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Title: The last space ship
Author: Leinster, Murray
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The last space ship" ***
The Last Space Ship
MURRAY LEINSTER
_A Breathtaking Power Packed
Full Length Novel_
GALAXY PUBLISHING CORP.
421 HUDSON STREET
NEW YORK 14, N. Y.
GALAXY _Science Fiction_ Novels, selected by the editors of
GALAXY _Science Fiction_ Magazine, are the choice of science
fiction novels both original and reprint.
GALAXY _Science Fiction_ Novel No. 25
35c a copy. Six Novel Subscriptions $2.00
_Copyright 1949 by Will F. Jenkins_
_Reprinted by arrangement with the publishers,
FREDERICK FELL, INC._
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_by_
THE GUINN COMPANY, INC.
NEW YORK 14, N. Y.
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
PART ONE
THE DISCIPLINARY CIRCUIT
1. Victim of Tyrants
2. Break for Freedom
3. Rays of Destruction
4. Outcasts of Space
5. Super-Science
6. Haven at Last
PART TWO
THE MANLESS WORLDS
1. Empires in the Making
2. The Deadly Beams
3. Contact!
4. Encounter in the Void
5. The Needed Fuel
6. Man-Made Meteor
7. Ready for Action
8. Pitched Battle
9. Homecoming
PART THREE
THE BOOMERANG CIRCUIT
1. Damaged Transmitter
2. Enemy Sabotage
3. Dangerous Trip
4. Despots Take Over
5. Industrial World
6. Vanished World
7. One Chance in a Million
8. Dark Barrier
9. Gadget of Hope
PART ONE
THE DISCIPLINARY CIRCUIT
1
_Victim of Tyrants_
Kim Rendell stood by the propped-up _Starshine_ in the transport
hall of the primary museum on Alphin III. He regarded a placard under
the space-ship with a grim and entirely mirthless amusement. He was
unshaven and hollow-cheeked. He was even ragged. He was a pariah
because he had tried to strike at the very foundation of civilization.
He stood beside the hundred-foot, tapering hull, his appearance marking
him as a blocked man. And he re-read the loan-placard within the
railing about the exhibit:
Citizens, be grateful to Kim Rendell, who shares with you the
pleasure of contemplating this heirloom.
This is a space-ship, like those which for ten thousand years were
the only means of travel between planets and solar systems. Even
after matter-transmitters were devised, space-ships continued to be
used for exploration for many years. Since exploration of the
Galaxy has been completed and all useful planets colonized and
equipped with matter-transmitters, space-ships are no longer in use.
This very vessel, however, was used by Sten Rendell when the first
human colonists came in it to Alphin III, bringing with them the
matter-transmitter which enabled civilization to enter upon and
occupy the planet on which you stand.
This ship is private property, lent to the people of Alphin III by
Kim Rendell, great-grandson of Sten Rendell.
Kim Rendell read it again. He was haggard and hungry. He had been
guilty of the most horrifying crime imaginable to a man of his time.
But the law would not, of course, allow him or any other man to be
coerced by any violence or threat to his personal liberty.
Freedom was the law on Alphin III, a wryly humorous law. No man could
be punished. No man could have any violence offered him. Theoretically,
the individual was free as men had never been free before in all of
human history. Despite Kim's crime, this space-ship still belonged to
him and it could not be taken from him.
Yet he was hungry, and he would remain hungry. He was shabby and he
would grow shabbier. This was the only roof on Alphin III which would
shelter him, and this solely because the law would not permit any man
to be excluded from his rightful possessions.
A lector came up to him and bowed politely.
"Citizen," he said apologetically, "may I speak to you?"
"Why not?" asked Kim grimly. "I am not proud."
The lector said uncomfortably:
"I see that you are in difficulty. Your clothes are threadbare." Then
he added with unhappy courtesy, "You are a criminal, are you not?"
"I am blocked," said Kim in a hard voice. "I was advised by the Prime
Board to leave Alphin Three for my own benefit. I refused. They put on
the first block. Automatically, after that, the other blocks came on
one each day. I have not eaten for three days. I suppose you would call
me a criminal."
"I sympathize deeply," the lector answered unhappily. "I hope that soon
you will concede the wisdom of the advised action and be civilized
again. But may I ask how you entered the museum? The third block
prevents entrance to all places of study."
Kim pointed to the loan-card.
"I am Kim Rendell," he said drily. "The law does not allow me to be
prevented access to my own property. I insisted on my right to visit
this ship, and the Disciplinary Circuit for this building had to be
turned off at the door so I could enter." He shivered. "It is very cold
out-of-doors today, and I could not enter any other building."
The lector looked relieved.
"I am glad to know these things," he said gratefully. "Thank you."
He glanced at Kim with a sort of fluttered curiosity. "It is most
interesting to meet a criminal. What was your crime?"
Kim looked at him under scowling brows.
"I tried to nullify the Disciplinary Circuit."
The lector blinked at him, fascinated, then walked hastily away as if
frightened. Kim Rendell stooped under the railing and approached the
_Starshine_.
The entrance-port was open, and a flush ladder led up to it. Kim,
hollow-cheeked and ragged and defiant, climbed the steps and entered.
The entry-port gave upon a vestibule which Kim knew from his
grandfather's tables to be an airlock. Kim's grandfather had once
gone off into space in the _Starshine_ with his father. It was,
possibly, the last space-flight ever made.
For a hundred years, now, the ship had been a museum-piece, open to
public inspection. But parts had been sealed off as uninstructive. Kim
broke the seals. This was his property, but if he had not already been
a criminal under block, the breaking of the seals would have made him
one. At least, it would have had to be explained to a lector who, at
discretion, could accept the explanation or refer it to a second-degree
counsellor.
The counsellor might deplore the matter and dismiss it, or suggest
corrective self-discipline.
If the seal-breaker did not accept the suggestion the matter would go
to a social board whose suggestion, in turn, could be rejected. But
when it reached the Prime Board--and any matter from the breaking of
a seal to mass murder would go there if suggested self-discipline was
refused--there was no more nonsense.
Kim's case had reached the Prime Board instantly, and he had been
advised to leave Alphin III for his own good. His crime was monstrous,
but he had ironically refused exile.
Now he was under block. His psychogram had been placed in the
Disciplinary Circuit.[1]
[Footnote 1: _Disciplinary Circuit_: The principal instrument of
government during the so-called Era of Perfection in the First Galaxy.
In early ages, all the functions of government were performed by human
beings in person. The Electric Chair (q.v.) was possibly the first
mechanical device to perform a governmental act, that of the execution
of criminals.
The Disciplinary Circuit was a device based upon the discovery of
the psychographic patterns of human beings, which permitted the
exact identification of any person passing through a neuronic field
of the type IX2H.... A development which permitted the induction of
alternative electric currents in any identified person, made the
Disciplinary Circuit possible.... It was first used in prisons,
permitting much less supervision of prisoners (See Prisons and
Prisoners) with equal security.
Later, because it allowed of an enormous reduction in the personnel
of government, all citizens were psychographed. Circuits were set
up in all cities of the First Galaxy. When a broadcast adaptation
became possible, the system was complete. Every citizen was liable to
discipline at any time.
No offender could hide from government. Wherever he might be, he was
subject to punishment focused upon him because of his completely
individual psychographic pattern.... Worship of efficiency and
the obvious reduction in taxes (See Taxes) at first obscured the
possibilities of tyranny inherent in such a governmental system....
[See (1) Era of Perfection, (2) Revolts, (3) Ades, (4) First Galaxy,
Reconquest of. For typical developments of government based upon the
Disciplinary Circuit, see articles on Sirius VIII, Algol II, Norten V
and the almost unbelievable but authenticated history of government on
Voorten II.]
_Encyclopaedia of History, Vol. XXIV. Cosmopolis, 2nd Galaxy._]
* * * * *
On the first day he was blocked from the customary complete outfit of
new garments, clean, sterile, and of his own choice. These garments
normally arrived by his bedside in the carrier which took away the old
ones to be converted back to raw material for the garment machines.
On the second day he could enter no place of public recreation. An
attempt to pass the door of any sport-field, theatre, or concert
stadium caused the Disciplinary Circuit to act. His body began to
tingle. He could turn back then. If he persisted, the tingling became
more severe. If he was obstinate, it became agony, which continued
until he turned back.
On the third day he found it impossible to enter any place of study or
labor. The fourth day blocked him from any place where food or drink
was served. On the fifth day his own quarters were barred to him.
After seven days the city and the planet would be barred. Anywhere
he went, his body would tingle, gently in the morning, more and more
strongly as the day wore on, until the torment became unbearable. Then
he would go to the matter-transmitter, name his chosen place of exile,
and walk off the planet which was Alphin III.
But it happened that Kim was a matter-transmitter technician. It
happened that he knew that the Disciplinary Circuit was tied in to the
matter-transmitter, and blocked men were not sent to destinations of
their own choosing.
Blocked men automatically went to Ades. And they did not come back.
Ever.
Behind the sealed-off parts of the space-ship, Kim searched hungrily
and worked desperately, not for food, of course. He had determined to
attempt the impossible. He had accomplished only the first step toward
it when he felt an infinitesimal tingling all over his body. He stood
rigid for a second, and then smiled grimly. He closed the casing of the
catalyzer he had examined and worked on.
"Just in time," he said. "The merciless brutes!"
He moved from the catalyzer. A moment later he heard footsteps. Someone
came up the flush ladder and into the space-ship. Kim Rendell turned
his head. Then he bent over the fuel-register, which amazingly showed
the tanks to be almost one-twelfth full of fuel, and stood motionless.
The footsteps moved here and there. Presently they came cautiously to
the engine-room. Kim did not stir. A man made an indescribable sound of
satisfaction. Kim, not moving even his eyes, saw that it was the lector
who had spoken to him outside the ship. He did not address Kim now.
With a quite extraordinary air of someone about to pick up an inanimate
object, the lector laid hands upon Kim to lift him off his feet.
"Citizen!" Kim said severely. "What does this mean?"
The lector gasped. He fell back. His mouth dropped open and his face
went white.
"I--I thought you were paralyzed."
"I do not care what you thought," Kim said. "It is against the law for
any citizen to lay violent hands upon another."
By an effort the lector babbler regained his self-control.
"You--you.... The Circuit failed to work!"
"You reported that I had entered this ship," Kim said drily. "There is
some uneasiness about what I do, because of my crime. So the Circuit
was applied to paralyze me, and you were ordered to bring me quietly to
the matter-transmitter. As you observe, it is not practical. Go back
and report it."
The lector said something incoherent, turned and fled. Kim followed him
leisurely to the entry-port. He turned the hand-power wheels which put
a barrier across the entrance. He went back to his examination of the
ship. The first part of the impossible had been achieved, but there was
much more, too much more, which must be done. He worked feverishly.
His grandfather had told him many tales of the _Starshine_.
She had made voyages of as long as two years in emptiness, at full
acceleration, during which she had covered four hundred light-years
of space, had purified her air, and fed her crew. Her tanks could
hold fuel for six years' drive at full acceleration and her
food-synthesizers, primitive as they were by modern standards, could
yet produce some four hundred foodstuffs from the carbon, hydrogen,
nitrogen, and traces of other elements into which almost any organic
raw material could be resolved.
