Title: The manless worlds
Author: Leinster, Murray
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The manless worlds" ***


                          The Manless Worlds

                          By MURRAY LEINSTER

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



                               CHAPTER I

                        _Empires in the Making_


The speaker inside the house spoke softly.

"Guests for Kim Rendell, asking permission to land."

Kim stared up at the unfamiliar stars of the Second Galaxy, and picked
out a tiny winking light with his eyes. He moved to a speaker-disk.

"Land and be welcomed." To Dona he added, "It's a flier. I've been
expecting something like this. We need fuel for the _Starshine_
if we're not to be stuck on this one planet forever. My guess is that
somebody has come through the matter-transmitter from Ades to argue
about it."

He moved to the edge of the terrace to watch the landing. Dona came and
stood beside him, her hand twisting into his. The night was very dark,
and the two small moons of Terranova cast no more than enough light
to outline nearby objects. The house behind Kim and Dona was low and
sprawling and, on its polished outer surface, unnamed Second Galaxy
constellations glinted faintly.

The flier came down, black and seemingly ungainly, with spinning rotors
that guided and controlled its descent, rather than sustaining it
against the planet's gravity. The extraordinarily flexible vegetation
of Terranova bent away from the hovering object. It landed and the
rotors ceased to spin. Figures got out.

"I'm here," said Kim Rendell into the darkness.

Two men came across the matted lawn to the terrace. One was the
colony organizer for Terranova and the other was the definitely
rough-and-ready mayor of Steadheim, a small settlement on Ades back in
the First Galaxy.

"I am honored," said Kim in the stock phrase of greeting.

The two figures came heavily up on the terrace. Dona went indoors
and came back with refreshments, according to the custom of Ades and
Terranova. The visitors accepted the glasses, in which ice tinkled
musically.

"You seem depressed," said Kim politely, another stock phrase. It was a
way of getting immediately to business.

"There's trouble," growled the Mayor of Steadheim. "Bad trouble. It
couldn't be worse. It looks like Ades is going to be wiped out. For
lack of space-ships and fuel. Those so-and-so's on Sinab Two!"

"Lack of space-ships and fuel?" protested Kim. "But you're making them!"

"We thought we were," growled the Mayor. "We've stopped. We're stuck.
We're finished--and the ships aren't. The same with the fuel. There's
not a drop for you and things look bad! But we can't make ships, and we
couldn't make fuel for them if we could! That's why we've come to you.
_We've got to have those ships!_"

He pounded with his fist for emphasis. Kim blinked at him. After twenty
thousand years of civilization it was odd to hear a man say that it
was impossible to make anything that happened to be wanted. Most of the
peoples of the First Galaxy, to be sure, were hardly progressive.

Every habitable planet had been explored and colonized, and the
human race swarmed and bred from rim to rim. But on every planet but
one--Ades--men were enslaved by the Disciplinary Circuit, which, as an
agent of government subjected every citizen on every planet to torture
or death at the whim of his rulers.[1]

[Footnote 1: _"The Disciplinary Circuit," by Murray Leinster_,
THRILLING WONDER STORIES, _February, 1946_]

So everywhere but on Ades in the First Galaxy progress had come to an
end and only those people who, for intelligence or crime or rebellion
or the lack of a sheeplike spirit, had been exiled to Ades looked
forward to any further triumphs for mankind.

Kim Rendell--himself a fugitive from the planet Alphin Three--had
allied himself with them and the colony on Terranova was a victory of
his contriving.

It was the first foothold of the human race across the monstrous void
surrounding the First Galaxy.

It was the promise of all the island universes in all the cosmos,
opened for the use of men. It had seemed that an unending march of
triumph lay ahead. So it was incredible that the men of Ades should be
unable to make space-ships or the fuel needed for ships to subjugate
the new galaxy.

"But why not?" demanded Kim. "What's preventing it? You've got the
record-reels from the _Starshine_! They tell you everything,
from the first steps in making a ship to the last least item of its
outfitting! You know how to make fuel!"

       *       *       *       *       *

All that was true. On most planets, to be sure, the making of
space-ships was not even dreamed of--abandoned even in the amusement
reels as too antique to be amusing. Space travel by ship had ceased
centuries since. Matter-transmitters on every planet conveyed persons
and things from one solar system to another in infinitely less time and
with infinitely greater convenience.

The _Starshine_, in fact, had been the last ship known to make an
interstellar voyage, and she was a museum-exhibit on Alphin Three when
Kim Rendell and Dona drove her through the museum roof and set out to
find a place where they could be free.

They'd had a bad time of it. They'd have died helplessly because
of the little ship's inherent limitations, had not Kim applied his
matter-transmitter-technician's knowledge and modified its drive past
recognition.

He'd made the little ship into a matter-transmitter which received
itself, traveling light-millennia in microseconds, and at long last
he and Dona had found a haven on Ades--the prison world to which all
malcontents were exiled and from which no exile had ever escaped.

The modified _Starshine_ had ended that state of things. She
carried a matter-transmitter to the Second Galaxy, and the folk of Ades
streamed through to a new island universe and with infinite opportunity
before them.

But the _Starshine_ had still been the only ship in space as far
as anyone knew. So others had been begun, back on Ades. They would open
planets by hundreds of millions for occupation. But now--

"Space!" exploded the Mayor of Steadheim. "Of course we know how! We
know all about it! There are fifty useless hulks in a neat row outside
my city--every one unfinished. We're short of metal on Ades and we had
to melt down tools to make them, but we did--as far as we could go. Now
we're stuck and we're apt to be wiped out because of it!"

The Mayor of Steadheim wore a bearskin cap and his costume was
appropriate to that part of Ades in which his municipality lay. He was
dressed for a subarctic climate, not for the balmy warmth of Terranova,
where Kim Rendell had made his homestead. He sweated as he gulped at
his drink.

"Tell me the trouble," said Kim. "Maybe--"

"Hafnium!" barked the mayor. "There's no hafnium on Ades! The ships are
done, all but the fuel-catalyzers. The fuel is ready--all but the first
catalyzation that prepares it to be put in a ship's tanks. We have to
have hafnium to make catalyzers for the ships. We have to have hafnium
to make the fuel!

"We haven't got it! There's not an atom of it on the planet! We're so
short of heavy elements, anyhow, that we make hammers out of magnesium
alloy and put stones in 'em to give them weight so they'll strike a
real blow! We haven't got an atom of hafnium and we can't make ships or
run them either without it!"

Kim blinked at the Colony Organizer for Terranova.

"Here--"

"No hafnium here either," said the Colony Organizer gloomily. "We
analyzed a huge sample of ocean salts. If there were any on the planet
there'd be a trace in the ocean. Naturally! So what do we do?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim spoke unhappily.

"I wouldn't know. I'm a matter-transmitter technician. I can do things
with power and, of course, I understand the _Starshine's_ engines.
But there's no record of the early, primitive types that went before
them--types that might work on other fuel. Maybe in some library on one
of the older planets--But at that, the fuel the _Starshine_ used
was so perfect that it would be recorded thousands of years back."

"Take a year to find it," said the Mayor of Steadheim bitterly. "If
we could search! And it might be no good then! We haven't got a year.
Probably we haven't a month!"

"We're beaten," mourned the Colony Organizer. "All we can do is get
as many through the Transmitter from Ades as possible and go on half
rations. But we'll starve."

"We're _not_ beaten!" roared the Mayor of Steadheim. "We'll get
hafnium and have a fighting fleet and fuel to power it! There's plenty
of the blasted stuff somewhere in the galaxy! Kim Rendell, if I find
out where it is, will you go get it?"

"The _Starshine_," said Kim grimly, "barely made it to port here.
There's less than six hours' fuel left."

"And who'd sell us hafnium?" demanded the Colony Organizer bitterly.
"We're the men of Ades--the rebels, the outlaws! We were sent to Ades
to keep us from contaminating the sheep who live under governments with
disciplinary circuits and think they're men! We'd be killed on sight
for breaking our exile on any planet in the First Galaxy! Who'd sell us
hafnium?"

"Who spoke of buying?" roared the mayor. "I was sent to Ades for
murder! I'm not above killing again for the things I believe in! I've a
wife on Ades, where there are ten men for every woman. I've four tall
sons! D'you think I won't kill for them?"

"You speak of piracy," said the Colony Organizer, distastefully.

"Piracy! Murder! What's the difference? When my sons are in danger--"

"What's this danger?" Kim said sharply. "It's bad enough to be
grounded, as we seem to be. But you said just now--"

"Sinab Two!" snorted the Mayor of Steadheim. "That's the danger! We
know! When a man becomes a criminal anywhere he's sent to us. In the
First Galaxy a man with brains usually becomes a criminal. A free man
always does! So we've known for a long while there were empires in the
making. You heard that, Kim Rendell!"

"Yes, I've heard that," agreed Kim.

So he had, but only vaguely. His own home planet, Alphin Three, was
ostensibly a technarchy, ruled by men chosen for their aptitude for
public affairs by psychological tests and given power after long
training.

Actually it was a tyranny, ruled by members of the Prime Council. Other
planets were despotisms or oligarchies and many were kingdoms, these
days. Every possible form of government was represented in the three
hundred million inhabited planets of the First Galaxy.

But every planet was independent and in all--by virtue of the
disciplinary circuit--the government was absolute and hence tyrannical.
Empires, however, were something new. On Ades, Kim had barely heard
that three were in process of formation.

"One's the Empire of Greater Sinab," snorted the mayor, "and we've just
heard how it grows!"

"Surprise attacks, no doubt," said Kim, "through matter-transmitters."

"We'd not worry if that were all!" snapped the mayor. "It's vastly
worse! You know the old fighting-beams?"

"I know them!" said Kim grimly.



                              CHAPTER II

                          _The Deadly Beams_


He did. They were the most terrible weapons ever created by men. They
had ended war by making all battles mass suicide for both sides.
They were beams of the same neuronic frequencies utilized in the
disciplinary circuits which kept men enslaved.

