
to have a lesson! We didn't try to free the whole galaxy because it was
too big a job. But it looks like we'll have to try!"

"I doubt the need," said Kim, amused. "After all, it's the disciplinary
circuit which has enslaved the human race. When the psychogram of
every citizen is on file, and a disciplinarian has only to put his
card in the machinery and press a button to have that man searched out
by disciplinary-circuit waves and tortured, wherever he may be--when
that's possible--any government is absolute. Men can't revolt when the
whole population or any part of it can be tortured at the ruler's whim."

Dona's expression changed.

"Kim!" she said accusingly. "Those things you got on Spicus Five and
dropped on the planets the soldiers came from--what were they?"

"I'll tell you," said Kim. "The disciplinary circuit is all right to
keep criminals in hand--not rebels like us, but thieves and such--and
it does keep down the number of officials who have to be supported by
the state. Police and guards aren't really needed on a free planet
with the disciplinary circuit in action. It's a useful machine for the
protection of law and order. The trouble is that, like all machines,
it's use has been abused. Now it serves tyranny. So I made a device to
defend freedom."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Mayor of Steadheim cocked a suspicious eye upon him.

"I procured a little gadget," said Kim. "I dropped the gadget in
various places where it wasn't likely to be found. If one man is under
disciplinary-circuit punishment, or two or three or four--that's not
unreasonable on a great planet--nothing happens. But if twenty-five or
fifty or a hundred are punished at once, the disciplinary circuit is
blown out as I just blew out that force-field generator."

The Mayor of Steadheim considered this information.

"_Ha-hmmm!_" he said profoundly.

"Criminals can be kept down, but a revolt can't be suppressed," Kim
went on. "The soldiers who are occupying the twenty-one planets will
be called back to put down revolts, as soon as the people discover the
disciplinary circuits on their planets are blowing out, and that they
blow out again as fast as they're re-made and used."

"_Hm!_" said the Mayor of Steadheim. "Not bad! And the rebels will have
some very tasty ideas of what to do to the folk who've tyrannized over
them. No troops can stop a revolt nowadays. Not for long!"

"No, not for long," said Kim. "No government will be able to rule
with a dissatisfied population. Not if it has a little gadget hidden
somewhere that will blow out the disciplinary circuit, if it's used to
excess."

"Good enough, good enough," grumbled the mayor. "When rulers are kept
busy satisfying their people, they won't have time to bother political
offenders like us on Ades, or start wars." He looked up. "Space!" he
groaned. "Three hundred million planets! How long before we can have
them all fitted out for freedom?"

Kim chuckled.

"I explained the principle of the gadget to a munitions-manufacturer
on Spicus Five," he said drily. "I offered it to him in exchange for
a dozen samples made up to my order. Does it occur to you that every
tyrant and every despot and every king in the Galaxy will be very, very
happy to buy those little gadgets at a fine fat price, to sow in the
dominions of his neighbors? Then he needn't fear them! Don't you see?
And my munitions-maker friend will be impartially ready to sell them to
his neighbors. They'll actually increase the market for military goods
for palace guards and the like."

The Mayor of Steadheim puffed in his breath until it looked as if he
would explode. Then he bellowed with laughter.

"Make the tyrants dethrone each other," he roared delightedly. "They'll
weaken each other until they find they've their own people to deal
with. There'll be a fine scramble! I give it five years, no more,
before there's not a king in the galaxy who dares order an execution
without a jury-trial first!"

"A consummation devoutly to be wished," said Kim, smiling. "I rather
like the idea myself."

The mayor heaved himself up.

"Hah!" he said, still chuckling. "I'll go back to my wife and tell her
to come outdoors and look at the stars. What will you two do next?"

"Sleep, I suspect," said Kim. It was all over. The realization made him
aware of how tired he was. "We'll probably put in twenty-four hours of
just plain slumber. Then we'll see if anything more needs to be done,
and then I guess Dona and I will head back to Terranova. The Organizer
there is worried about a shortage of textiles."

"To the devil with him," grunted the Mayor of Steadheim. "We've had
a shortage of sunlight! You're a good man, Kim Rendell. I'll tell my
grandchildren about you, when I have them."

He waved grandly and went out. A little later his flier took off,
occulting stars as it rose.

Kim closed the airlock door. He yawned again.

"Kim," said Dona. "We had to break that shield, but it was dangerous."

"Yes," said Kim. He yawned again. "So it was. I'll be glad to get back
to our house on Terranova."

"So will I," said Dona. Her face had become determined. "We shouldn't
even think of leaving it again, Kim! We should--anchor ourselves to it,
so nobody would think of asking us to leave."

"A good idea," said Kim. "If it could be done."

Dona looked critically at her fingers, but she flushed suddenly.

"It could," she said softly. "The best way would be--children."



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The boomerang circuit" ***


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