She was, in fact, one of the last and most useful space-ships ever
constructed at the last space-ship yard in existence. She was almost
certainly the last ever to be used. But she was only a museum-piece
now and her switches were opened and her control-cables severed lest
visitors to the museum injure her. But Kim's grandfather had lectured
him at great length upon her qualities. The old gentleman had had an
elderly man's distaste for modern perfectionism.
Kim threw switches here and there. He spliced cables wherever he found
them cut. He was hungry and he was gaunt, and he worked with a bitter
anticipation of failure. He had been in the museum for almost an hour,
and in the ship for half of that, when voices called politely through
the barrier-grille.
"Citizen Kim Rendell, may we enter?"
He made sure it was safe, then opened the way.
"Enter and welcome, citizens," he said ironically, in the prescribed
formula. But his hands were clenched and he was all ready to fight for
his life.
2
_Break for Freedom_
Slowly the Prime Board of Alphin III filed up the flush ladder and into
the cabin of the _Starshine_. There was Malby, who looked like an
elderly sheep. There was Ponter, who rather resembled an immature frog.
There was Shimlo, who did not look like anything but an advanced case
of benevolent imbecility, and Burt, who at least looked intelligent and
whom Kim Rendell hated with a corrosive hatred.
"Greeting, citizen," Malby said. Even his voice had a bleating quality.
"Despite your crime, we have broken all precedent to come and reason
with you. You are not mad, yet you act like a madman."
Kim grinned savagely at him.
"Come, now! I found a material that changes a man's psychogram, so he's
immune to the Disciplinary Circuit. I was immune to discipline. So you
four had me seized and my little amulet taken away from me. And then
you sealed up every other bit of that material on the planet. Not so?"
"Naturally," Burt said pleasantly. "The Disciplinary Circuit is
the basis of civilization nowadays. All discipline and hence all
civilization would cease if the Circuit were nullified. Naturally, you
must be disposed of."
"But carefully, so if there is anyone who shares my secret, he'll be
betrayed by trying to help me!" said Kim. "And quietly, too, so those
amiable sheep, my fellow-citizens, won't suspect there's anything
wrong. They don't realize that they're slaves. They don't know of
your pleasure-palaces on the other side of the planet. They don't
realize that, when you take a fancy to a woman and she's blocked in her
quarters until she's hysterical with fear and loneliness, you advise
her to take psychological treatments which make her a submissive inmate
of the harems you keep there. They don't know what happens to men you
put under block for being too inquisitive about those women and who
enter the matter-transmitter for exile."
Burt looked mildly inquiring. "What does happen to them?"
"Ades!" Kim said furiously. "They go to the transmitter and name their
chosen place of exile, and the transmitter-clerk dutifully pushes the
proper buttons, but the Circuit takes over. They go to Ades! And no man
has ever come back."
There was a sudden tension in the air. Burt looked at his fellows.
Shimlo was the picture of benevolent indignation, but his eyes were
ugly. Ponter opened his mouth and closed it absurdly, looking more than
ever like a frog.
"This is monstrous!" Malby bleated. "This is monstrous!"
Burt held up his hand.
"How did you get this strange idea?" he asked.
"I'm a matter-transmitter technician, fourth grade," Kim said coldly.
"I worked on the transmitter when it gave trouble. I found the
Disciplinary Circuit tie-in. I traced it. So I knew there was something
wrong about all personal freedom on Alphin III and I started to look
for more things wrong. I found them. I started to do something about
them. Then I got caught."
Burt nodded.
"So!" he said thoughtfully. "We underestimated you, Kim Rendell. It
is much pleasanter to rule Alphin Three as beloved citizens than as
admitted tyrants. There are times when we have to protect ourselves.
Naturally, we would rather not show our hands. It is clear that you
must be sent into exile. Frankly, to Ades--whatever it may be like
there. Apparently you did not have any friends."
"I dared not trust any of the sheep you rule," Kim said angrily. "But
I did know there was more hafnium on this ship. I didn't dare come
at first, or you'd have guessed. But after I'd starved a bit and was
convincingly cold, I risked the venture. You guessed my intention
too late. I can defy you again, even if you did take away my first
protection from the Circuit. You know that?"
Burt nodded again.
"Of course," he admitted. "Yet we do not want a scandal. We will make
a bargain within limits. You must be disposed of, but we will promise
that you can go wherever you choose via the matter-transmitter."
"Your word's no good," Kim snapped.
"You will starve," Burt said mildly. "Of course you can seal yourself
in the ship, but we will have lectors, special lectors, waiting for you
when you come out again."
Kim scowled. "Yes?" he said. "I've been here half an hour. The ship's
circuits were cut, but I've put the communicator back in working order.
I can broadcast over the entire planet, telling the truth. I won't
destroy your power, but I'll make your slaves begin to realize what
they are. Sooner or later, one of them will kill you."
Malby bleated. It was not necessarily panic, but there are some minds
to whom public admiration is necessary. Such persons will commit any
crime to get admiration which they crave with a passionate desire. Burt
held up his hand again.
"But why tell us?" he asked pleasantly. "Why didn't you simply
broadcast what you've learned? Possibly it was because you wished to
bargain with us first? You have terms?"
Kim ground his teeth.
"That's right," he said. "There is a girl, Dona Brett. She was to marry
me, but one of you saw her, I think you, Burt. She is now blocked in
her quarters to grow hysterical and terrified. It was on account of her
that I acted too soon, and got caught. I want her here."
Burt considered without perceptible emotion.
"She is quite pretty, but there are others," he said in his detached
way. "If we send her, you will not broadcast?"
"I'll kill her and myself," Kim said. "It's apparently the only service
I can do her. Get out, now. It will take your best technician at least
forty minutes to make a scrambler which will keep me from broadcasting.
I'll give you twenty minutes to get her to me. I'll talk to all the
planet if she isn't here."
Burt shrugged.
"Almost, I overestimated you," he said mildly. "I thought you had an
actual plan. Very well. She will come. But if I were you, I would not
delay my suicide."
Burt's eyes gleamed for an instant. Then he went out, followed by
the others. Kim worked the controls which sealed the ship. He got
feverishly to work again.
From time to time he stared desperately out of the vision-ports, and
then resumed his labors. His task seemingly was an impossible one.
The _Starshine_ had been made into a mere museum exhibit. It was
complete, but Kim's knowledge was inadequate and his time far too short.
Eighteen minutes passed before he saw Dona. She stood quietly beside
the railing outside the space-ship, alone and quite pale. He opened
the outer airlock door. She came up. He closed the outer door and
opened the inner. She faced him. She was deathly white. As she saw him,
hollow-cheeked and bitter, she managed to smile.
"My poor Kim! What did they do to you?"
"Blocked me!" Kim cried. "Took away my hafnium gadget and put me on
the Circuit. They locked up every scrap of hafnium on the planet
behind an all-citizen block. They just didn't know that it was used in
space-ships in the fuel-catalyzers. I've found enough to make the two
of us safe, though. Here!" He thrust a scrap of metal into her hand.
"Hold it tightly. It has to touch your skin."
She caught her breath.
"I was blocked in my quarters, and I couldn't come out," she told him
unsteadily. "I was going crazy with terror, because you'd told me what
it might mean. I tried--so hard--to break through. But flesh and blood
can't face the Circuit. I hadn't any reason to hope that you'd be able
to do anything, but I did hope."
"I told them I'd kill both of us," he said fiercely. "Maybe I shall!
But if I can only find the right cable, we'll have a chance!"
Suddenly, every muscle in his body went rigid and a screaming torment
filled him. It lasted for part of a second. His face went gray. He
wetted his lips.
"Burt!" he said thickly. "He had a psychometer under his robe. They
came here, and he knew my psychogram was changed by the hafnium I'd
found, so while they talked he stole the new pattern. It's taken them
this long to get it ready for the Circuit. Now they're putting it in."
With a sudden, convulsive jerk, he went rigid once more. His muscles
stood out in great knots. He was paralyzed, with every nerve and sinew
in his body tensed to tetanic rigor. Agony filled him with an exquisite
torment. It was the Disciplinary Circuit. It was those waves broadcast,
focused upon him at full power. They would have found him anywhere upon
the planet. And their torment was unspeakable.
Dona sobbed suddenly.
"Kim!" she cried desperately. "I know you can hear me! Listen! They
must have me on the Circuit too, only what you gave me has thrown it
off. They expect to hold us paralyzed while they cut in with torches
and take us. But they mustn't! So I'm going to give you the thing
you gave me. If it changed my pattern, it will change yours again,
to something they can't guess at." She sobbed again. "Please, Kim!
Don't give it back. Go ahead and do what you planned, whatever it is.
And if you don't win out, please kill me before you give up. Please!
I don't want to be conditioned to do whatever they want in their
pleasure-palaces."
She took the tiny sliver of metal in her shaking fingers. She pushed
aside the flesh of her hand to put it in his grip. Courageously she
released it.
The agonized paralysis left Kim Rendell. But now Dona was a pitiful
figure of agony.
Kim groaned. Rage filled him. His anguish and fury was so terrible
that he would have destroyed the whole planet, had he been able. But
he could not permit her gift, which she had given at the price of such
torment, to go without reward. He must struggle on to save them both,
even though now he had no hope.
He sprang to the control-board. He stabbed at buttons almost at random,
hoping for a response. He'd tried to get the ship into some sort of
operating condition, but now there was no time. Frenziedly he attempted
to find some combination of controls which would make something,
anything happen. He slipped the second bit of hafnium into his mouth to
have both hands free. In desperation he ripped the control-board panel
loose. He saw clipped wires everywhere behind it. Seizing the dangling
ends, he struck them fiercely together. A lurid blue spark leaped. He
cried out in triumph, and the morsel of metal Dona had sacrificed to
him dropped from his lips.
His muscles contorted and agony filled him.
There was a roaring noise. The _Starshine_ bucked violently. There
were crashes and there was a feeling of intolerable weight which he
could feel, despite his agony. The ship reeled crazily. It smashed
through a wall. It battered into a roof. It spun like a mad thing and
went skyward tail-first with Kim Rendell in frozen, helpless torment,
holding two cables together with muscles utterly beyond his control.
It went up toward empty space, in which no other vessel was navigating
anywhere.
3
_Rays of Destruction_
Eventually the "_Starshine_," alone in space as no other
space-ship had been alone in twenty thousand years, behaved like a
sentient thing. At first, of course, her actions were frenzied, almost
insane, as if the Disciplinary Circuit waves which made Dona a statue
of agony and kept Kim frozen with contorted muscles could affect the
space-ship too.
Wildly the little vessel went upward through air which screamed as it
parted for her passage. She yawed and swayed and ludicrously plunged
backwards. The screaming of the air rose to a shriek, and then to a
high thin whistle, and then ceased altogether. Finally she was free of
the air of Alphin III.
After this she really made speed, backing away from the planet. Her
meteor-detectors had been turned on in one of Kim's random splicings,
and when current reached them they reported a monstrous obstruction in
her path and shunted in the meteor-repelling beams. The obstacle was
the planet itself, and the beams tried to push it away. Naturally, they
pushed the ship itself away, out into the huge chasm of interplanetary
space.