But where the disciplinary circuits were used in place of police and
prisons and merely tortured the individual citizen to whom they were
tuned--wherever he might be upon a planet--the fighting-beams killed
indiscriminately. They induced monstrous, murderous currents in any
living tissue containing the amino-chains normally a part of human
flesh.

They were death-rays. They killed men and women and children alike in
instants of shrieking agony. But no planet could be attacked from space
if it was defended by such beams. It was two thousand years since the
last attempt at attack from space had been made.

That fleet had been detected far out and swept with fighting-beams and
every living thing in the attacking ships died instantly. So planets
were independent of each other. But when space-ships ceased to be used
the fighting-beams were needless and ultimately were scrapped or put
into museums.

"Somebody," the mayor said wrathfully, "has changed those beams!
They're not tuned to animal tissue in general any more! They're tuned
to male tissue. To blood containing male hormones, perhaps! And Sinab
Two is building an empire with 'em! We found out only two weeks ago!

"There's a planet near Ades--Thom Four. Four years ago its
matter-transmitter ceased to operate. The Galaxy's going to pot anyhow.
Nothing new about that! But we just learned the real reason. The real
reason was that four years ago fighting-beams swept Thom Four from pole
to pole. The beams killed men and left women unharmed.

"Every man on Thom Four died as the planet rotated. The beams came from
space. Every man and every boy and every male baby died! There were
only girls and women left." He added curtly, "There were half a billion
people on Thom Four!"

Kim stiffened. Dona, beside him, drew closer.

"Every man killed!" said Kim. "What--"

The Mayor Steadheim swore angrily.

"Half the population! On Ades we're nine-tenths men! Women don't run to
revolt or crime. There'd not be much left on Ades if those beams swept
us! But I'm talking about Thom Four. The men died. All of them. So many
that the women couldn't bury them all.

"One instant, the planet was going about its business as usual. The
next, every man was dead, his heart burst and blood running from his
nostrils. Lying in the streets, toppled in the baths and eating-halls,
crumpled beside the machines.

"Boys in the schools dropped at their desks. Babes in arms, with their
mothers shrieking at the sight! Only women left. A world of women!
Cities and continents filled with dead men and women going mad with
grief!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim felt Dona's hand fumbling for his. She held it fast.

"Go on!" said Kim.

"When they thought to go to the matter-transmitter and ask for help
from other planets the matter-transmitter was smashed. They didn't
go at first. They couldn't believe it. They called from city to city
before they realized theirs was a manless world. Then, when they'd have
told the men of another planet what had happened--they couldn't.

"For four years there was not one man or boy on the planet Thom Four.
Only women. The old ones grew older. The girls grew up. Some couldn't
remember ever seeing a man. No communication with other worlds. Then,
one day, there was a new matter-transmitter in the place of the smashed
one. Men came out of it. The women crowded about them.

[Illustration: The men from Sinab Two were very friendly--and women
crowded about them.]

"The men were very friendly. They were from Sinab Two. Their emperor
had sent them to colonize. There were a thousand women to every
man--ten thousand! Some of the women realized what had been done.
They'd have killed the newcomers. But some women fell in love with
them, of course!

"In a matter of days every man had women ready to fight all other women
who would harm him. Their own men were dead four years. What else could
they do? More and more men colonists came. Presently things settled
down. The men were happy enough. They'd no need to work with all the
women about.

"They established polygamy, naturally! Presently it was understood that
Thom Four was part of the empire of Greater Sinab. So it was. What
else? In a generation there'll be a new population, all its citizens
descended from loyal subjects of the emperor.

"And why shouldn't they be loyal? A million colonists inherited the
possessions and the women of a planet! It was developed. Everything
was built. Every man was rich and with a harem. A darned clever way to
build an empire! Who'd want to revolt--and who could?"

He stopped. The two moons of Terranova floated tranquilly, higher in
the sky. The soft sweet unfamiliar smells of a Terranovan night came to
the small group on the terrace of Kim Rendell's house.

"That's what's ahead of Ades!" raged the Mayor of Steadheim. "And
I've four sons! A woman of Thom Four smashed the lock on the new
matter-transmitter, which set it to send only to Sinab, and traveled to
Khiv Five to warn them. But they laughed at her and when she begged to
be sent to a distant planet they grinned--and sent her to Ades!"

He paused.

"Not long after, a criminal from Khiv Five--he'd struck a minor noble
for spitting on him--came to Ades. There'd been inquiry for that woman.
Spies, doubtless, from Thom Four, trying to trace her. It was clear
enough she'd told the truth."

"So," said Kim slowly, "you think Ades will be next."

"I know it!" said the Mayor of Steadheim. "We've checked the planets
that have cut communication in our star-cluster. Twenty once inhabited
planets have ceased to communicate in the past few years--the twenty
planets nearest to Sinab. We figured Khiv Five would be next. Then we'd
be in line for it.

"Khiv Five cut communications four days ago! Every man on Khiv Five is
dead! We've had exiles from a dozen nearby planets. All know Khiv Five
is cut off. It's inhabitated only by women, going mad with grief!

"In a few years, when they grieve no longer, but despair instead, new
colonists from Sinab will come out of a new matter-transmitter to let
the women fall in love with them--and to breed new subjects for the
Empire of Sinab! So we've got to have space-ships, man! We've got to!"

Kim was silent. His face was hard and grim.

"Twenty planets those so-and-so's have taken over!" roared the mayor.
"They've murdered not less than four billion men already, and the
weasels have a hundred wives apiece and the riches of generations for
reward! D'you think I'll let that happen to Ades, with my four sons
there? _Space_, no! I want ships to fight with!"

The two small moons rose higher. Strange sweet smells floated in the
air. Dona pressed close to Kim. On Terranova, across the gulf between
island universes, Kim was surely safe, but any woman can feel fear for
her man on any excuse.

"Its a hard problem," said Kim evenly. "We barely made Terranova with
the _Starshine_, and there's just about enough fuel left to take
off with. Of course, on transmitter-drive she could go anywhere, but I
doubt that we've fuel enough to land her.

"Here on Terranova we need supplies from Ades to live. If
fighting-beams play on Ades we'll starve. And, even if we had fuel the
_Starshine_ isn't armed and they'll have a fleet prepared to fight
anything."

Dona murmured in his ear.

"We're beaten, then," said the Colony Organizer bitterly. "Ades will
be wiped out, we'll starve and the Sinabians will go through the First
Galaxy, killing off the men on planet after planet and then moving in
to take over."

Dona murmured again in Kim's ear. The Mayor of Steadheim growled
profanely, furiously. Dona laughed softly. The two visitors stared at
her suspiciously.

"What do we do, Kim Rendell?"

"I suppose," said Kim wryly, "we'll have to fight. We've no fuel and no
weapons--but that ought to surprise them."

"Eh?"

"They'll be prepared," Kim explained, "to defend themselves against
any conceivable resistance by any conceivable weapon. And a warship a
fairly intelligent planet could build should be able to wipe out ten
thousand _Starshines_. So when we attack them without any weapons
at all they won't quite know what to do."

The two visitors simply stared at him.

"You've got to get hafnium! You've got to get fuel! You can't face a
battleship!"

"But," said Kim, "battleships have fuel on board and they'll have
hafnium too. It'll be risky--but convenient...."



                              CHAPTER III

                              _Contact!_


Actually there was less than a quart of fuel in the _Starshine's_
tanks. Kim knew it ruefully well. It would run the little ship at
interplanetary speed for perhaps six hours. On normal overdrive--two
hundred light-speeds--it would send her just about one-seventh of a
light-year, and star-systems averaged eight light-years apart in both
the First and Second Galaxies.

Of course, on transmitter-drive--the practically infinite speed
the _Starshine_ alone in history had attained--the ship might
circumnavigate the cosmos on a quart of fuel. But merely rising from
Terranova would consume one-third of it, and landing on any other
planet would take another third.

Actually the little ship was in the position of being able to go almost
anywhere, but of having no hope at all of being able to come back.

It rose from Terranova though, just three days after the emergency was
made clear. There were a few small gadgets on board--hastily made in
the intervening seventy-two hours--but nothing deadly--nothing that
could really be termed a weapon.

The _Starshine_ climbed beyond the atmosphere of the Second Galaxy
planet. It went on overdrive--at two hundred light-speeds--to a safe
distance from Terranova's planetary system. Then it stopped in normal
space, not stressed to allow for extra speed.

Kim jockeyed it with infinite care until it was aimed straight at the
tiny wisp of nebulous light which was the First Galaxy, unthinkable
thousands of light-years away. At long last he was satisfied. He
pressed the transmitter-field button--and all space seemed to reel
about the ship.

At the moment the transmitter-field went on, the _Starshine_ had a
velocity of twenty miles per second and a mass of perhaps two hundred
tons. The kinetic energy it possessed was fixed by those two facts.

But, when the transmitter-field enveloped it, its mass dropped--divided
by a factor approaching infinity. And its speed necessarily increased
in exact proportion because its kinetic energy was undiminished. It was
enclosed in a stressed space in which an infinite speed was possible.
It approached that infinite speed on its original course.

Instantly, it seemed, alarm-gongs rang and the cosmos reeled again.
Suddenly there was a glaring light pouring in the forward vision-ports.
There were uncountable millions of stars all about and, almost straight
ahead, a monstrous, palpitating Cepheid sun swam angrily in emptiness.

The _Starshine_ had leaped the gulf between galaxies in a time to
be measured in heart-beats and the transmitter-field was thrown off
when the total quantity of radiation impinging upon a sensitive plate
before her had reached a certain total.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dona watched absorbedly as Kim made his observations and approximately
fixed his position. The Mayor of Steadheim looked on suspiciously.

"What's this?"

"Locating ourselves," Kim explained. "From the Second Galaxy the best
we could hope for was to hit somewhere in the First. We did pretty
well, at that. We're about sixty light-centuries from Ades."

"That's good, eh?" The mayor mopped his face. "Will we have fuel to get
there?"

Kim jockeyed the _Starshine_ to a new line. He adjusted the
radiation-operated switch to a new value, to throw off the field more
quickly than before. He pressed the field-button again. Space reeled
once more and the gongs rang and they were deep within the galaxy. A
lurid purple sun blazed balefully far to the left.

Kim began another jockeying for line.

"Khiv Five was beamed about a week ago," he said reflectively. "We're
headed for there now. I think there'll be a warship hanging around, if
only to drop into the stratosphere at night and pick up the broadcasts
or to drop off a spy or two. Dona, you've got your wristlet on?"

Dona, unsmiling, held up her hand. A curious bracelet clung tightly to
the flesh. She looked at his forearm, too. He wore a duplicate. The
Mayor of Steadheim rumbled puzzledly.

"These will keep the fighting-beams from killing us," Kim told
him wryly. "And you too. But they'll hurt like the dickens. When
they hit, though, these wristlets trip a relay that throws us into
transmitter-drive and we get away from there in the thousandth of a
second. The beams simply won't have time to kill us. But they'll hurt!"

He made other adjustments--to a newly-installed switch on the
instrument-board.

"Now--we see if we get back to Terranova."

He pressed the transmitter-drive button a third time. Stars swirled
insanely, with all their colors changing. Then they were still. And
there was the ringed sun Khiv with its family of planets about it.

Khiv Five was readily recognizable by the broad, straight bands of
irrigated vegetation across its otherwise desert middle, where the
water of the melted icecaps was pumped to its winter hemisphere.
It was on the far side of its orbit from the stopping-place of the
_Starshine_, though, and Kim went on overdrive to reach it. This
used as much fuel as all the journey from the Second Galaxy.

The three speed-ranges of the _Starshine_ were--if Kim had but
known it--quaintly like the three speeds of ancient internal-combustion
land-cars. Interplanetary drive was a low speed, necessary for taking
off and landing, but terribly wasteful of fuel.

Overdrive had been the triumph of space-navigation for thousands of
years. It was like the second gear of the ancient land-cars. And the
transmitter-drive of Kim's devising was high speed, almost infinite
speed--but it could not be used within a solar system. It was too fast.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim drove to the farther orbit of Khiv Five and then went into a long,
slow, free fall toward the banded planet below. In the old days it
would have been changed to a landing-parabola at an appropriate moment.

"Now," said Kim grimly, "my guess is that we haven't enough fuel to
make anything but a crash-landing. Which would mean that we should all
get killed. So we will hope very earnestly that a warship is still
hanging about Khiv Five, and that it comes and tries to wipe us out."

Dona pointed to a tiny dial. Its needle quivered ever so slightly from
its point of rest.

"Mmmmm," said Kim. "Right at the limit of the detector's range.
Something using power. We should know how a worm on a fish-hook feels,
right now. We're bait."

He waited--and waited--and waited.

The small hundred-foot hull of the space-ship seemed motionless, seen
from without. The stars were infinitely far away. The great ringed sun
was a hundred and twenty million miles distant. Even the belted planet
Khiv Five was a good half-million miles below.

Such motion as the _Starshine_ possessed was imperceptible.
It floated with a vast leisureliness in what would be a parabolic
semi-orbit. But it would take days to make sure. And meanwhile....

Meanwhile the _Starshine_ seemed to spawn. A small object appeared
astern. Suddenly it writhed convulsively. Light glinted upon it. It
whirled dizzily, then more dizzily still, and abruptly it was a shape.
It was, in fact, the shape of a space-ship practically the size of the
_Starshine_ itself, but somehow it was not quite substantial. For
minutes it shimmered and quivered.

"You'll find it instructive," said Kim drily to the Mayor of Steadheim,
"to look out of a stern-port."

The Mayor lumbered toward a stern-port. A moment later they heard him
shout. Minutes later, he lumbered back.

"What's that?" he said angrily. "I thought it was another ship! When I
first saw it, I thought it was ramming us!"

"It's a gadget," said Kim abstractedly. His eyes were on the indicator
of one of the detectors. The needle was definitely away from its point
of rest. "There's something moving toward us. My guess is that it's a
warship with fighting-beams--and hafnium and fuel."



                              CHAPTER IV

                        _Encounter in the Void_


The Mayor of Steadheim looked from one to the other of them. Dona was
pale. She looked full of dread. Kim's lips were twisted wryly, but his
eyes were intent on the dial. The mayor opened his mouth, and closed
it, then spoke wrathfully.

"I don't understand all this! Where'd that other ship come from?"

"It isn't a ship," said Kim, watching the dial that told of the
approach of something that could only be an enemy--and it had been a
matter of faith that only the _Starshine_ roamed the spaceways. "I
got it made back on Terranova.

"We took a big reel of metal spring-wire, and wound it round and round
a shape like that of the _Starshine_. When it was in place we
annealed and tempered it so it would always resume that shape. And then
we wound it back on its reel. I just dumped it out in space from a
special lock astern.

"It began to unroll, and of course to go back to the form it had been
tempered in. Here, with no gravity to distort it, it went perfectly
back into shape. Close-to, of course, you can see it's only a shell
and a thin one. But a few miles away it would fool you."

The needle on the detector-dial crept over and over. Kim wet his lips.
Dona's face was white.

Then Kim winced and the Mayor of Steadheim roared furiously and the
universe without the view-ports swayed and dissolved into something
else. Alarm-gongs rang and the _Starshine_ was in a brand-new
place, with a blue-white giant sun and a dwarf companion visible
nearby. The ringed sun Khiv had vanished.

"K-kim!" said Dona, choking.

"I'm quite all right," he told her. But he wiped sweat off his face.
"Those beams aren't pleasant, no matter how short the feeling is."

He turned back to the controls. The faint whine of the gyros began. The
_Starshine_ began to turn about. Kim applied power. But it took a
long time for the ship's nose to be turned exactly and precisely back
in the direction from which it had come.

"It's getting ticklish," he said abruptly. "There's less than a cupful
of fuel left."

"_Space!_" said the Mayor of Steadheim. He looked sick and weak
and frightened. "What happened?"

"We were in a sort of orbit about Khiv Five," said Kim, succinctly.
"We had a decoy ship out behind us. A warship spotted our arrival. It
sneaked up on us and let go a blast of its beams--the same beams that
killed all the men on Khiv Five.

"They didn't bother Dona--she's a girl--but they would have killed us
had not a relay flung the _Starshine_ away from there. The beams
got left behind. So did the dummy ship. I think they'll clamp on to
it to look it over. And if our engines keep turning over long enough,
we'll be all right. Now, let's see!"

       *       *       *       *       *

His jaw was set as the transmitter-drive came on and the familiar
crazy gyration of all the stars again took place and the gongs rang
once more. But his astrogation was perfect. There was the ringed sun
Khiv again with its banded fifth planet and its polar ice-cap and
its equatorial belt of desert with the wide bands of irrigated land
crossing it. Kim drove for the planet. He looked at the fuel-gauge.

"Our tanks," he said evenly, "read empty. What fuel's left is in the
catalyzer."

A needle stirred on the bank of indicators. Dona caught her
breath. Kim sweated. The indication on the dial grew stronger. The
electron-telescope field sparkled suddenly, where light glinted on
glistening metal. Kim corrected course subtly.

There was the tiny form which looked so amazingly like a duplicate
of the _Starshine_. It was actually a thin layer of innumerable
turns of spring-wire. On any planet it would have collapsed of its own
weight. Here in space it looked remarkably convincing.

But the three in the _Starshine_ did not look at it. They looked
at the shape that had come alongside it and made fast with magnetic
grapples that distorted the thin decoy wildly--the shape that gave no
sign of any activity or any motion or any life.

That shape was a monster space-ship a thousand feet long. It looked as
if it bulged with apparatus of death. It was ominous. It was gigantic.
It was deadly.

"Our trick worked," said Kim uneasily. "We should begin to feel
uncomfortable, you and I, in minutes--if only our engines keep running!"

He spoke to the Mayor of Steadheim. Almost as he spoke, a tiny tingling
began all over his body. As the ship went on, that tingling grew
noticeably stronger.

"What--"

"We've no weapons," said Kim, "nor time to devise them. But when we
were slaves on the planets we came from we were held enslaved by a
circuit that could torture us or paralyze us at the will of our rulers.
The disciplinary circuit. Remember?

"I put a disciplinary-circuit generator in that little decoy ship. I
took a suggestion from what our friends yonder did to the fighting
beams. I tuned the disciplinary circuit to affect any man--but no
woman--within its range.

"The generator went on when she grappled the decoy. Every man in it
should be helpless. If it stands like that, we'd be paralyzed too if we
went near. But not Dona."

The tingling was quite strong. It was painful. Presently it would be
excruciating. It would be completely impossible for any man within
fifty miles of the decoy space-ship to move a muscle.

"However," said Kim, "I've arranged that. I'd disciplinary-circuit
projectors fitted on the _Starshine_. We turn them on that ship.
Automatically, the generator on the decoy will cut off. Our friends
will still be helpless, and we can go up and grapple--if our engines
keep going!"

He threw a switch. A relay snapped over somewhere and a faint humming
noise began. The tingling of Kim's body ceased. The decoy and the enemy
space-ship grew large before them. The enemy was still motionless.

Its crew, formerly held immobile by the circuit in the decoy, was now
held helpless by the beams from the _Starshine_. But neither Kim
nor the Mayor of Steadheim could enter the enemy ship without becoming
paralyzed too.

Dona slipped quietly from the control-room. She came back, clad in a
space-suit with the helmet face-plate open.

"All ready, Kim," she said quietly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sweat stood out in droplets on Kim's face. The _Starshine_
drifted ever so gently into position alongside the pair of motionless
shapes--the one so solid and huge, the other so flimsy and
insubstantial. Kim energized the grapples. There was a crushing impact
as the _Starshine_ anchored itself to the enemy.

Kim reached over and pulled out a switch.

"That's the wristlet relay switch," he told Dona. "We stay here until
you come back--even if a fighting-beam hits us. You've got to go
on board that monster and get some fuel and, if you can, a hafnium
catalyzer. If another battleship's around and comes up--you drive the
_Starshine_ home with what fuel you can get. We'll be dead, but
you do that. You hear?"