It kept up for a long time, too, because Kim was paralyzed by the
broadcast waves. They were kept focused upon him by the psychographic
locator. So long as those waves of the Disciplinary Circuit came
up through the ionosphere, Kim's spasmodically contracted muscles
kept together the two cables which had started everything. But the
_Starshine_ backed away at four gravities acceleration, faster and
ever faster, and ordinary psychographic locators are not designed for
use beyond planetary distances.
Ultimately the tormenting radio-beam lessened from sheer distance. At
last the influence broke off suddenly and Kim's hands on the leads
dropped away. The beam fumbled back to contact, and wavered away again,
and presently was only a tingling sensation probing for a target the
locators could no longer keep lined up.
Then the _Starshine_ seemed to lose her frenzy and become merely
a derelict. She sped on, giving no sign of life for a time. Then her
vision-ports glowed abruptly. Kim Rendell, working desperately against
time and with the chill of outer space creeping into the ship's
unpowered hull, had found a severed cable which supplied light and
heat.
An hour later still, the ship steadied in her motion. He had traced
down the gyros' power-lead and set them to work.
Two hours later yet the _Starshine_ paused in her flight. Her
long, pointed nose turned about. A new element of motion entered the
picture she made. She changed course.
At last, as if having her drive finally in operation gave her something
of purposefulness, the slim space-ship ceased to look frenzied or
frowsy or bemused, and swam through space with a serene competence,
like something very much alive and knowing exactly what she was about.
She came to rest upon the almost but not quite airless bulk of Alphin
II some thirty hours after her escape from Alphin III. Kim was
desperately hungry. But for the lesser gravity of the smaller inner
planet, which was responsible for its thinned-out atmosphere, he might
have staggered as he walked. Certainly a normal space-suit would have
been a heavy burden for a man who had starved for days. Dona, also,
looked pale and worn-out when she took from him the things he brought
back through the airlock.
They put the great masses of spongy, woody stuff in the synthesizer. It
was organic matter. Some of it, perhaps, could have been consumed as
food in its original state. But the synthesizer received it, and hummed
and buzzed quietly to itself, and presently the man and woman ate.
The synthesizer was not the equivalent of those magnificently complex
food-machines which in public dining-halls provide almost every dish
the gourmets have ever invented from raw materials. But it did make a
palatable meal from the tasteless vegetation of the small planet.
Kim said quietly, when they had finished eating, "Now we'll find out
for certain what Burt intends to do about us." He grimaced. "He's
dangerously intelligent. He underestimated me before. He may consider
us dead, or he may overestimate us. I think he'll play it safe. I
would, in his place."
"What does that mean?" Dona asked wistfully. "We will be able
to go to some other planet, won't we, Kim? As if we'd gone in the
matter-transmitter in a perfectly normal fashion? Simply to take up
residence on another world?"
Kim shook his head. "I'm beginning to doubt it," he said slowly. "The
discovery that with a bit of hafnium a man can change his psychographic
pattern is high explosive. If the Disciplinary Circuit can't pick him
out as an individual, any man can defy any government which depends
on the Circuit. Which means that no government is safe. I've got to
remove you for the sake of the government everywhere in the Galaxy."
"But they can't touch us here," said Dona. "We're safe now."
Kim shook his head.
"No. I was too hungry to think, before. We're not safe. I've got to
work like the devil. Do you remember your Galactic History? Remember
what the Disciplinary Circuit was built up to? Remember the Last War?
It's not only the space-ships which went into museums. I'm suddenly
scared stiff."
He stood up and abruptly began to put on the space-suit again. His face
had become haggard.
"In the Last War there were no battles, only massacres," he said curtly
as he snapped buckles. "There was no victory. They used a beam which
was a stepped-up version of the Disciplinary Circuit. They called it
a fighting-beam, then, and they thought they could fight with it. But
they couldn't. It simply made war impossible. So ultimately they hooded
over the projectors of the fighting-beams, and most of them probably
fell to rust. But there are some in the museums. If Burt and the others
want to play safe, they'll haul those projectors out of the museum and
hook them up to find and kill us. And there's no question but that they
can do it."
He stepped into the airlock and closed the door, still fumbling with
the last adjustments to his space-suit.
Dona was puzzled by his gloomy forebodings. She heard the outer door
open. As she stood there bewildered, she heard him bringing more raw
food-stuff to the airlock with a feverish haste. He made two trips,
three, and four.
She found herself screaming shrilly because of an agony already past.
It had been a bare flash of pain. It was gone in the fraction of a
second, in the fraction of a millisecond. But it was such pain! It was
the anguish of the Disciplinary Circuit a thousand times multiplied.
It was such torment as the ancients tried vainly to picture as the lot
of damned souls in hell. Had it lasted, any living creature would have
died of sheer suffering.
But it flashed into being, and was gone, and Dona had cried out in a
strangled voice. She was filled with a horrible weakness from the one
instant of anguish, and she felt stark panic lest it come again.
The outer airlock door slammed shut. The inner opened. Kim came
staggering within. He did not strip off the space-suit. He ran
clumsily toward the now-repaired control-panel, his face contorted.
"Lie down flat!" he shouted as he opened his face-plate. "I'm taking
off."
The _Starshine_ roared from the almost-barren world which was
an inferior planet of the sun Alphin, not worth colonization by men.
Acceleration built up and built up and built up to the very limit of
what the human body could stand.
After twenty minutes, it dropped from four gravities to one.
"Dona!" Kim called hoarsely.
She answered faintly.
"They've got the ancient projectors hooked up," he said as hoarsely
as before. "They're searching for us. We were so far away that the
beam flashed past. It won't record finding us for minutes, as it'll
take time for the response to get back. That's what will save us, but
they're bound to touch us occasionally until we get out of range."
The _Starshine_ swung about in space. The brutal acceleration
began again, at an angle to the former line of motion.
Ten minutes later there was another moment of intolerable pain. Every
nerve in their bodies jumped in a tetanic convulsion. Had it continued,
their muscles would have torn loose from their bones and their hearts
would have burst from the violence of the fearful contraction. The
_Starshine_ would have gone on senselessly as a speeding coffin.
But again the searing torment lasted for only the fraction of a second.
Back on Alphin III, great projectors swept across the sky. They were
ancient devices, those projectors. They were quaint, even primitive
in appearance. But a thousand years before they had been the final
word in armament. They represented an attack against which there was
no defense. A defense which could not be breached. Those machines had
ended wars.
They poured forth tight beams of the same wave-frequencies and forms
of which the Disciplinary Circuit was a more ancient development
still. But where the Circuit was an exquisitely sensitive device for
the exquisitely graduated torment of individuals, these beams were
murderers of men. They were not tuned to the psychographic patterns of
single persons, but coarsely, in irresistible strength, to all living
matter containing given amino-chain molecules. In short, to all men.
And they had made the Last War the last. There had been one battle in
that war. It had taken place near Canis Major, where there had been
forty thousand warships of space lined up in hostile array. The two
fleets were almost equally matched in numbers, and both possessed the
fighting beams. They hurtled toward each other, the beams stabbing out
ahead. They interpenetrated each other and went on, blindly.
It was a hundred years before the last of the run-away derelicts
blundered to destruction or was picked up by other space-ships which
then still roved the space-ways. Because there was no defense against
the fighting-beams, which were aimed by electronic devices, a ship did
not cease to fight when its crew was dead. And every crew had died
when a fighting-beam lingered briefly on their ship. There was not
one single survivor of the Battle of Canis Major. The fleets plunged
at each other, and every living thing in both fleets had perished
instantly. Thereafter the empty ships fought on as robots against all
other ships. So there were no more wars.
For two hundred years after that battle, the planets of the Galaxy
continued to mount their projectors and keep their detector-screens
out. But war had defeated itself. There could be no victories, but only
joint suicides. There could be no conquests, because even a depopulated
planet's projectors would still destroy all life in any approaching
space-ship for as many years as the projectors were powered for. But in
time, more especially after matter-transmitters had made space-craft
useless, they were forgotten. All but those which went into museums for
the instruction of the young.
These resuscitated weapons were now at work to find and kill Kim
and Dona. In a sense it was like trying to kill flies with a
sixteen-inch gun. The difficulties of aiming were extreme. To set up a
detector-field and neutralize it would take time and skill which were
not available.
So the beams swept through great arcs, with operators watching for
signs of contact. It was long minutes after the first contact before
the instruments on the projectors recorded it, because the news could
only go back at the speed of light. Then the projectors had to retrace
their path, and the _Starshine_ had moved. The beams had to fumble
blindly for the fugitives, and they told of each touch, but only after
it occurred. And Kim struggled to make his course unpredictable.
In ten hours the beam struck four times only, because Kim changed
course and acceleration so fiercely and so frequently that a contact
could only be a matter of chance.
Then for a long time there was no touch at all. In two days Alphin, the
sun, had dwindled until it was merely the brightest of the stars, with
a barely perceptible disk. On the third day the beam found them yet
again, and Dona burst into hysterical sobs. But it was not really bad,
this time. There is a limit to the distance to which a tight beam can
be held together in space, by technicians who have no space-experience
and instinctive know-how.
Within hours after this fifth contact, Kim Rendell found the last key
break in the control-cables of the ship, and was able to throw on
the overdrive, by which the _Starshine_ fled from Alphin at two
hundred times the speed of light. Then, of course, they were safe. Even
had the beam of agony been trained directly upon the ship, it could not
have overtaken them.
But Dona was a bundle of shrinking nerves when it was over, and Kim
raged as he looked at her scared eyes.
"I know," she said unsteadily, when he had her in the control-room to
look at the cosmos as it appeared at faster-than-light speed. "I know
I'm silly, Kim. It can't hurt us any more. We're going to another solar
system entirely. They won't know anything about us. We're all right.
Quite all right. But I'm just all in little pieces."
With somber brow, Kim stared at the vision-plates about him. The
Universe as seen at two hundred light-speeds was not a reassuring
sight. All stars behind had vanished. All those on either hand were
dimmed to near-invisibility. Ahead, where the very nose of the
space-ship pointed, there were specks of light in a recognizable
star-pattern, but the colors and the magnitudes were incredible.
"We're heading now for Cetis Alpha," Kim said slowly, after a
long time. "It's the next nearest solar system. Our fuel-tanks
are one-twelfth full. We have power to travel a distance of fifty
light-years, no more, and it would take us three months to cover that.
Cetis Alpha is seven light-years away, or it was."
"We're going to settle on one of the planets there?" Dona asked
hopefully. "What are they like, Kim?"
"You might look them up in the Pilot," Kim said, rather glumly. "There
are six inhabited ones."
"You sound worried," she said. "What is it?"
"I'm wondering," Kim admitted. "If Burt and the Prime Board should send
word ahead of us by matter-transmitter, to these six planets and all
the other inhabited planets within fifty or a hundred light-years,
it would be awkward for us. Transmission by matter-transmitter is
instantaneous, and it wouldn't take too long for the governments on
the Cetis Alpha planets to set up detectors and remount the projectors
which could kill us. Burt would call us very dangerous criminals. He'd
say we were so dangerous we had better be killed before we land." He
paused, and added, "He's right."
"I don't see why they should do anything so cruel."
"We've struck at the foundation of government," Kim said savagely. "On
Alphin Three there's a pretense that all men are free, and we know
it's a lie. But on the other planets they don't even pretend. On Loré
Four they have a king. On Markab Two the citizens wear collars of
metal--slave-collars--and members of the aristocracy have the right to
murder social inferiors at pleasure. On Andrometa Nine the Disciplinary
Circuit, and so the government, is in the hands of a blood-thirsty
lunatic. The Circuit backs all governments alike, the supposedly free
and the frankly despotic governments impartially. We're a danger to all
of them. Even a decent government, if there is one, would dread having
its citizens able to defy the Circuit. Yet in ten words I can tell how
to nullify the one instrument on which all government is based. Once
that knowledge gets loose, nothing can suppress it."
Dona sighed.
"I was hoping we could go some place where we would be safe," she said.
"Isn't there any such place?"
Kim's laugh was bitter.
"I wonder if there's any place where we can be free," he said. "I
planned big, Dona, but it didn't work out. There wasn't another man on
Alphin Three who wanted to be free as much as I did. I'd about decided
that just the two of us would put on protectors and journey from one
planet to another in search of freedom. But then Burt saw you, and you
were locked up so you'd go frantic with fear and loneliness. Later
they'd have given you a psychological conditioning to cure you of
terror, and sent you away to Burt's pleasure-palace."
"Why didn't you take me away before Burt saw me?" she asked. "Why did
you wait?"
Kim groaned. "Because I wasn't ready. When I realized the danger, I
tried to get you, and I was caught. They found out what I had and
everything became hopeless. They put me on block to see if anyone would
try to befriend me, but I hadn't any friends. I didn't know anyone
else who wouldn't have been frightened if I'd told him he was a slave.
I threatened the Prime Board with a broadcast, but I'm afraid nobody
would have believed me."
"It all happened because of me," Dona said. "Forget what I said about
wanting to be safe, Kim. I don't care any more, not if I'm with you."
Kim scowled at the weird pattern of strangely-colored stars upon the
vision-plate.
"We're using a lot of our fuel in trying for Cetis Alpha's planets. I'd
like to--well--have a marriage ceremony."
Despite her anxiety, Dona burst out laughing.
"It's about time, you big lug!" she cried. "I was beginning to lose
hope."
Kim laughed too. "All right. I'll see if it can be managed. But if
warnings have been sent ahead of us, marriage may be difficult."
4
_Outcasts of Space_
Like a silver arrow, the "_Starshine_" continued to bore on
through a weird, synthetic Universe, two hundred times faster than
light. In the space-ship Kim worked angrily, making desperate attempts
to devise a method of nullifying the non-individualized fighting beams
with which--now that he was in free space in a space-ship--any attempt
to land upon an inhabited planet might be frustrated.
In the end he constructed two small wristlets, one for himself and
one for Dona to wear. If tuned waves of the Circuit struck them, the
wristlets might nullify them. But if the fighting-beams struck, that
would be another story.
Twelve days after turning on the overdrive, which by changing the
constants of space about the space-ship, made two hundred light-speeds
possible, Kim turned it off. He had previously assured himself that
Dona was wearing the little gadget he had built. As he snapped off the
overdrive field, the look of the Universe changed with a startling
suddenness. Stars leaped into being on every side, amazingly bright
and astoundingly varicolored. Cetis Alpha loomed almost dead ahead, a
glaring globe of fire with enormous streamers streaming out on every
side.
There were planets, too. As the _Starshine_ jogged on at a normal
interplanetary--rather than interstellar--speed, Dona focused the
electron telescope upon the nearest. It was a great, round disk,
with polar ice-caps and extraordinarily interconnected seas, so that
there were innumerable small continents distributed everywhere. Green
vegetation showed, and patches of cloud, and when Dona turned the
magnification up to its very peak, they were certain that they saw the
pattern of a magnificent metropolis.
She looked at it hungrily. Kim regarded it steadily. They did not speak
for a long time.
"It would be nice there," Dona said longingly, at last. "Do you think
we can land, Kim?"
"We're going to try," he told her.
But they didn't. They were forty million miles away when a sudden
overwhelming anguish smote them both. All the Universe ceased to be....
* * * * *
Six weeks later, Kim Rendell eased the _Starshine_ to a landing on
the solitary satellite of the red dwarf sun Phanis. It was about four
thousand miles in diameter. Its atmosphere was about one-fourth the
density needed to support human life. Such vegetation as it possessed
was stunted and lichenous. The terrain was tumbled and upheaved, with
raw rock showing in great masses which had apparently solidified in a
condition of frenzied turmoil. It had been examined and dismissed as
useless for human colonization many centuries since. That was why Kim
and Dona could land upon it.
They had spent half their store of fuel in the desperate effort to find
a planet on which they could land.
Their attempt to approach Cetis Alpha VI had been the exact type of
all their fruitless efforts. They came in for a landing, and while yet
millions of miles out, recently reinstalled detector-screens searched
them out. Newly stepped-up long distance psychographic finders had
identified the _Starshine_ as containing living human beings.
Then projectors, taken out of museums, had hurled at them the deadly
pain-beams which had made war futile a thousand years before. They
might have died within one second, from the bursting of their hearts
and the convulsive rupture of every muscular anchorage to every bone,
except for one thing.
Kim's contrived wristlets had saved them. The wristlets, plus a relay
on a set of controls to throw the _Starshine_ into overdrive
travel through space. The wristlets contained a morsel of hafnium, so
that any previous psychographic record of them as individuals would
no longer check with the psychogram a searchbeam would encounter.
But also, on the first instant of convulsive contraction of muscles
beneath the wristlets, they emitted a frantic, tiny signal. That signal
kicked over the control-relay. The _Starshine_ flung itself into
overdrive escape, faster than light, faster than the pain-beams could
follow.
They had suffered, of course. Horribly. But the pain-beams could not
play upon them or more than the tenth of a millisecond before the
_Starshine_ vanished into faster-than-light escape. They had
tried each of the six planets of Cetis Alpha. They had gone rather
desperately to Cetis Gamma, with four inhabited planets, and Sorene,
with three. Then the inroads on their scant fuel-supply and their
dwindling store of vegetation from Alphin II made them accept defeat.
The massed volumes of the Galactic Pilot for this sector, age-yellowed,
brittle volumes now, had told them of vegetation on the useless planet
of the dwarf star Phanis. They came to it. Kim was stunned and bitter.
And they landed.
After the ship had settled down in a weird valley with fantastic
overhanging cliffs and a frozen small waterfall nearby, the two of them
went outside. They wore space-suits, of course, because of the extreme
thinness of the air.
"I suppose we can call this home, now," Kim said bitterly.
It was night. The sky was cloudless, and all the stars of the Galaxy
looked down upon them as they stood in the biting cold. His voice went
by space-phone to the helmet of Dona, by his side.
"I guess I can stand it if you can, Kim," she said quietly.
"We've got fuel for six weeks' drive," he said ironically. "That means
we can go to any place within twenty-five light-years. We've tried
every solar system in that range. They're all warned against us. They
all had their projectors in operation. We couldn't land. And we'd have
starved unless we got to some new material for the synthesizer. This
was the only place we could land on. So we have to stand it, if we
stand anything."
Dona was silent for a little while.
"We've got each other, Kim," she said slowly.
"For a limited time," he said. "If we use our fuel only for heat and to
run the synthesizer for food, it will probably last several years. But
ultimately it will run out and we'll die."
"Are you sorry you threw away everything for me, Kim?" asked Dona. "I'm
not sorry I'm with you. I'd rather be with you for a little while and
then die. Certainly death is better than what I faced."
Kim made a furious gesture.
"It's recognized, everywhere, that the population of a planet has the
right to make all the laws of that planet. We are the population here.
We could be married by our own act. But suppose we had children? When
our fuel gives out they'd die with us. I think we'd go mad anticipating
that. We can't even have each other. We're imprisoned here as they used
to imprison criminals. For life. We can have no hope. There is nothing
we can work at. We can't even try to do anything."
He clenched his hands inside his space-gloves. Dona looked at him.
"Are you going to give up, Kim?"
"Give up what?" Then he said bitterly, "No, Dona. I'm going to find
some excuse for hoping. Some lie I can tell myself. But I'll know I'm
simply trying to deceive myself."
There was a long silence. Hopelessness. Futility.
"I've been thinking, Kim," Dona said softly, at last. "There are three
hundred million inhabited planets. There are trillions and quintillions
of people in the Galaxy. If they knew about us, some of them at least
would want to help us. There are some, probably, who'd hope we could
help them. If we were to think of a new approach to the problem we
face, and reach the people who would want to help us, it might mean
eventual rescue."
"Signals travel at the speed of light," Kim said. "We'd be dead long
before even a tight-beam signal could reach another star-cluster, if
there were anybody there to receive or act on it. But there aren't any
space-ships except the _Starshine_. It was the last ship used in
the Galaxy."
Dona said stoutly:
"We've been regarding our predicament as if it were unique, as if
nobody else in the Universe wanted to be free. As if there was only
one problem--ours! I heard a story once, Kim. It was about a man who
had to carry a certain particular grain of dust to another place. A
silly story, of course. But this was the top grain in a dust-pile. The
man tried to find something that would pick up the one grain of dust,
and something that would hold it quite safe. But he couldn't solve the
problem. There wasn't any box that would hold a single grain of dust.
He couldn't even pick up a solitary dust-grain. And how could he carry
it if he couldn't pick it up?"
"That's a fable," Kim said, harshly. "There's a moral?"
Dona smiled. "Yes," she said. "There is. He picked up the dust-grain.
With a shovel. He picked up a lot of others, too, but that didn't
matter. And he could find a box to hold a hundred thousand dust-grains,
when he couldn't find a box to hold one."
Kim was silent. Dona nodded and smiled at him.
"If you want a new way to think, how about thinking not just of us and
our problem, but the problem of all the people like us who have gone
into revolt?" she said. "How about all the people who've been sent to
Ades? How about all those who will go in years to come? I don't know
the answer, Kim, but it's another way to think. Since we've failed to
solve a little problem by itself, suppose we look at it as part of a
big one? It's a new approach, anyhow."
There was silence. The bright, many-colored stars overhead moved
perceptibly toward what would be called the west by age-old custom.
Weird shapes of frozen rock loomed above the space-ship, and the
starlight glimmered up on thin hoarfrost which settled everywhere upon
this small planet in the dark hours.
Kim stirred suddenly, and was still again. Dona continued to watch
him. She could not see his face, but it seemed to her that he stood
straighter, somehow. Then, suddenly, he spoke gruffly.
"Let's go back in the ship," he said. "Space-suits are admirable
inventions, Dona, but they have limitations. I can't kiss you through a
space-helmet."
He did not wait until they were out of the airlock, and she clung to
him. Then he grinned for the first time in many days.
"My dear," he said contentedly. "Not only are you the best-looking
female I ever saw, but you've got brains. Now watch me!"
"What are you going to do?" she asked breathlessly.
"Too much to waste time talking about it," he told her. "Want to
help? Look up Ades in the Pilot. I had completely forgotten I was a
matter-transmitter technician."