"I'll--hurry, Kim," Dona said.

"Be careful!" commanded Kim fiercely. "There shouldn't be a man on that
ship who can move, but be careful!"

She kissed him quickly and closed the face-plate of her helmet. She
went into the airlock and closed the inner door.

There was silence in the _Starshine_. Kim sweated. The outer
airlock door opened. The two ships were actually touching. The clumping
of the magnetic shoes of Dona's space-suit upon the other ship's hull
was transmitted to the _Starshine_.

Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim heard the clankings as she opened the
other ship's outer airlock door--the inner door. Then they heard
nothing.

Dona was in an enemy space-ship, unarmed. Subjects of the Empire of
Greater Sinab manned it. They or their fellows had murdered half the
population of the banded planet below. They were helpless, now, to be
sure, held immobile by fields maintained by the precariously turning
engines of the _Starshine_.

But the fuel-gauge showed the fuel-tanks absolutely dry. The
_Starshine_ was running on fuel in the pipe-line and catalyzers.
It had been for an indefinite time. Its engines would cut off at any
instant.

When the lights flickered Kim groaned. This meant that the last few
molecules of fuel were going from the catalyzer. He feverishly cut
off the heaters which kept the ship warm in space. He cut off the
air-purifier.

He became desperately economical of every watt of energy. He used power
for the disciplinary-circuit beams which kept the enemy crew helpless
and for the grapples which kept the two ships in contact--for nothing
else.

       *       *       *       *       *

But still the lights flickered. The engines gasped for power. They
started and checked and ran again, and again checked.

The second they failed finally, the immobile monster alongside
would become a ravening engine of destruction. The two men in the
_Starshine_ would die in an instant of unspeakable torment.
Dona--now fumbling desperately through unfamiliar passageways amid
contorted, glaring figures--would be at the tender mercy of the crew.

And when the three of them were dead the drive of the _Starshine_
would be at the disposal of the Empire of Greater Sinab if they only
chose to look at it. The beastly scheme of conquest would spread and
spread and spread throughout the galaxy and enslave all women--and
murder all human men not parties to the criminality.

The lights flickered again. They almost died and on the
_Starshine_, Kim clenched his hands in absolute despair. On the
enemy warship the frozen, immobile figures of the crew made agonized
raging movements.

But the engine caught fugitively once more, and Dona worked desperately
and then fled toward the airlock with her booty while the disciplinary
circuit field which froze the Sinabian crew wavered, and tightened, and
wavered once more.

And died!

Dona dragged open the enemy's inner airlock door as a howl rose behind
her. She flung open the outer as murderous projectors warmed. She
clattered along the outer hull of the Sinabian ship on her magnetic
shoes, and saw the _Starshine_ drifting helplessly away, even the
grapples powerless to hold the two bodies together.

At that sight, Dona gasped. She leaped desperately, with star-filled
nothingness above and below and on every hand. She caught the
_Starshine's_ airlock door.

[Illustration: Dona leaped desperately through star-filled nothingness
to catch the _Starshine's_ airlock door.]

And Kim cut out the disciplinary-circuit beams and the flow of current
to the grapples and, with a complete absence of hope, pressed the
transmitter-drive button. He had no shred of belief that it would work.

But it did. The equalizer-batteries from the engines gave out one
last surge of feeble power--and were dead. But that was enough, since
nothing else drew current at all. The stars reeled.

This was a test.

Almost anything could happen. Kim held his breath, anxiously watching
and waiting for the worst, his senses attuned to the delicate
mechanisms about him.

And then, slowly, the reaction was fully determined, and he smiled.



                               CHAPTER V

                           _The Needed Fuel_


The _Starshine_ had a mass of about two hundred tons and an
intrinsic velocity of so many miles per second. When the field went on,
her mass dropped almost to zero, but her kinetic energy remained the
same. Her velocity went up almost to infinity. And the universe went
mad.

The vision-ports showed stark lunacy. There were stars, but they
were the stars of a madman's dream. They formed and dissolved into
nothingness in instants too brief for estimate. For fractions of
microseconds they careered upon impossible trajectories across the
vision-ports' field of view.

Now a monstrous blue-white sun glared in terribly, seemingly almost
touching the ship. An instant later there was utter blackness all
about. Then colossal flaring globes ringed in the _Starshine_, and
shriveling heat poured in.

Then there was a blue watery-seeming cosmos all around like the vision
of an underwater world and dim shapes seemed to swim in it, and then
stars again, and then....

It was stark, gibbering madness!

But Kim reached the instrument-board. With the end of the last morsel
of power he had ceased to have weight and had floated clear of the
floor and everything else.

By the crazy, changing light he sighted himself and, when he touched
a sidewall, flung himself toward the now-dark bank of instruments. He
caught hold, fumbled desperately and threw the switch a radiation-relay
should have thrown. And then the madness ended.

There was stillness. There was nothing anywhere. There was no weight
within the ship, nor light, nor any sound save the heavy breathing of
Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim. The vision-ports showed nothing.

Looking carefully, with eyes losing the dazzle of now-vanished suns,
one could see infinitely faint, infinitely distant luminosities. The
_Starshine_ was somewhere between galaxies, somewhere in an
unspeakable gulf between islands of space, in the dark voids which are
the abomination of desolation.

There were small clankings aft. The outer airlock door went shut. A
little later the inner door opened. And then Kim swam fiercely through
weightlessness and clung to Dona, still in her space-suit, unable to
speak for his emotion.

The voice of the Mayor of Steadheim arose in the darkness which was
the interior of the _Starshine_--and the outer cosmos for tens of
thousands of light years all about.

"What's this," he rumbled wrathfully as he floated without weight in
darkness. "Is this what happens when a man dies? It'll be frightfully
tedious."

Dona now had the face-plate of her helmet open. She kissed Kim hungrily.

"I--brought you something," she said unsteadily. "I'm not sure what,
but--something. They've separate engines to power their generators on
that ship, and there were tanks I thought were fuel-tanks."

"Space!" roared the Mayor of Steadheim, forward. "Who's that talking?
Am I dead? Is this hades?"

"You're not dead yet," Kim called to him. "I'll tell you in a minute if
you will be."

There were no emergency-lights in the ship, but Dona's suit was
necessarily so equipped. She turned on lights and Kim looked at the two
objects she had brought.

"My dear," he told her, "you did it! A little fuel-tank with gallons in
it and a complete catalyzer. By the size of it, one of their beams uses
an engine big enough for fifty ships like this!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Clutching at every projection, he made his way to the engine-room. Dona
followed.

"I'm glad, Kim," she said unsteadily, "that I was able to do something
important. You always do everything."

"The heck I do," he said. "But anyhow...."

He worked on the tank. She'd sheared it off with a tiny atomic torch
and the severed fuel-line had closed of itself, of course. He spliced
it into the _Starshine's_ fuel-line, and waited eagerly for the
heavy, viscid fluid to reach the catalyzer and then the engines.

"We'll--be all right now?" asked Dona hopefully.

"We were on transmitter-drive for five minutes, at a guess. You know
what that means!"

She caught her breath.

"_Kim!_ We're lost!"

"To say that we're lost is a masterpiece of understatement," he said
wryly. "At transmitter-speed we could cross the First Galaxy in a
ten-thousandth of a second. Which means roughly a hundred thousand
light years in a ten-thousandth of a second. And we traveled for three
hundred seconds or thereabouts. What are our chances of finding our way
back?"

"Oh, Kim!" she cried softly. "It's unthinkable!"

He watched the meters. Suddenly, the engines caught. For the fraction
of a second they ran irregularly. Then all was normal. There was light.
There was weight. An indignant roar came from forward.

"If this is hades--"

They went to the control-room. The Mayor of Steadheim sat on the floor,
staring incredulously about him. As they entered he grinned sheepishly.

"I was floating in the air and couldn't see a thing, and then the
lights came on and the floor smacked me! What happened and where are
we?"

Kim went to the instrument-board and plugged in the heaters--already
the vision-ports had begun to frost--and the air-purifier and the other
normal devices of a space-ship.

"What happened is simple enough," said Kim. "The last atom of power on
board the ship here threw us into transmitter-field drive. And when
that field is established it doesn't take power to maintain it.

"So we started to move! There's a relay that should have stopped us,
but there wasn't enough power left to work it. So we traveled for
probably five minutes on transmitter-drive."

"We went a long way, eh?" said the mayor, comfortably.

"We did," said Kim grimly. "To Ades from its sun is ninety million
miles--eight light-minutes. Minutes, remember! The First Galaxy is a
hundred thousand light-years across. Light travels a hundred thousand
years, going ninety million miles every eight minutes to cross it.

"The _Starshine_ travels a hundred thousand light-years in the
ten-thousandth part of a second. In one second--a billion light-years.
The most powerful telescope in the Galaxy cannot gather light from so
far away. But we went at least three hundred times farther.

"Three hundred billion light-years, plus or minus thirty billions more!
We went beyond the farthest that men have ever seen, and kept on
beyond the farthest that men have ever thought of!

"The light from the island universes we can see through the ports has
never yet reached the First Galaxy since time began. It hasn't had
time! We're not only beyond the limits that men have guessed at, we're
beyond their wildest imagining!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The Mayor of Steadheim blinked at him. Then he got up and peered out
the vision-ports. Dim, remote luminosities were visible, each one a
galaxy of a thousand million suns!

"Hah!" grunted the mayor, "Not much to look at, at that! Now what?"

Kim spread out his hands and looked at Dona.

"Turning about and trying to go back," he said, "would be like starting
from an individual grain of sand on a desert, and flying a thousand
miles, and then trying to fly back to that grain of sand again. That's
how the First Galaxy stacks up."

Dona took a deep breath.

"You'll find a way, Kim! And--anyhow--"

She smiled at him shakily. Whether or not they ever saw another human
being she was prepared to take what came, with him. The possibility
of being lost amid the uncountable island universes of the cosmos
had been known to them both from the beginning of the use of the
_Starshine_.

"We'll take some pictures," Kim told her, "and then sit down on a
planet and figure things out."

He set to work making a map of all the island universes in view of
the _Starshine's_ current position, with due regard to the
_Starshine's_ course. On the relatively short jumps within a
galaxy, and especially those of a few light-years only, he could simply
turn the ship about and come very close to his original position--the
line of it, anyhow.

But he did not know within many many billions of light-years how far
he had come and he did know that an error of a hundredth of a second
of arc would amount to millions of light-years at the distance of the
First Galaxy.

The positions of galaxies about the First were plotted only within a
radius of something like two million light-years. There had never been
a point in even that! At fifteen hundred thousand times that distance
he was not likely to strike the tiny mapped area by accident.

He set to work. Presently he was examining the photographs by enlarger
for a sign of structure in one of the galaxies in view. One showed
evidences of super-giant stars--which proved it the nearest. He aimed
the _Starshine_ for it. He threw the ship into transmitter-drive.

The galaxy was startlingly familiar when they reached it. The stellar
types were normal ones and there were star-clusters and doubtless
star-drifts too and Kim was wholly accustomed to astro-navigation now.

He simply chose a sol-type sun, set the radiation-switch to stop
the little space-ship close by, aimed for it and pressed a button.
Instantly they were there. They visited six solar systems.

They found a habitable planet in the last--a bit on the small side, but
with good gravity, adequate atmosphere and polar icecaps to assure its
climate.

They landed and its atmosphere was good. The Mayor of Steadheim stepped
out and blinked about him.

"Hah!" he said gruffly. "If we've come as far as you say it was hardly
worth the trip!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim grinned.

"It looks normal enough," he acknowledged. "But chemistry's the same
everywhere and plants will use chlorophyll in sunlight from a sol-type
sun. Stalks and leaves will grow anywhere, and the most efficient
animals will be warm-blooded. Given similar conditions you'll have
parallel evolution everywhere."

"Hm--" said the Mayor of Steadheim. "A planet like this for each of my
four sons to settle on, now--when we've settled with those rats from
Sinab--"

The planet was a desirable one. The _Starshine_ had come to rest
where a mountain-range rose out of lush, strange, forest-covered hills,
which reached away and away to a greenish sea. There was nothing in
view which was altogether familiar and nothing which was altogether
strange. The Mayor of Steadheim stamped away to a rocky out-crop where
he would have an even better view.

"Poor man!" said Dona softly. "When he finds out that we can never go
back, and there'll be only the three of us here while horrible things
happen back--back home."

But Kim's expression had suddenly become strained.

"I think," he said softly, "I see a way to get back. I was thinking
that a place as far away as this would be ideal for the Empire of
Sinab to be moved to. True, they've murdered all the men on nineteen
or twenty planets, but we couldn't repair anything by murdering all of
them in return.

"If we moved them out here, though, there'd be no other people for them
to prey on. They'd regret their lost opportunities for scoundrelism but
their real penalty would be that they'd have to learn to be decent in
order to survive. It's a very neat answer to the biggest problem of the
war with Sinab--a post-war settlement."

"But we haven't any chance of getting back, have we?"

"If we wanted to send them here, how'd we do it?" asked Kim. "By
matter-transmitter, of course. A receiver set up here--as there used to
be one on Ades--to which a sender would be tuned.

"When a transmitter's tuned to a receiver you can't miss. But our
transmitter-drive is just that--a transmitter which sends the ship and
itself, with a part which is tuned to receive itself, too.

"I'll set up the receiving element here, for later use. And I'll tune
the sender-element to Ades. We'll arrive at the station there and
everyone will be surprised."

He paused and spoke reflectively.

"A curious war, this. We've no weapons and we arrive at a post-war
settlement before we start fighting. We've decided how to keep from
killing our enemies before we're sure how we'll defeat them and I
suspect that the men had better stay at home and let the women go out
to battle. I'm not sure I like it."

He set to work. In twelve hours one-half of the transmitter-drive of
the _Starshine_ had been removed and set up on the unnamed planet
of a galaxy not even imagined by human beings before.

In fifteen hours the _Starshine_, rather limpingly, went aloft.

An hour later Kim carefully tuned the transmitting part of the little
ship's drive to the matter-receiving station on Ades. In that way, and
only in that way, the ship would inevitably arrive at the home galaxy
of humanity.

And he pushed a button.

It arrived at the matter station on Ades instead of descending from the
skies. And the people on Ades were surprised.



                              CHAPTER VI

                           _Man-Made Meteor_


No obvious warlike move had been made on either side, of course. Ades
swam through space, a solitary planet circling its own small sun. About
it glittered the thousands of millions of stars which were the suns of
the First Galaxy.

Nearby, bright and unwinking, Sinab and Khiv and Phanis were the
largest suns of the star-cluster which was becoming the Empire of
Sinab. Twenty planets--twenty-one, with Khiv Five--were already cut
off from the rest of the galaxy, apparently by the failure of their
matter-transmitters.

Actually those twenty planets were the cradles of a new and horrible
type of civilization. On the other inhabited worlds every conceivable
type of tyranny had come into being, sustained by the disciplinary
circuit which put every citizen at the mercy of his government
throughout every moment of his life.

On most worlds kings and oligarchs reveled in the primitive
satisfaction of arbitrary power. There is an instinct still surviving
among men which allows power, as such, to become an end in itself,
and when it is attained to be exercised without purpose save for its
own display. Some men use power to force abject submission or fawning
servility or stark terror.

In the Empire of Greater Sinab there was merely the novelty that the
rulers craved adulation--and got it. The rulers of Sinab were without
doubt served by the most enthusiastic, most loyal, most ardently
co-operative subjects ever known among men.

Every member of the male population of Sinab--where women were
considered practically a lower species of animal--could look forward
confidently to a life of utter ease on one planet or another, served
and caressed by solicitous females, with no particular obligation save
to admire and revere his rulers and to breed more subjects for them.

It made for loyalty, but not for undue energy. There was no great worry
about the progress of the splendid plan for a greater Sinab. All went
well. The planet Khiv Five had been beamed from space some nine days
since.

Every man upon the planet had died in one instant of unholy anguish,
during which tetanic convulsions of the muscles of his heart burst it
while the ligaments and anchorages of other muscles were torn free of
his skeleton by the terrific contraction of muscle fibres.

Every woman on Khiv Five was still in a state of frantic grief which
would become despair only with the passage of time. It was strange that
two guard-ships circling Khiv Five no longer reported to headquarters
but it was unthinkable that any harm could have come to them. Records
showed that no other planet had practised space travel for centuries or
millennia.

Only the Empire of Sinab had revived the ancient art for purposes of
conquest. There was no reason to be solicitous, so the Empire of Sinab
waited somnolently for time to pass, when colonists would be called up
to take over the manless Khiv Five and all its cities and its women.

There was another small planet called Ades, next in order for
absorption into the Empire. A squadron had been dispatched to beam it
to manlessness--though volunteers for its chilly clime would not be
numerous.

The failure of two guard-ships to report, of course, could have
no meaning to that other squadron. Of course not! There were no
space-ships save the fleet of Greater Sinab. There were no weapons
mounted for use against space-craft anywhere.

There was nothing to hinder the expansion of Greater Sinab to include
every one of the galaxy's three hundred million inhabited planets. So
nobody worried on Sinab.

       *       *       *       *       *

On Ades it was different. That small planet hummed with activity. It
was not the ordered, regimented-from-above sort of activity any other
planet in the galaxy would have shown. It was individual activity,
often erratic and doubtless inefficient. But it made for progress.

First, of course, a steady stream of human beings filed into the
matter-transmitter which communicated with Terranova in the Second
Galaxy. Gangling boys, mostly, and mothers with small boy-children
made the journey, taking them to Terranova where the beams of Sinabian
murder-craft could not cause their death.

The adults of Terranova were not anxious to flee from Ades. The men
with wives--though there were only one-tenth as many women as men on
Ades--savagely refused to abandon them. Those without wives labored
furiously to complete the space-ships that waited for their finishing
touches on the outskirts of every community on the planet.

The small drum of fuel taken by Dona from the warship off Khiv Five
was depleted by Kim's use of it, but the rest was enormously useful.
The catalyzer from the same warship was taken apart and its previous
hafnium parts recovered. And then the values of individualism appeared.

A physicist who had been exiled from Muharram Two for the crime
of criticizing a magistrate, presented himself as an expert on
autocatalysis. With a sample of the catalyzed fuel to start the process
he shortly had a small plant turning out space-fuel without hafnium at
all. The catalyzed fuel itself acted as a catalyst to cause other fuel
to take the desired molecular form.

A power-plant engineer from Hlond Three seized upon the principle and
redesigned the catalyzers to be made for the ships. For safety's sake a
particle of hafnium was included but the new-type catalyzers required
only a microscopic speck of the precious material.

Hafnium from the one bit of machinery from the one beam-generator of an
enemy war-craft, was extended to supply the engine-rooms of a thousand
space-craft of the _Starshine's_ design.

In a myriad other ways individuals worked at their chosen problems.
Hundreds undoubtedly toiled to contrive a shield for the fighting
beams--tuned to kill men only--which were the means by which Ades was
to be devastated. The scientists of half a galaxy had tried that five
thousand years before without success.

But one man did come up with a plausible device. He proposed a
shielding paint containing crystals of the hormone to which the
fighting-beams were tuned. The crystalline material should absorb the
deadly frequencies, so they could not pass on to murder men.

It would have been simple enough to synthesize any desired organic
substance, but Kim pointed out grimly that the shield would be made
useless by changing the tuning of the beams. Other men devised horrific
and generally impractical weapons.

But again, one man came up with a robot ship idea, a ship which could
be fought without humans on board and controlled even at interstellar
distances. Radio signals at the speed of light would be fantastically
too slow.