He kissed her again, exuberantly, and strode for the _Starshine_
record-room, shedding the parts of his space-suit as he went. He pulled
down the microfilm reels covering the ship's construction and zestfully
set to work to review them, making notes and sketches from time to
time. The reels, of course, contained not only the complete working
drawings of the entire ship, showing every bolt and rivet, but also
every moving part in stereoscopic relationship to its fellows, with
full data so that no possible breakdown could take place without full
information being available for its repair.
Dona watched him furtively as she began the tedious task of hunting
through the Galactic Pilot of this sector, two-hundred-odd volumes, for
even a stray reference to the planet Ades.
Ultimately she did find Ades mentioned. Not in the bound volumes of the
Pilot, but in the microfilm abbreviated Galactic Directory. Ades rated
just three lines of type--its space-coördinates, the spectral type of
its sun, a climate-atmosphere symbol which indicated that three-fourths
of its surface experienced sub-Arctic conditions, and the memo:
"Its borderline habitability caused it to be chosen as a penal
colony at a very early date. Landing upon it is forbidden under all
circumstances. A patrol-ship is on guard."
The memorandum was quaint, now that no space-line had operated in five
centuries, no exploring ship in nearly two, and the Space Patrol itself
had been disbanded three hundred years since.
"Mmmm!" Kim said. "If we need it, not too bad. People could survive on
Ades. People probably have. And they won't be sheep, anyhow."
"How far away is it?" Dona asked uneasily. "We have enough fuel for
twenty-five light-years' travel, you said."
"Ades is just about halfway across the Galaxy," he told her. "We
couldn't really get started there if our tanks were full. The only way
to reach it is by matter-transmitter."
But he did not look disheartened. Dona watch his face.
"It's ruled out. What did you hope from it, Kim?"
"A wedding," he said, and grinned. "But it isn't ruled out, Dona.
Nothing's ruled out, if an idea you gave me works. Your story about
the dust-grain hit my mind just right. I was trying to figure out how
to travel a hundred light-years on twenty-five light-years' fuel, even
though the Prime Board may have sent warnings three times that far. But
if you can't solve a little problem, make it a big one and tackle that.
That's what your story meant. It's a nice trick!"
5
_Super-Science_
Dona was puzzled by what Kim had said. She stared at him, wide-eyed,
trying to figure out his meaning. For a moment or two he made no
attempt to explain. He just stood there, grinning at her.
"Listen, Dona," he said, finally. "Why did they stop making
space-ships?"
"Matter-transmitters are quicker and space-ships aren't needed any
more."
"Right!" Kim said. "But why was the _Starshine_ used by my revered
great-grandfather to bring the first colonists to Alphin Three?"
"Because--well--because you have to have a receiver for a
matter-transmitter, and you have to carry it. Alphin Three was almost
the last planet in the Galaxy to be colonized, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Why do you have to carry a receiver? No, don't bother. But do
answer this one. If two places are both too far to get to, what's the
difference?"
"Why, none."
"Oh, there's a lot!" he told her. "The next star-cluster is too far
away for the _Starshine_ with her present drive and fuel. To the
next galaxy is no farther. But when I stopped trying to think of ways
to stretch our fuel, and started trying to think of a way to get to the
next galaxy, I got it."
She stared.
"Are we going there to live?" she said submissively. But her eyes were
sparkling with mirth.
He kissed her exuberantly.
"My dear, I wouldn't put anything past the two of us together. But let
me show you how it works."
He spread out the drawings he had made from the construction-records
while she searched the Pilot. He expounded their meaning
enthusiastically and she listened and made admiring comments, but it
is rather doubtful if she really understood. She was too much occupied
with the happy knowledge that he was again confident and hopeful.
But the idea was not particularly complicated. Every fact was familiar
enough. Space-ships, in the old days, and the _Starshine_, in
this, were able to exceed the speed of light by enclosing themselves in
an overdrive field, which was space so stressed that in it the velocity
of light was enormously increased. Therefore the inertia of matter,
its resistance to acceleration, or its mass, was reduced by the same
factor, y.
The kinetic energy of a moving space-ship, of course, had to remain
the same when an overdrive field was formed about it. Thus when its
inertia was decreased by the field, its velocity had to increase.
Mathematically, the relationship of mass to velocity with a given
quantity of kinetic energy is, for normal space, MV=E. In an overdrive
field, where the factor y enters, the equation is M/y, yV=E. The
value of y is such that speeds up to two hundred times that of light
result from a space-ship at normal interplanetary speed going into an
overdrive field.
A matter-transmitter field, as everyone knows now, simply raises the
value of y to infinity. The formula then becomes M/infinity, infinity
V=E. The mass is divided by infinity and the velocity multiplied by
infinity. The velocity, in a planet-to-planet transmitter, is always
directly toward the receiver to which the transmitter is tuned.
In theory, then, a man who enters such a transmitter passes through
empty space unprotected, but his exposure is so exceedingly
brief--across the whole First Galaxy transit was estimated to require
.0001 second--that not one molecule of the air surrounding him has time
to escape into emptiness.
Thus the one device is simply an extension of the principle of
the other. A matter-transmitter is merely an enormously developed
overdrive-field generator with a tuning device attached. But until
this moment, apparently it had not happened that a matter-transmitter
technician was in a predicament where the only way out was to put those
facts together. Kim was such a technician, and on the _Starshine_
he had probably the only overdrive field generator of space-ship
pattern still in working order in the Universe.
"All I've got to do is to add two stages of coupling and rewind the
exciter-secondary," he told her zestfully. "Doing it by hand may take
a week. Then the _Starshine_ will be a matter-transmitter which
will transmit itself! The toughest part of the whole job will be the
distance-gauge. And I've got that."
Worshipfully, Dona looked up at him. She probably hoped that he would
kiss her again, but he mistook it for interest.
He explained at length. There could be, of course, no measure of
distance traveled in emptiness. Astrogation has always been a matter
of dead reckoning plus direct observation. But at such immeasurably
high speeds there could be no direct observation. At matter-transmitter
speeds, no manual control could stop a ship in motion within any given
galaxy!
So Kim had planned a photo-gauge, which would throw off the
transmitter-field when a specific amount of radiation had reached it.
At thousands of light-speeds, the radiation impinging on the bow of
a ship, would equal in seconds the normal reception of years. When
a specific total of radiation had struck it, a relay would cut off
the drive field. Among other features, such a control would make it
impossible for a speeding ship to venture too close to a sun.
Kim set joyously to work to make three changes in the overdrive
circuit, and to build a radiation-operated relay.
Outside the space-ship the sky turned deep-purple. Presently the
dull-red sun arose, and the white hoarfrost melted and glistened wetly,
and most of it evaporated in a thin white mist. The frozen waterfall
dripped and dripped, and presently flowed freely. The lichenous plants
rippled and stirred in the thin chill winds that blew over the small
planet, and even animals appeared, stupid and sluggish things, which
lived upon the lichens.
Hours passed. The dull-red sun sank low and vanished. The little
waterfall flowed more and more slowly, and at last ceased altogether.
The sky became a deep dense black and multitudes of stars shone down on
the grounded space-ship.
It was a small, starved world, this planet, swinging in lonely
isolation around a burned-out sun. About it lay the Galaxy in which
were three hundred million inhabited worlds, circling brighter, hotter,
much more splendid stars. But the starveling little planet was the only
place in all the Galaxy, save one, where no Disciplinary Circuit held
the human race in slavery.
Nothing happened visibly upon the planet during many days. There were
nights in which the hoarfrost glistened whitely, and days in which the
frozen waterfall thawed and splashed valiantly. The sluggish, stupid
animals ignored the space-ship. It was motionless and they took it
for a rock. Only twice did its two occupants emerge, to gather the
vegetation which was raw material for their food-synthesizer. On the
second expedition, Kim seized upon an animal to add to the larder, but
its helpless futile struggles somehow disgusted him. He let it go.
"I prefer test-tube meat," he said distastefully. "We've food enough
anyhow for a long, long time. At worst we can always come back for
more."
They went into the ship and stored the vegetable matter in the
synthesizer-bins. They returned, then, to the control-room.
"I think it's right," Kim said soberly, as he took the seat before the
control-panel. "But nobody ever knows. Maybe we have a space-ship now
which makes matter-transmitters absurd. Maybe we've something we can't
control at all, which will land us hundreds of millions of light-years
away, so that we'll never be able to find even this galaxy again."
"Maybe we might have something which will simply kill us instantly,"
Dona said quietly. "That's right, isn't it?"
He nodded.
"When I push this button we find out."
She put her hand over his. She bent over and kissed him. Then she
pressed down his finger on the control-stud.
Incredible, glaring light burst into the viewports, blinding them.
Relays clicked loudly. Alarms rang stridently. The _Starshine_
bucked frantically, and the vision-screens flared with a searing light
before the light-control reacted....
There was a sun in view to the left. It was a blue-white giant which
even at a distance which reduced its disk to the size of a water-drop,
gave off a blistering heat. To the right, within a matter of a very few
millions of miles, there was a cloud-veiled planet.
"At least we traveled," Kim said. "And a long way, too. Cosmography's
hardly a living science since exploration stopped, but that star surely
wasn't in the cluster we came from."
He cut off the alarms and the meteor-repeller beams which strove
to sheer the _Starshine_ away from the planet, as they had
once driven it backward away from Alphin III. He touched a stud
which activated the relay which would turn on overdrive should a
fighting-beam touch its human occupants.
He waited, expectant, tense. The space-ship was no more than ten
million miles from the surface of the cloud-wreathed world. If there
were an alarm-system at work, the detectors on the planet should
be setting up a terrific clamor, now, and a fighter-beam should be
stabbing out at any instant to destroy the two occupants of the
_Starshine_. Kim found himself almost cringing from anticipation
of the unspeakable agony which only an instant's exposure to a
pain-beam involved.
But nothing happened. They watched the clouds. Dona trained the
electron telescope upon them. They were not continuous. There were
rifts through which solidity could be glimpsed, sometimes clearly, and
sometimes as through mist.
She put in an infra-red filter and stepped up the illumination. The
surface of the planet came into view on the telescope-screen. They
saw cities. They saw patches of vegetation of unvarying texture,
which could only be cultivated areas providing raw material for the
food-synthesizers. They saw one city of truly colossal size.
"We'll go in on planetary drive," Kim said quietly. "We must have gone
beyond news of us, or they'd have stabbed at us before now. But we'll
be careful. I think we'd better sneak in on the night-side. We'll turn
on the communicator, by the way. We may get some idea of the identity
of this sun."
He put the little ship into a power-orbit, slanting steeply inward in a
curve which would make contact with the planet's atmosphere just beyond
the sunset line. He watched the hull-thermometers for their indications.
They touched air very high up, and went down and down, fumbling and
cautious. The vision-screens were blank for a long time, but the
instruments told of solidity two hundred miles below, then one hundred,
then fifty, twenty-five, ten--
Suddenly the communicator-speaker spoke in a gabble of confusing
voices. Dona tuned it down to one. All the Galaxy spoke the same
language, of course, but this dialect was strangely accented. Presently
they grew accustomed and could understand.
"We all take pride in the perfection of our life," the voice said
unctuously. "Ten thousand years ago perfection was attained upon this
planet, and it is for us to maintain that perfection. Unquestioningly,
we obey our rulers, because obedience is a part of perfection.
Sometimes our rulers give us orders which, to all appearances, are
severe. It is not always easy to obey. But the more difficult obedience
may be, the more necessary it is for perfection. The Disciplinary
Circuit is a reminder of that need as it touches us once each day to
spur us to perfection. The destruction of a family, even to first and
second cousins, for the disobedience of a single member, is necessary
that every seed of imperfection shall be eliminated from our life."
Kim and Dona looked at each other. Dona turned to another of the voices.
"People of Uvan!" The tones were harsh and arrogant. "I am your new
lord. These are your orders. Your taxes are increased by one-tenth. I
require absolute obedience not only to myself, but to my guards. If
any man, woman or child shall so much as think a protest against my
lightest command, he or she shall writhe in agony in a public place
until death comes, and it will not come quickly! Before my guards
you will kneel. Before my personal attendants you will prostrate
yourselves, not daring to lift your eyes. That is all for the present."
Dona cut it off quickly. A dry, crisp voice came in on a higher
wave-length.
"This is Matix speaking. You will arrange at once to procure from
Khamil Four a shipment of fighting animals for the Lord Sohn's festival
four days hence. Fliers will arrive at the matter-transmitter to take
them on board tomorrow afternoon two hours before sunset. Lord Sohn
was most pleased with the gheets in the last shipment. They do not
fight well against men, but against women they are fairly deadly. In
addition--"
"Somehow, I don't think we'll land, Dona," Kim said very quietly. "But
turn back to the first voice."
Her hand shook, but she obeyed. The unctuous voice had somehow the air
of ending its speech.
"Before going on, I repeat we are grateful for the perfection of our
way of life, and we resolve firmly that so long as our planet shall
circle Altair, in no wise will we depart from it."
Kim turned the nose of the _Starshine_ upward. The stars of the
Galaxy seemed strangely bright and monstrously indifferent. The little
space-ship drove back into the heavens.
After a pause, Kim turned to Dona.
"Look up Altair," he said. "We came a very long way indeed."
There was silence save for the rustling of the index-volume as Dona
searched for Altair in the sun-index. Presently she read off the
space-coördinates. Kim calculated, ruefully.
"That wasn't space-travel," he said drily. "That was
matter-transmission. The _Starshine_ is a matter-transmitter,
Dona, transmitting itself and us. I wasn't aware of any interval
between the time I pressed the stud and the time the altered field shut
off. But we came almost a quarter across the Galaxy."
"It was--horrible," Dona said, shivering. "I thought Alphin Three was
bad, but the tyranny here is ghastly."
"Alphin Three is a new planet," Kim told her grimly. "This one below us
is old. Alphin Three has been occupied for barely two hundred years.
Its people have relatively the vigor and the sturdy independence of
pioneers, and still they're sheep! We're in an older part of the Galaxy
now and the race back here has grown old and stupid and cruel. And I
imagine it's ready to die."
He bent forward and made a careful adjustment of the light-operated
distance-gauge. He cut it down enormously.
"We'll try it again," he said. He pressed the stud....
6
_Haven at Last_
An increasing sense of futility and depression crept over Kim and Dona
during the next few days.
They visited four solar systems, separated by distances which would
have seemed unthinkable before the alteration of the overdrive.
There was no longer any sensation of travel, because no distance
required any appreciable period of time. Once, indeed, Kim commented
curtly on the danger that would exist if they went too close to the
Galaxy's edge. With only the amount of received light to work the
cut-out switch, under other circumstances they might have plunged
completely out of the Galaxy and to unimaginable distances before the
switch could have acted.
"I'm going to have to put a limiting device of some sort on this
thing," he observed. "With a limiting device, the transmitter-drive
can't stay on longer than a few micro-seconds. If we don't, we might
find ourselves lost from our own Galaxy and unable to find it again.
Not that it would seem to matter so much."
His skepticism seemed justified. The _Starshine_ was the only
vessel now plying among the stars. It had been of the last and best
type, though by no means the largest, ever constructed, and by three
small changes in its overdrive mechanism Kim had made it into something
of which other men had never dreamed.
For the first time in the history of the human race, other galaxies
were open to the exploration and the colonization of men. It was
probably possible for the cosmos itself to be circumnavigated in the
_Starshine_. But its crew of two humans could find no planet of
their own race on which they dared to land.
They approached Voorten II, and found a great planet seemingly empty of
human beings. There were roads and cities, but the roads were empty and
the cities full of human skeletons. Kim and Dona saw only three living
beings of human form, and they were skin and bones and shook clenched
fists and gibbered at the slim space-craft as it hovered overhead. The
_Starshine_ soared away.
It hovered over Makab VI, and there were towers which had been
power-houses rusting into ruin, and human beings naked and chained,
pulling ploughs while other human beings flourished whips behind them.
The great metropolis where the matter-transmitter should have been was
ruins. Unquestionably the matter-transmitter here had been destroyed
and the planet was cut off from the rest of civilization.
They came fearfully to rest above the planet center upon Moteh VII and
saw decay. The people reveled in the streets, but listlessly, and the
communicator brought only barbarous, sensual music and howled songs of
a beastliness that was impossible to describe.
The vessel actually touched ground upon Xanin V. Kim and Dona actually
talked to two citizens. But those folk were blank-faced and dull. Yet
what they told Kim and Dona, apathetically, in response to questioning,
was so disheartening that Dona impulsively offered to take them away.
But the two citizens were frightened at the idea. They fled when Dona
would have urged them.
Out in clear space again, on interplanetary drive, Kim looked at Dona
with brooding eyes.
"It looks as if we can't find a home, Dona," he said quietly. "The
human race is finished. We completed a job, we humans. We conquered a
galaxy and we occupied it, and the job was done. Then we went downhill.
You and I, we came from the newest planet of all, and we didn't
fit. We're criminals there. But the older planets, like these, are
indescribably horrible." He stopped, and asked wryly, "What shall we
do, Dona? I'd have liked a wedding ceremony. But what are we going to
do?"
Dona smiled at him.
"There's one place yet. The Prime Board called us criminals. Let's look
up the criminals on Ades. Maybe--and it's just possible--people who
have mustered energy and independence enough to commit political crimes
would be bearable. If we don't find anything there, why, we'll go to
another galaxy, choose a planet and settle down. And I promise I won't
be sorry, Kim!"
Kim made his computations and swung the _Starshine_ carefully. He
was able to center the course of the space-ship with absolute precision
upon the sun around which Ades circled slowly in lonely majesty.
He pressed the matter-transmission stud, and the alarm-bells rang
stridently, and there was the sun and the planet Ades barely half a
million miles from their starting-point.
It was not a large planet, and there was much ice and snow. The
electron telescope showed no monster cities, either, but there
were settlements of a size that could be picked out. Kim sent the
_Starshine_ toward it.
"Of course, I'm only head of this small city," said the man with the
bearskin hat. "And my powers are limited here, but I think we'll find
plenty to join us. I'll go, of course, if you'll take me."
Kim nodded in an odd grim satisfaction.
"We'll set up matter-transmitters," he suggested. "Then there'll be
complete and continuous communication with this planet from the start."
"Right," said the man with the bearskin hat. He added candidly: "We've
brains on Ades, my friend. We've got every technical device the rest
of the Galaxy has, except the Disciplinary Circuit, and we won't allow
that! If this is a scheme of some damned despot to add another planet
to his empire, it won't work. There are three empires already started,
you know, all taken by matter-transmitter. But that won't work here!"
"If you build the transmitters yourselves, you'll know there's
nothing tricky about the circuits," Kim said. "My offer is to take a
transmitter and an exploring party to the next nearest galaxy and pick
out a planet there to start on. Ades isn't ideal."
"No," agreed the man with the bearskin hat. "It's too cold, and we're
overcrowded. There are twenty million of us and more keep coming out
of the transmitter every day. The Galaxy seems to be combing out
all its brains and sending them all here. We're short of minerals,
though--metals, especially. So we'll pick some good sound planets to
start on over in a second galaxy. Hm! Come to the communicator and
we'll talk to the other men we need to reach."
They went out of the small building which was the center of government
of the quite small city. There was nothing impressive about it,
anywhere. It was not even systematically planned. Each citizen, it
appeared, had built as he chose. Each seemed to dress as he pleased,
too.
To Kim and to Dona there was a startling novelty in the faces they saw
about them. On Alphin III almost everybody had looked alike. At any
rate their faces had worn the same expression of bovine contentment.
On other planets contentment had not been the prevailing sentiment. On
some, despair had seemed to be universal.
But these people, these criminals, were individuals. Their manner was
not the elaborate, cringing politeness of Alphin III. It was free and
natural.
The communicator-station was rough and ready. It was not a work of
art, but a building put up by people who needed a building and built
one for that purpose only. The vision-screens lighted up one by one and
faces appeared, as variegated as the costumes beneath them. They had a
common look for aliveness which was heartening to Kim.
The conference lasted for a long time. There was enthusiasm, and there
was reserve. The _Starshine_ would carry a matter-transmitter to
the next galaxy and open a way for migration of the criminals of Ades
to a new island universe for conquest.
Kim would turn over the construction-records of the space-ship
so that others could be built. He would give the details of the
matter-transmitter alteration. No space-ships had been attempted
by the inhabitants of Ades, because fighting-beams would soon have
been mounted on useful planets, against them, and all useful planets
contained only enemies.
"What do you want?" asked a figure in one vision-plate. "We don't do
things for nothing, here, and we don't take things without paying for
them, either."
"Dona and I want only a place to live and a people to live among who
are free," Kim answered sharply.
"You've got that," the man in the bearskin hat said. "All right? We'll
all call public meetings and confirm these arrangements?"
The heads of other cities nodded.
"We'll pass on the news to other cities at once," another man said. He
was one of those who had nodded. "Everybody will wish to come in on it,
of course. If not now, then later."
"Wait!" Kim said suddenly. "How about the planets around us? Are we
going to leave them enslaved?"
"Nobody can free a slave," a whiskered man in a vision-plate said
drily. "We could only release prisoners. In time we may have to take
them over, I suppose, but on the planet I come from there aren't a
dozen men who'd know how to be free if we emancipated them. They don't
want to be free. They're satisfied as they are. If any of them want to
be free, they'll be sent here, eventually."
"I am reluctant to desert them," Kim answered slowly.
"Count, man," the man with bearskin hat cried. "There are three
hundred million inhabited planets! All of them but Ades are ruled by
Disciplinary Circuits. If we set out to liberate them, it would take
one thousand years, and there are only twenty million of us. Designate
just one of us to stay on each planet to teach the people to be free
again. Otherwise we wouldn't do a tenth of the job and we'd destroy
ourselves by scattering. But, hang it all, we'd be tyrants! No! We go
on and start on a new galaxy. That's a job worth doing. We'll keep a
group of watchers here to receive the new ones who come here into exile
and forward them. Some day, maybe, we'll come back and take over the
old Galaxy if it seems worth while. But we've a job to do. How many
galaxies are there, anyhow, for us and our children and our children's
children to take over?"