He proposed miniature matter-transmitters automatically shuttling a
magnetic element between ship and planet-station and back to the ship
again, the solid object conveying all the information to be had from
the ship's instruments to the planet-station, and relaying commands to
the ship's controls. The trick could have been made to work, and it
would be vastly faster than any radiation-beam. But there was no time
to manufacture them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Actually, only four days after the return of the partly dismantled
_Starshine_ from the farther side of nowhere, Kim took off again
from Ades with fifty other ships following him. There were twenty other
similar squadrons ready to take space in days more.

But for a first operation he insisted on a small force to gain
experience without too much risk. At transmitter-speeds there could be
no such thing as cruising in fleet formation, nor of arriving at any
destination in a unit. Guerilla warfare was inevitable.

The navy of the criminals of Ades, though, went swirling up through the
atmosphere of that cold planet like a column of voyaging wild geese. It
broke through the upper atmosphere and there were all the suns of the
Galaxy shining coldly on every hand.

The ships headed first for Khiv Five, lining up for it with such
precision as the separate astrogators--hurriedly trained by Kim--could
manage. It was a brave small company of tiny ships, forging through
space away from the sunlit little world behind them. The light of the
local sun was bright upon their hulls.

Glinting reflections of many-colored stars shimmered on their shadowed
sides. They drove on and on, on planetary drive, seemingly motionless
in space. Then the _Starshine_ winked out of existence. By ones
and twos and half-dozens, the others vanished from space.

It was the transmitter-drive, of course. The repaired _Starshine_
vanished from space near Ades because it went away from Ades at such
speed that no light could possibly be reflected from it. It reappeared
in space within the solar system of Khiv because it slowed enough to be
visible.

But it seemed utterly alone. Yet presently an alarm-gong rang, and
there was one of its sister-ships a bare ten thousand miles away. The
rest were scattered over parsecs.

Kim drove for the banded planet on which dead men still lay unburied.
His fleet was to rendezvous above its summer pole, as shown by the size
of the ice-cap. There had been two guard-ships circling Khiv Five to
keep account of the development of grief into despair. Dona had robbed
one of them while its crew was held helpless by projectors of the
disciplinary-circuit field.

A second had been on the way to its aid when the _Starshine_
reeled away with the last morsel of energy in its equalizing-batteries.
With fifty small ships, swift as gad-flies though without a single
weapon, Kim hoped to try out the tactics planned for his fleet, and
perhaps to capture one or both of the giants.

He picked up a third member of his force on the way to the planet
and the three drove on in company. Detectors indicated two others at
extreme range. But as the three hovered over the polar cap of Khiv
Five, others came from every direction.

Then a wheezing voice bellowed out of the newly-installed space-radio
in the _Starshine's_ control-room. It was the voice of the Mayor
of Steadheim, grandly captaining a tiny ship with his four tall sons
for crew.

"_Kim Rendell!_" he bellowed. "_Kim Rendell! Enemy ships in
sight! We're closing with them and be da--_"

His voice stopped--utterly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kim snapped orders and his squadron came swarming after him. The
direction of the message was clear. It had come from a point a bare
two thousand miles above the surface of Khiv Five and with coordinates
which made its location easy.

It was too close for the use of transmitter-drive, of course. Even
overdrive at two hundred light-speeds was out of the question. On
normal drive the little ships--bare specks in space--spread out and
out. Their battle tactics had been agreed upon. They wove and darted
erratically.

They had projectors of the disciplinary-circuit field, which would
paralyze any man they struck with sufficient intensity. But that was
all--for the good and sufficient reason that such fields could be
tested upon grimly resolute volunteers and adjusted to the utmost of
efficiency.

On the prison world of Ades, to which criminals were sent from all over
the galaxy, there was no legal murder. Killing fighting-beams could not
be calibrated. There were no available victims.

The detectors picked up a single considerable mass. Electron telescopes
focussed upon it. Kim's lips tensed. He saw a giant war-craft, squat
and ungainly--with no air-resistance in space there is no point in
streamlining a space-ship--and with the look of a mass of crammed
generators of deadly beams.

It turned slowly in its flight. It was not one space-ship, but two--two
giant ships grappled together. It turned further and there was a
shimmering, unsubstantial tiny shape clutched to one....

"The dickens!" said Kim bitterly. He called into the space-phones; "Kim
Rendell speaking! Don't attack! Those ships aren't driving, they're
falling! They'll smash on Khiv Five and we can't do anything about it.
Keep at least fifty miles away!"

A wheezing voice said furiously from the communicator,

"They tricked me! I went for 'em, and the transmitter-drive went on!
I'll get 'em this time!"

Kim barked at the Mayor of Steadheim, even as in the field of the
electron telescope he saw a tiny mote of a space-ship charge valorously
at the monsters. It plunged toward them--and vanished.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dona spoke breathlessly.

"But what happened, Kim?"

"This," said Kim bitterly, "is the end of the battle we fought with one
of those ships a week ago. We put out a decoy and that ship grappled
it. A disciplinary-circuit generator went on and paralyzed its crew.

"You remember that we went up to it and you went on board. I turned off
its generator from a distance and held the crew paralyzed with beams
from the _Starshine_. There was another ship coming when you got
off and we got away to the other side of beyond."

"Yes, but--"

"We vanished," said Kim. "The other enemy ship came up. Its skipper
must have decided to go on board the first for a conference, or perhaps
to inspect the decoy. It grappled to the first--and the magnetic surge
turned on the disciplinary field again in the gadget in the decoy!

"Every man in both ships was paralyzed all over again! Both ships were
drifting with power off! They've been falling toward Khiv Five! Every
man of both crews must be dead by now, but the field's still on and it
will stay on! They'll crash!"

"But can't we do anything?" demanded Dona anxiously. "I know you want a
ship."

"It would be handy to have those beams modified so we could paralyze a
planet from a distance," said Kim grimly, "but these ships are gone."

"I could go on board again," said Dona breathlessly.

"No! They'll hit atmosphere in minutes, now. And even if we could cut
off the paralyzing field and get to the control-room nobody could pull
an unfamiliar ship out of that fall. I wouldn't let you try it anyhow.
They're falling fast. Miles a second. They'll hit with the speed of a
meteor!"

"But try, Kim!"

For answer he pulled her away from the electron telescope and pointed
through the forward vision-port. The falling ships had seemed almost
within reach on the electron-telescope screen. But through the
vision-port one could see the whole vast bulk of Khiv Five.

Two thirds of it glowed brightly in sunlight, but night had fallen
directly below. The falling ships were the barest specks the eye
could possibly detect--too far for hope of overhauling on planetary
drive, too close to risk any other. Any speed that would overtake the
derelicts would mean a crash against the planet's disk.

"I think," said Kim, "they'll cross the sunset line and fall in the
night area."

They did. They vanished, as specks against the sunlit disk. Then,
minutes later, a little red spark appeared where the bulk of the banded
planet faded into absolute black. The spark held and grew in brightness.

"They've hit atmosphere," Kim told her. "They're compressing the air
before them until it's incandescent. They're a meteoric fall."

The spark flared terribly, minute though it was from this distance.
It curved downward as the air slowed its forward speed. It was an
infinitesimal comet, trailing a long tail of fire behind it. It swooped
downward in a gracefully downward-curving arc. It crashed.

"Which," said Kim coldly in the _Starshine's_ control-room, "means
that two Sinabian warships are destroyed without cost to us. It's a
victory. But it's very, very bad luck for us. With those two ships and
transmitter drive we could end the war in one day."



                              CHAPTER VII

                          _Ready for Action_


Indignantly the Mayor of Steadheim bellowed from the space-phone
speaker and Kim answered him patiently.

"The decoy still had a disciplinary-circuit field on," he explained for
the tenth time. "You know about it! When you tried to go galumphing
in, the field grabbed you and paralyzed you. When your muscles went
iron hard, the relay on your wrist--you wear it to protect you from the
fighter-beams--threw your ship into transmitter-speed travel.

"So you were somewhere else. When you came back you charged in again
and the same thing happened. The relay protected you against our field
as well as the enemy fighter-beams. That's all."

The Mayor wheezed and sputtered furiously. It was plain that he had
meant to distinguish himself and his four sons by magnificent bravery.

"There's something that needs to be done," said Kim. "Those two ships
are smashed but they hadn't time to melt. There'll be hafnium in the
wreckage, anyhow--and metal is scarce on Ades. See what you can salvage
and get it to Ades. It's important war work. Ask for other ships to
volunteer to help you."

The Mayor of Steadheim roared indignantly--and then consented like a
lamb. In the space-navy of Ades there could not yet be anything like
iron discipline. Kim led his forces as a feudal baron might have led a
motley assemblage of knights and men-at-arms in ancient days. He led by
virtue of prestige and experience. He could not command.

The fleet grew minute by minute as lost ships came in. And Kim
worked out a new plan of battle to meet the fact that he could not
hope to appear over Sinab with gigantic generators able to pour out
disciplinary-circuit beams over the whole planet.

He explained the plan painstakingly to his followers and presently set
a course for Sinab. A surprising number of ships volunteered to go to
ground on Khiv Five with the Mayor of Steadheim to salve what could be
retrieved of the shattered two warships.

No more than thirty little craft of Ades pointed their noses toward
Sinab. They went speeding toward it in a close-knit group, matching
courses to almost microscopic accuracy and keeping their speed
identical to a hair in hopes of arriving nearly in one group.

"So we'll try it again," said Kim into the space-phone. "Here we go!"

He pressed the transmitter-drive button and all the universe danced a
momentary saraband--and far off to the left the giant sun Sinab glowed
fiercely.

       *       *       *       *       *

Five of the little ships from Ades were within detector-range. But
there were four monstrous moving masses which by their motion and
velocity were space-ships rising from the planet and setting out upon
some errand of the murder-empire. The same thought must have come
instantly to those upon each of the little ships. They charged.

There had been no war in space for five thousand years. The last
space-battle was that of Canis Major, when forty thousand warships
plunged toward each other with their fighting-beams stabbing out
savagely, aimed and controlled by every device that human ingenuity
could contrive.

That battle had ended wars for all time, the galaxy believed, because
there was no survivor on either side. In seconds every combatant ship
was merely a mass of insensate metal, which fought on in a blind
futility.