"It's a job that will never be finished," another voice said. "That's
good!"
* * * * *
There were trees visible from the window of the house that had been
offered by a citizen for Kim's and Dona's use. The sun went down beyond
those trees, with a glowing of many colors in the foliage. Kim had
never watched a sunset before except upon the towers and pinnacles of
a city. He had never noted quite this sharp tang in the air, either,
which he learned was the smell of fresh growing things.
"I think I'm going to like living like this," he said to Dona. "Have
you noticed the way people act? They don't behave as if I were
important at all, in one way. They seem to think I'm commonplace. But
I've never before felt so definitely that I matter."
"You do, Kim, darling," Dona said, wisely. She stood close beside him,
watching the sunset too. She looked up at him. "You matter enormously,
and they know it. But to themselves they matter, too, and when they
listen to you and agree with you it's because they mean it, instead of
just citizen-like politeness. It is good. I think it must be a part of
what we've been looking for. It's a part of freedom, I suppose."
"And you," Kim said. "Do you feel important too?"
She laughed at him and pressed close.
"My dear!" she said. "Could I help it? Can any woman help feeling
important on her wedding-day? Do you realize that we've been married
two whole hours?"
PART TWO
THE MANLESS WORLDS
1
_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."
"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!_"
"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!"
"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 sub-arctic 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 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.
2
_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 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 of 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.
"The men were very friendly. They were from Sinab Two. Their employer
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 on 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-one 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 inhabited 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.
"It's 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...."
3
_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-drives 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 ice-caps 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."
4
_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 space-ways.
"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 viewports 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 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 had 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 pipeline 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 passage-ways 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 immobile 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.
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.
5
_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
micro-seconds 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.
Dona now had the face-plate of her helmet open. She kissed Kim hungrily.
"--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 ice-caps 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.
6
_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
cooperative 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 practiced 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
upon 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 precious
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 gadflies 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 coördinates
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 were 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.
"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."
7
_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 would 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 save 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 mass 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 the
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.
8
_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 convey 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, lonesomely 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 seconds' 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 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 drive 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.
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!"
9
_Homecoming_
A 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 descendants 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, "These women will all want to come here!"
"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 are 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.
"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.
PART THREE
THE BOOMERANG CIRCUIT
1
_Damaged Transmitter_
Kim Rendell had almost forgotten that he was ever a matter-transmitter
technician. But then the matter-transmitter on Terranova ceased to
operate and they called on him.
It happened just like that. One instant the wavering, silvery film
seemed to stretch across the arch in the public square of the principal
but still small settlement on the first planet to be colonized in the
Second Galaxy. The film bulged, and momentarily seemed to form the
outline of a human figure as a totally-reflecting, pulsating cocoon
about a moving object. Then it broke like a bubble-film and a walking
figure stepped unconcernedly out. Instantly the silvery film was formed
again behind it and another shape developed on the film's surface.
Only seconds before, these people and these objects had been on another
planet in another island universe, across unthinkable parsecs of space.
Now they were here. Bales and bundles and parcels of merchandise.
Huge containers of foodstuffs--the colony on Terranova was still not
completely self-sustaining--and drums of fuel for the space-ships busy
mapping the new galaxy for the use of men, and more people, and a huge
tank of viscous, opalescent plastic.
Then came a pretty girl, smiling brightly on her first appearance
on a new planet in a new universe, and crates of castings for more
space-ships, and a family group with a pet zorag on a leash behind
them, and a batch of cryptic pieces of machinery, and a man.
Then nothing. Without fuss, the silvery film ceased to be. One could
look completely through the archway which was the matter-transmitter.
One could see what was on the other side instead of a wavering,
pulsating reflection of objects nearby. The last man to come through
spoke unconcernedly over his shoulder, to someone he evidently believed
just behind, but who was actually now separated from him by the abyss
between island universes and some thousands of parsecs beyond.
Nobody paid any attention to matter-transmitters ordinarily. They had
been in use for ten thousand years. All the commerce of the First
Galaxy now moved through them. Space-ships had become obsolete, and
the little _Starshine_--which was the first handiwork of Man to
cross the gulf to the Second Galaxy--had been a museum exhibit for
nearly two hundred years before Kim Rendell smashed out of the museum
in it, with Dona, and the two of them went roaming hopelessly among the
ancient, decaying civilizations of man's first home in quest of a world
in which they could live in freedom.
But the matter-transmitter had ceased to operate. Five millions of
human beings in the Second Galaxy were isolated from the First. Ades
was the only planet in the home galaxy on which all men were criminals
by definition, and hence were friendly to the people of the new
settlements. Every single other planet--save the bewildered and almost
manless planets which had been subject to Sinab--was a tyranny of one
brutal variety or another.
Every other planet regarded the men of Ades as outlaws, rebels, and
criminals. The people of Terranova, therefore, were not cut off from
the immigrants and supplies and the technical skills of Ades. They were
necessarily isolated from the rest of the human race. And then, besides
that, there were sixteen millions of people left on Ades, cut off from
the hope that Terranova represented.
Kim Rendell was called on immediately. The Colony Organizer of
Terranova, himself, went in person to confer and to bewail.
Kim Rendell was peacefully puttering with an unimportant small gadget
when the Colony Organizer arrived. The house was something of a gem of
polished plastic--Dona had designed it--and it stood on a hill with a
view which faced the morning sun and the rising twin moons of Terranova.
The atmosphere-flier descended, and Dona led the Organizer to the
workshop in which Kim puttered. The Organizer had had half an hour in
which to think of catastrophe. He was in a deplorable state when Kim
looked up from the thing with which he was tinkering.
"Enter and welcome," he said cheerfully in the formal greeting. "I'm
only amusing myself. But you look disturbed."
The Colony Organizer bewailed the fact that there would be no more
supplies from Ades. No more colonists. Technical information, urgently
needed, could not be had. Supplies were necessary for exploring
parties, and new building-machines were desperately in demand, and the
storage-reserves were depleted and could last only so long if no more
came through.
"But," said Kim blankly. "Why shouldn't they come through?"
"The matter-transmitter's stopped working!" The Colony Organizer wrung
his hands. "If they're still transmitting on Ades, think of the lives
and the precious material that's being lost!"
"They aren't transmitting," said Kim. "A transmitter and a receiver are
a unit. Both have to work for either one to operate--except in the very
special case of a transmitter-drive ship. But it's queer. I'll come
take a look."
He slipped into the conventional out-of-door garments. Dona had
listened. Now she said a word or two to Kim, her expression concerned.
Kim's expression darkened.
"That's what I'm afraid of," he told her. "A transmitter is too simple
to break down. They can get detuned, but we made the pairs for Ades and
Terranova especially. Their tuning elements are set in solid plastite.
They couldn't get out of tune!"
He picked up a small box. He tucked it under his arm.
"I'll be back," he told Dona heavily. "But I suspect you'd better pack."
He went out to the grounded flier. The Colony Organizer took it up and
across the green-clad hills of Terranova. The vegetation of Terranova
is extraordinarily flexible, and the green stuff below the flier swayed
elaborately in the wind. The top of the forests bowed and bent in
the form of billows and waves. The effect was that of an ocean which
complacently remained upraised in hillocks and had no normal surface.
It was not easy to get used to such things.
"I'm terribly worried," said the Organizer anxiously. "There is a
tremendous shortage of textiles, and the ores we usually send back to
balance our account are piling up."
"You're badly worried, eh?" said Kim grimly.
"Of course! How can we keep our economic system now?"
Kim made an angry noise.
"I'm a lot more worried than you are," he snapped. "Nothing should
have stopped this particular pair of transmitters from working but the
destruction of one or the other! This box in my pocket might tell me
the answer, but I'm afraid to find out. I assure you that temporary
surpluses and shortages of ores and textiles are the least of the
things we have to worry about."
The little flier sped on, with the great, waving billows of the forest
beneath it. On one hillock there was a clearing with a group of four
plastic houses shining in the sunlight. They looked horribly lonely in
the sea of green, but the population on Terranova was spread thin. Far
over at the horizon there was another clearing. Sunlight glinted on
water. A pleasure-pool. There was a sizable village about it. Half a
dozen soarers spun and whirled lazily above. Kim said:
"The thing is that Ades and the planets left over after we handled
Sinab are the only places in the whole First Galaxy where there are
no disciplinary circuits. Ades is the only place where a man can
spit in the eye of another man and the two of them settle it between
themselves. There's a government of sorts, on Ades, as there is here,
but there's no ruler. Also there's nobody who can strut around and make
other men bow to him. A woman on Ades, and here, belongs to the man
she wants to belong to. She can't be seized by some lordling for his
own pleasure, and turned over to his guards and underlings when he's
through with her."
"That's true," said the Colony Organizer, who was still worried. "But
the transmitter--"
"Gossip of the admirable state of things on Ades has gone about," said
Kim hardly. "Some of our young men appointed themselves missionaries
and went roaming around the planets, spreading word that Ades wasn't
a bad place. That if you were exiled to Ades you were lucky. They
probably bragged that we whipped the Empire of Sinab in a fight."
At this the mouth of the Organizer dropped open in astonishment.
"Of course, of course! The number of exiles arriving at Ades increased.
It was excellent. We need people for the Second Galaxy, and people who
earn exile are usually people with courage, willing to take risks for
the sake of hope."
"Don't you realize that such things have been dangerous? When people on
Markab Two began to hope?" Kim said impatiently. "When peasants on the
planets of Allioth began to imagine that things might be better? When
slaves on Utbeg began to tell each other in murmurs that there was a
place where people weren't slaves? Don't you see that such things would
alarm the rulers of such planets? How can people be held as slaves
unless you keep them in despair?"
The Colony Organizer corrected his course a trifle. Far away the walls
of the capital city of Terranova glinted in the sunlight.
"And there are the twenty-one planets which fell into our laps when
we had to smash Sinab," said Kim. "Ades became the subject of dreams.
Peasants and commoners think of it yearningly, as a sort of paradise.
But kings and tyrants dream of it either as a nightmare which threatens
the tranquility of their realms, or else as a very pretty bit of loot
to be seized if possible. There are probably ten thousand royal courts
where ambitious men rack their brains for some plausible way to wipe
out Ades as a menace and take over our twenty-one planets for loot.
Ades is already full of spies, sent there in the guise of exiles.
There've been men found murdered after torture,--seized and tortured by
spies hoping to find out the secrets by which we whipped Sinab. There's
one bomb-crater on Ades already, where a bomb smuggled through the
transmitter was set off in an effort to wipe out all the brains on the
planet. It didn't, but it was bad."
2
_Enemy Sabotage_
Skillfully the colony organizer sent the flier into the long shallow
glide that would land it in the planet capital city. There were only
twenty thousand people in that city. It would rate as a village
anywhere except on Ades, but it was the largest settlement on Terranova.
"Then you think," said the harassed Organizer, "that some outrage has
been committed and the transmitter on Ades damaged--perhaps by another
bomb?"
"I hope it's no worse than that," said Kim. "I don't know what I fear,
but there are still sixteen million people on Ades, and some of them
are very decent folk. In a little while I'll know if it's nothing
important, or if it's bad. I could have found out back at home, but I
wanted to hold on to hope."