The fighting-beams killed in thousandths of seconds. The robot gunners
aimed with absolute precision. The two fleets joined battle and the
robots fixed their targets and every ship became a coffin in which all
living things were living no longer, which yet fought on with beams
which could do no further harm.

With every man in both fleets dead the warships raged through
emptiness, pouring out destruction from their unmanned projectors.
It was a hundred years before the last war-craft, its fuel gone and
its crew mere dust, was captured and destroyed. But there had been no
space-fight since--until now.

And this one was strangeness itself. Four huge, squat ships of war
rose steadily from the planet Sinab Two. They were doubtless bound
on a mission of massacre. The Empire of Sinab gave no warning of its
purpose. It did not permit the option of submission.

Its ships headed heavily out into space, crammed with generators of the
murder-frequency. They had no inkling of any ships other than those of
their own empire as being in existence anywhere.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a slim and slender space-craft winked into
being--a member of Kim's squadron, just arrived. Within a fraction of
an instant it was plunging furiously for the Sinabian monster.

The _Starshine_ also flung itself into head-long attack, though it
was unarmed save for projectors of a field that would not kill anyone.
The other ships--and more, as they appeared--darted valorously for the
giants.

Meteor-repellers lashed out automatically. Scanners had detected the
newcomers and instantly flung repeller-beams to thrust them aside. They
had no effect. Meteor-repellers handle inert masses but, by the nature
of its action, an interplanetary drive neutralizes their effect.

The small ships flashed on.

Kim found himself grinning sardonically. There would be alarms ringing
frantically in the enemy ships and the officers would be paralyzed
with astonishment at the sudden appearance and instant attack by
space-craft which could not--to Sinabian knowledge--exist.

Four ships plunged upon one monster. Three dashed at another. Eight
little motes streaked for a third and the fourth seemed surrounded by
deadly mites of space-ships, flashing toward it with every indication
of vengeful resolution.

The attacks were sudden, unexpected, and impossible. There was no time
to put the murder-beams into operation. They took priceless seconds to
warm up.

       *       *       *       *       *

In stark panic the control-room officer of the ship at which the
_Starshine_ drove jammed his ship into overdrive travel. The
Sinabian flashed into flight at two hundred times the speed of light.
It fled into untraceable retreat, stressed space folded about it.

Kim spoke comfortably into the space-phone:

"Everything's fine! If the others do the same...."

A second giant fled in the same fashion. The small ships of Ades were
appearing on every hand and plunging toward their enemies. A third huge
ship made a crazy, irresolute half-turn and also took the only possible
course by darting away from its home planet on overdrive. Then the
fourth!

"They'd no time to give an alarm," said Kim crisply. "Into atmosphere
now and we do our stuff!"

The tiny craft plunged toward the planet below them. It swelled in the
_Starshine's_ forward vision-ports. It filled all the firmament.
Kim changed course and aimed for the limb of the planet. The ship went
down and down.

A faint trembling went through all the fabric of the ship. It had
touched atmosphere. There was a monstrous metropolis ahead and below.
Kim touched a control. A little thing went tumbling down and down. He
veered out into space again.

He watched by electron telescope. Like tiny insects, the fleet of Ades
flashed over the surface of the planet. They seemed to have no purpose.
They seemed to accomplish nothing. They darted here and there and fled
for open space again, without ever touching more than the outermost
reaches of the planet's atmosphere.

But it took time. They were just beginning to stream up into emptiness
again when the first of the giant warships flashed back into view. This
time it was ready for action.

Its beam-projectors flared thin streams of ions that were visible
even in empty space. The ships of Ades plunged for it in masses. The
fighting-beams flared terribly.

And the little ships vanished. Diving for it, plunging for it, raging
toward it with every appearance of deadly assault, they flicked into
transmitter-drive when the deadly beams touched them. Because the crews
of every one were fitted with the wristlets and the relays which flung
them into infinite speed when the fighting-beams struck.

In seconds, when the second and third and fourth Sinabian warships came
back from the void prepared for battle, they found all of space about
their home planet empty. They ragingly reported their encounter to
headquarters.

Headquarters did not reply. The big ships went recklessly, alarmedly,
down to ground to see what had happened. They feared annihilation had
struck Sinab Two.

But it hadn't. The fleet of Ades had bombed the enemy planet, to be
sure, but in a quite unprecedented fashion. They had simply dropped
small round cases containing apparatus which was very easily made and
to which not even the most conscientious of the exiles on Ades could
object.

They were tiny broadcasting units, very much like one Kim had put in a
decoy ship, which gave off the neuronic frequencies of the disciplinary
circuit, tuned to men. The cases were seamless spheres, made of an
alloy that could only be formed by powder metallurgy, and could not be
melted or pierced at all.

It was the hardest substance developed in thirty thousand years of
civilization. And at least one of those cases had been dropped on every
large city of Sinab Two, and when they struck they began to broadcast.



                             CHAPTER VIII

                           _Pitched Battle_


Every man in every city of the capital planet of the empire was
instantly struck motionless. From the gross and corpulent emperor
himself down to the least-considered scoundrel of each city's slums,
every man felt his every muscle go terribly and impossibly rigid. Every
man was helpless and convulsed. And the women were unaffected.

On Sinab two, which was the capital of a civilization which considered
women inferior animals, the women had not been encouraged to be
intelligent. For a long time they were merely bewildered. They were
afraid to try to do anything to assist their men.

Those with small boy-children doubtless were the first to dare to use
their brains. It was unquestionably the mother of a small boy gone
terribly motionless who desperately set out in search of help.

She reasoned fearfully that, since her own city was full of agonized
statues which were men, perhaps in another city there might be aid. She
tremblingly took a land-car and desperately essayed to convoy her son
to where something might be done for him.

And she found that, in the open space beyond the city, he recovered
from immobility to a mere howling discomfort. As the city was left
farther behind he became increasingly less unhappy and at last was
perfectly normal.

But it must have been hours before that discovery became fully known,
so that mothers took their boy-children beyond the range of the small
cases dropped from the skies. And then wives dutifully loaded their
helpless husbands upon land-cars or into freight-conveyors and so got
them out to where they could rage in unbridled fury.

The emperor and his court were probably last of all to be released from
the effects of the disciplinary-circuit broadcasts by mere distance.
The Empire was reduced to chaos. For fifty miles about every bomb it
was impossible for any man to move a muscle.

For seventy-five it was torment.

No man could go within a hundred miles of any of the small objects
dropped from the _Starshine_ and her sister-ships without
experiencing active discomfort.

Obviously, the cities housed the machinery of government and the
matter-transmitters by which the Empire communicated with its
subject worlds and the food-synthesizers and the shelters in which
men were accustomed to live and the baths and lecture-halls and
amusement-centers in which they diverted themselves.

Men were barred from such places absolutely. They could not govern nor
read nor have food or drink or bathe or even sleep upon comfortable
soft couches. For the very means of living they were dependent upon the
favor of women--because women were free to go anywhere and do anything,
while men had to stay in the open fields like cattle.

The foundation of the civilization of Greater Sinab was shattered
because women abruptly ceased to be merely inferior animals. The
defenses of that one planet were non-existent, and even the four
ships just taken off went down recklessly to the seemingly unharmed
cities--to land with monstrous crashes and every man in them helpless.
The ships were out of action for as long as the broadcast should
continue.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the fleet of Ades rendezvoused at Ades, and again put out into
space. They divided now and attacked the subjugated planets. They had
no weapons save the devices which every government in the galaxy used.

It was as if they fought a war with the night-sticks of policemen. But
the disciplinary circuit which made governments absolute, by the most
trivial of modifications became a device by which men were barred from
cities, and therefore from government. All government ceased.

Active warfare by the Empire of Sinab became impossible. Space-yards,
armories, space-ships grounded and space-ships as they landed from the
void--every facility for war or rule in an empire of twenty planets
became useless without the killing of a single man and without the
least hope of resistance.

Only--a long while since, a squadron of Sinabian warships had headed
out for Ades as a part of the program of expansion of the empire. It
had lifted from Sinab Two--then the thriving, comfortable capital of
the empire--and gone into overdrive on its mission.

The distance to be covered was something like thirty light-years.
Overdrive gave a speed two hundred times that of light, which was very
high speed indeed, and had sufficed for the conquest of a galaxy, in
the days when the human race was rising.

But even thirty light-years at that rate required six weeks of
journeying in the stressed space of overdrive. During those six weeks,
of course, there could be no communication with home base.

So the squadron bound for Ades had sped on all unknowing and
unconscious while Khiv Five was beamed and all its men killed and
while the _Starshine_ had essayed a return journey from the Second
Galaxy and then sped crazily to universes beyond men's imagining and
returned, and while the midget fleet of Ades wrecked the empire in
whose service the travelers set out to do murder.

The journeying squadron--every ship wrapped in the utter
unapproachability of faster-than-light travel--was oblivious to all
that had occurred. Its separate ships came out of overdrive some forty
million miles from the solitary planet Ades, lonelily circling its
remote small sun.

The warships of Sinab had an easier task in keeping together
on overdrive than ships of the _Starshine_ class on
transmitter-drive, but even so they went back to normal space forty
million miles from their destination--two second's journey on
overdrive--to group and take final counsel.

Kim Rendell in the _Starshine_ flashed back from the last of the
twenty planets of Sinab as six monster ships emerged from seeming
nothingness. The _Starshine's_ detectors flicked over to the
"_Danger_" signal-strength.

Alarm-gongs clanged violently. The little ship hurtled past a monster
at a bare two-hundred miles distance, and there was another giant a
thousand miles off, and two others and a fifth and sixth....

       *       *       *       *       *

The six ships drew together into battle formation. Their detectors,
too, showed the _Starshine_. More, as other midgets flicked into
being, returning from their raid upon the Empire, they also registered
upon the detector-screens of the battle-fleet.

The fighter-beams of the ships flared into deadliness. They were
astounded, no doubt, by the existence of other space-craft than
those of Sinab. But as the little ships flung at them furiously, the
fighting-beams raged among them.

Small, agile craft vanished utterly as the death-beams hit--thrown into
transmitter-drive before their crews could die. But the Sinabians could
not know that. They drove on. Grandly. Ruthlessly. This planet alone
possessed space-craft and offered resistance.

It had appeared only normal that all the men on Ades should die. Now
it became essential. The murder-fleet destroyed--apparently--the tiny
things which flung themselves recklessly and went on splendidly to
bathe the little planet in death.

The midgets performed prodigies of valor. They flung themselves at the
giants, with the small hard objects that had destroyed an empire held
loosely to the outside of their hulls.

When the death-beams struck and they vanished, the small hard objects
went hurtling on.

They could have been missiles. They traveled at miles per second. But
meteor-repellers flung them contemptuously aside, once they were no
longer parts of space-craft with drives in action.

The little ships tried to ram, and that was impossible. They could do
nothing but make threatening dashes. And the giants went on toward Ades.

From forty million miles to thirty millions the enemy squadron drove
on with its tiny antagonists darting despairingly about it. At thirty
millions, Kim commanded his followers to flee ahead to Ades, give
warning, and take on board what refugees they could.

But there were nineteen million souls on Ades--at most a million had
crowded through to Terranova in the Second Galaxy--and they could do
next to nothing.

At twenty millions of miles, some of the midgets were back with
cases of chemical explosive. They strewed them in the paths of the
juggernaut ships. With no velocity of their own--almost stationary
in space--someone had thought they might not activate the Sinabian
repellers.

But that thought was futile. The repeller-beams stabbed at them with
the force of collisions. The chemical explosives flashed luridly in
emptiness and made swift expanding clouds of vapor, of the tenuity of
comets' tails. The enemy ships came on.

At ten million miles two unmanned ships, guided by remote control,
flashed furiously toward the leading war-craft. They, at least, should
be able to ram.

       *       *       *       *       *

Repeller-beams which focused upon them were neutralized by the
space-torpedoes' drives. They drove in frenziedly. But as they drew
closer the power of the repeller-beams rose to incredible heights and
overwhelmed the power of the little ships' engines and shorted the
field-generating coils and blew out the motors--and the guided missiles
were hurled away, broken hulks.

[Illustration: As the little space torpedoes drew closer, the power of
the repeller-beams rose to incredible heights.]

The fleet reached a mere five million miles from the planet Ades.
Its separate members had come to realize their invincibility against
all the assaults that could be made against them by the defending
forces--unexpected as they were--of this small world.

The fleet divided, to take up appropriate stations above the planet and
direct their projectors of annihilation downward. They would wipe out
every living male upon the planet's surface. They would do it coldly,
remorselessly, without emotion.

Presently the planet would become part of an empire which, in fact,
had ceased to function. The action of the fleet would not only be
horrible--it would be futile. But its personnel could not know that.

The giant ships took position and began to descend.

Odd little blue-white glows appeared in the atmosphere far below.
They seemed quite useless, those blue-white glows. The only effect
that could at once be ascribed to them was the sudden vanishing of
a dozen little ships preparing to make, for the hundredth time,
despairing dashes at the monsters. Those little ships winked out of
existence--gone into transmitter-drive.

And then the big ships wavered in their flight. Automatic controls
seemed to take hold. They checked in their descent, and presently were
motionless....

A roar of triumph came to Kim Rendell's ears from the space-phone
speaker in the _Starshine's_ control-room. The Mayor of Steadheim
bellowed in exultation.

"We got 'em, by Space! We _got_ 'em!"

"Something's happened to them," said Kim. "What?"

"I'm sending up a couple of shiploads of women," rumbled the Mayor of
Steadheim zestfully. "Women from Khiv Five. They'll take over! Remember
you had us go to ground to salvage the two ships that crashed there?

"They bounced when they landed. They shook themselves apart and spilled
themselves in little pieces instead of smashing to powder. We picked
up half a dozen projectors that could be repaired--all neatly tuned to
kill men and leave women unharmed.

"We brought 'em back to Ades and mounted 'em--brought 'em here with
wives for my four sons and a promise of vengeance for the other women
whose men were murdered. We just gave these devils a dose of the
medicine they had for us!

"Those ships are coffins, Kim Rendell! Every man in the crews is dead!
But no man can go aboard until their beams are cut off! I'll send up
the women from Khiv Five to board 'em. They'll attend to things! If
any man's alive they'll slit his throat for him!"



                              CHAPTER IX

                             _Homecoming_


Considerable time later, Kim Rendell eased the _Starshine_ down
through the light of the two Terranovan moons to the matted lawn
outside his homestead in the Second Galaxy. A figure started up from
the terrace and hurried down to greet him as he opened the exit-port
and helped Dona to the ground.

"Who's this?" asked Kim, blinking in the darkness after the lighted
interior of the _Starshine_. "Who--"

"It's me, Kim Rendell," said the Colony Organizer for Terranova. He
sounded unhappy and full of forebodings. "We've been doing all we can
to take care of the crowds who came through the matter-transmitter, but
it was a difficult task--a difficult task!

"Now the crowd of new colonists has dropped to a bare trickle. Every
one has a different story. I was told, though, that you were coming
back in the _Starshine_ and could advise me. I need your advice,
Kim Rendell! The situation may be terrible!"

Kim led the way to the terrace of his house.

"I wouldn't say it will be terrible," he said cheerfully enough. "It's
good to get back home. Dona--"

"I want to look inside," said Dona firmly.

She went within, to satisfy the instinct of every woman who has been
away from home to examine all her dwelling jealously on her return. Kim
stretched himself out in a chair.

The stars--unnamed, unexplored, and infinitely promising--of all the
Second Galaxy twinkled overhead. Terranova's two moons floated serenely
across the sky, and the strange soft scents of the night came to his
nostrils. Kim sniffed luxuriously.

"Ah, this is good!" he said zestfully.

"But what's happened?" demanded the Colony Organizer anxiously. "In
three weeks we had four hundred thousand new arrivals through the
transmitter. Most of them were children and boys.

"Then the flood stopped--like that! What are we to do about them? Did
you get fuel for your ship? I understand the danger from Sinab is over,
but we find it hard to get information from Ades. Everyone there--"

"Everyone there is busy," said Kim comfortably. "You see, we smashed
the Empire without killing more than a very few men. On Sinab Two where
the empire was started, we chased the men out of the cities and put
them at the mercy of the women.

"So many men had emigrated to the planets whose men had been killed
off, that there was a big disproportion even on Sinab. And the women
were not pleased. They'd been badly treated too. We didn't approve of
the men, though.

"We gave them their choice of emigrating to a brand new world, with
only such women as chose to go with them or of being wiped out. They
chose to emigrate. So half the technical men on Ades have been busy
supervising their emigration."

"Not to here?" asked the Colony Organizer in alarm. "We can't feed
ourselves, yet!"

"No, not to here," said Kim drily. "They went to a place we scouted
accidentally in the _Starshine_. They're not likely to come back.
I left a matter-receiver there, and when they've all gone through
it--all the men from twenty planets, with what women want to go with
them--we'll smash that receiver and they'll be on their own.

"They're quite a long way off. Three hundred billion light-years, more
or less. They're not likely to come in contact with our descendents for
several million years yet. By that time they'll either be civilized or
else."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Colony Organizer asked questions in a worried tone. Kim answered
them.

"But twenty-one planets with no men on them," said the Organizer
worriedly, "Those women will all want to come here!"

Kim grinned.

"Not quite all. There were ten men on Ades for every woman. A lot
of them will settle on the twenty planets where the proportion is
reversed. A surprising lot will want to move on to the Second Galaxy,
though."

"But--"

"We'll be ready for them," said Kim. "We've space-ships enough for
exploration now. The Mayor of Steadheim wants a planet for each of his
four sons to colonize. They picked up wives on Khiv Five and want to
get away from the old chap and indulge in a little domesticity.

"And there'll be plenty of others." He added, "We've some big war-craft
to bring over too, in case there's any dangerous animals or--entities
here."

"But--" said the Colony Organizer again.

"We're sending ships through the First Galaxy, too," said Kim, "to do a
little missionary work. After all, twenty-one planets without men!

"So the _Starshine's_ sister-ships will drop down secretly on one
planet after another to start whisperings that a man who's sent to Ades
is a pretty lucky man. If he has courage and brains he's better off
than living as a human sheep under kings or technarchs who'll clap the
disciplinary circuit on him if he thinks for himself.

"There'll be more criminals and rebels than usual from now on. The
flow of men who are not quite sheep will increase. With three hundred
million planets to draw from and the way whispers pass from world to
world, the adventurous spirits will start getting themselves sent to
Ades.

"There'll be planets for them to move to and women to marry and a
leaven of hardy souls to teach them that being a free man is pretty
good fun. We won't make an empire of those twenty-one planets--just a
refuge for every man with backbone in all the Galaxy."

The Colony Organizer looked worried.

"But there are Terranova and the Second Galaxy waiting to be explored
and colonized. Maybe they'll be satisfied to stay there."

Kim laughed. When he ceased to laugh he chuckled.

"I'm here! I've got a wife. Do you suppose that any woman will want her
husband to stay on one of those twenty-one planets for years to come?
Where women outnumber men? Where--well--a man with a roving eye sees
plenty of women about for his eyes to rove to?"

The Colony Organizer still worried, nevertheless, until Dona came out
from the inside of the house. She had assured herself that everything
was intact and her mind was at rest. She brought refreshments for Kim
and their guest. She settled down close beside Kim.

"I was just saying," said Kim, "that I thought there would still
be plenty of people coming from Ades and the twenty-one planets to
Terranova and to settle on the new worlds as they're opened up."

"Of course," said Dona. "I wouldn't live there! Any normal woman, when
she has a husband, will want to move where he'll be safe!"

And she might have been referring to the holocausts on those planets
caused by the death-beams of the dead Sinabian Empire. But even the
Colony Organizer did not think so.



*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The manless worlds" ***


Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.