His lips were tightly compressed. The flier landed. The two men got out
and went along a yielding walk to the central square of the city.
Many persons had collected in the square, more people in that one spot
than Kim had seen together for a long time. Now at least a thousand
men and women and children had gathered, and were standing motionless,
looking at the tall arch of the transmitter.
There would have been nothing extraordinary about the appearance of
the arch to a man from past ages. It would have seemed to be quite
commonplace--gracefully designed, to be sure, and with a smooth purity
of line which the ancient artists only aspired to, but still not at
all a remarkable object. But the throng of onlookers who stared at it,
did so because they could look through it. That had never before been
possible. It had been a matter-transmitter. Now it was only an arch.
The people stared.
Kim went in the technician's door at the base of the arch. The local
matter-technician greeted him with relief.
"I'm glad you have come, Kim Rendell," he said uneasily. "I can find
nothing wrong. Every circuit is correct. Every contact is sound. But it
simply does not work!"
"I'll see," said Kim. "I'm sure you are right, but I'll verify it. Yet
I'm afraid I'm only postponing a test I should have made before."
He went over the test-panel, trying the various circuits. All checked
up satisfactorily. He went behind the test-panel and switched a number
of leads. He returned to the front and worked the panel again. The
results were widely at variance with the original readings, but Kim
regarded them with an angry acceptance.
"I reversed some leads, just in case a checking instrument was out
by the same amount as a circuit," he told the technician. "To be
frank about it, I made sure you hadn't knocked out the transmitter on
purpose. Such things have been done." Then he said grimly, "This one
is all right. The transmitter on Ades is out of action. It not only
doesn't work, but they haven't been able to fix it in--how long?"
"Two hours now," said the technician unhappily.
"Too long!" said Kim.
He unpacked his box. It was very small, a foot by a foot by a foot.
There was a cone-shaped hole in one end which diminished to a small
hole at the other end. Kim sweated a little.
"I should have tried this before," he said. "But I wanted to hope. With
all the First Galaxy fearing and hating Ades, somebody would think of a
way to do us damage, even without space-ships!"
He turned a tiny knob on the box, and looked through the hole. His lips
tautened. He began to make tests. His face grew more and more drawn and
sombre. At last he turned the little knob again, and nothing happened.
His face went quite white.
"What is it?" asked the Colony Organizer.
Kim sat down, looking rather sick.
"It's bad," he said. Then he gestured toward the box. "When we were
fighting Sinab, somebody worked out an idea for the remote control
of ships. Beam control would be too slow. At a few million miles,
the information the robot gathered would take seconds to get back
to the control-board, and more seconds would be needed for the
controlling signals to get back to the robot. In terms of light-years,
communications that way would be impossible."
Kim glanced at the Organizer, who signified by a nod that he understood.
"If it took a year each way, there'd be two years between the robot's
observation of something to be acted on," Kim continued, "and the
signal that would make it act. So this man proposed very tiny
matter-transmitters. One on the robot and one on the home planet. A
solid object would receive all the information the robot's instruments
gathered.
"The transmitter would send it back to the control-board at
transmitter-speed, and the board would impress orders on it and send
it to the robot again. It could shuttle across the width of a galaxy
a hundred times a second, and make robot-control at any distance
practical. A few of them were made, but not used. This is one of them.
"I had it for measuring the actual speed of transmitter-travel between
here and Ades. We thought the distance would be enough for a good
measurement. It wasn't. But this is a transmitter like the big one, and
it has a mate on Ades, and its mate is a hemisphere away from Ades'
main transmitter. And neither one works. Something's happened on Ades,
that involves both hemispheres. And the transmitter couldn't have been
knocked out by something that only killed people. It looks as if Ades
may have been destroyed."
There was an instant's uncomprehending silence. Then the realization
struck home. In all of human history no planet had ever been completely
destroyed. Dozens, even hundreds, had been devastated, before wars
came to an end by the discovery of a weapon too terrible to be used.
Four had been depopulated by that weapon, the fighting-beam. But never
before had it even been imagined that a planet could be wiped out of
existence.
"There are theoretic considerations," said Kim, dry-throated, "which
make a material weapon like atomic explosive unthinkable. There are
other considerations which make it certain that any immaterial weapon
that could destroy a planet would have infinite speed and therefore
infinite range. _If_ Ades has been destroyed, all the human race,
including us, must sooner or later be subject to those who control
such a weapon." Kim Rendell paused and cleared his throat. "If they
start off by destroying the only world on which men are free, I don't
think I like it. Now I must go back home. I'd better get over to the
First Galaxy in the _Starshine_ and find out what's happened."
* * * * *
The thousand million suns of the First Galaxy swam in space, attended
by their families of planets. Three hundred million worlds had
been populated by the human race. For thirty thousand years the
descendants of the people of Earth--that almost mythical first home of
humanity--had spread through the vastness of what once had seemed to
them the very cosmos itself.
In the older, long-settled planets, civilization rose to incredible
heights of luxury and of pride, and then took the long dive down into
decadence and futility while newer, fresher worlds still struggled
upward from the status of frontier settlements.
But at long last humanity's task in the First Galaxy was ended. The
last planet suitable for human occupancy had been mapped and colonized.
The race had reached the limit of its growth. It had reached,
too--or so it seemed--its highest possible point of development.
Matter-transmitters conveyed parcels and persons instantly and easily
from rim to rim of the Galaxy.
Disciplinary Circuits enforced the laws of planetary governments beyond
any hope of evasion or defiance. There were impregnable defenses
against attacks from space. There could be no war, there could be no
revolt, there could be no successful crime--save by those people who
controlled governments--and there could be no hope. So humanity settled
back toward barbarism.
Perhaps it was inevitable that conquest should again become possible,
revolt conceivable, and crime once more feasible even to individuals,
so that hope could return to men. And perhaps it was the most natural
thing imaginable that hope first sprang from the prison world of Ades.
Whispers spread from planet to planet. Ades, to which all rebels and
nonconformists had been banished in hopeless exile, was no longer a
symbol for isolation and despair. Its citizens--if criminals could be
citizens anywhere--had revived the art of space-travel by means of
ships.
The rest of the Galaxy had abandoned space-ships long ago as
antiquities. Matter-transmitters far surpassed them. But Ades had
revived them and fought a war with the Empire of Sinab, and won
it, and twenty-one planets with all their cities and machines had
fallen to them. But the men of Sinab had been sent to an unimaginable
fate, leaving wives and daughters behind. The fact that the women of
the Sinabian Empire were mostly the widows of men massacred for the
Empire's spread was not clearly told in the rumors which ran about
among the worlds.
If you became a criminal and were exiled to Ades, you were lucky. There
were not enough men on Ades to accomplish the high triumphs awaiting
them on every hand. There was hope for any man who dared to become a
rebel. Exile to Ades was the most fortunate of adventures instead of
the most dreadful of fates.
Those whispers were fascinating, but they were seditious. The oligarchs
and tyrants and despots and politicians who ruled their planets by the
threat of the disciplinary circuit, found this new state of affairs
deplorable. Populations grew restive. There was actually hope among the
common people, who could be subjected to unbearable torment by the mere
pressure of a button. And of course hope could not be permitted. Allow
the populace to hope, and it would aspire to justice. Grant it justice
and it might look for liberty! Something had to be done!
So something was done. Many things were done. Royal courts debated the
question, alike of the danger and of possible loot in the empire to
which Ades had fallen heir. And in consequence the despots had acted.
The _Starshine_ winked into existence near the sun which had been
the luminary of Ades. It was a small, cold sun, and Ades had been its
only planet. The _Starshine_ had made the journey from Terranova
in four leaps, of which the first was the monstrous one from the Second
Galaxy to the First. Accuracy of aim could not be expected over such an
expanse.
The little ship had come out of its first leap near that preposterous
group of the blue-white suns of Dheen, whose complicated orbits about
each other still puzzled mathematicians. And Kim had come to the sector
of the Galaxy he desired on his second leap, and to the star-cluster in
the third, and the fourth brought him to the small sun he looked for.
But space was empty about it. A sun without planets is a rarity so
strange that it is almost impossible. This sun had possessed Ades.
Nevertheless Kim searched for Ades. He found nothing. He searched for
debris of an exploded planet. He found nothing. He set cameras to
photograph all the cosmos about him, and drove the _Starshine_ at
highest interplanetary speed for twelve hours. Then he looked at the
plates.
In that twelve hours the space-ship had driven some hundreds of
thousands of miles. Even nearby stars at distances of light-years,
would not have their angles change appreciably, and so would show upon
the plates as definite, tiny dots. But any planet or any debris within
a thousand million miles would make a streak instead of a dot upon the
photographic plate.
There was nothing. Ades had vanished.
He aimed for the star Khiv and flashed to its vicinity. The banded
planet Khiv Five swam sedately in emptiness. Kim drove for it, at first
on mere overdrive, and then on the interplanetary drive used for rising
from and landing on the surface of worlds. He landed on Khiv Five.
Women looked at him strangely. A space-ship which landed on Khiv
Five--or anywhere else, for that matter--must certainly come from Ades,
but ships were not commonplace sights. Kim was no commonplace sight,
either. Six years before, the men on Khiv Five had died in one rotation
of the planet. Every man and boy was murdered by the killing-beams of
the now defunct Sinabian Empire. Now there were only women, save for
the very few men who had migrated to it in quest of wives, and had
remained to rear families.
The population of Khiv Five was overwhelmingly female.
Kim found his way to the governing center of the capital city. Dona
walked with him through the city streets. There were women everywhere.
They turned to stare at Kim. They looked at Dona with veiled eyes.
Long years on an exclusively feminine world does strange things to
psychology. There were women wearing the badges of mourning for
husbands dead more than half a decade.
In a sense it was a dramatization of their loss, because all women,
everywhere, take a melancholy pleasure in the display of their
unhappiness. But in part to boast of grief for a lost husband was an
excuse for not having captured one of the few men who had arrived since
the mass murder. As a matter of fact, Kim did not see a single man in
the capital city of Khiv Five, but its streets swarmed with women.
He asked for the head of the planet government, and at long last found
an untidy woman at a desk. He asked what was known of Ades.
"I was on Terranova," he explained. "The matter-transmitter went off
and it did not come back on. I came back by space-ship to find out
about it, and went to where Ades should have been. I'm Kim Rendell, and
I used to be a matter-transmitter technician. I thought I might repair
the one on Ades if it needed repairing. But I could find no planet
circling Ades' sun."
The woman regarded him with what was almost hostility.
"Kim Rendell," she said. "I've heard of you. You are a very famous man.
But we women on Khiv Five can do without men!"
"No doubt," Kim said patiently. "But has there been any word of Ades?"
"We are not interested in Ades," she said angrily. "We can do without
Ades."
"But I'm interested in Ades," said Kim. "And after all, it was Ades
which punished the murderers of the men of Khiv Five. A certain amount
of gratitude is indicated."
"Gratitude!" said the untidy woman harshly. "We'd have been grateful if
you men of Ades had turned those Sinabians over to us! We'd have killed
them--every one--slowly!"
"But the point is," said Kim, "that something has happened to Ades. It
might happen to Khiv Five. If we can find out what it was, we'll take
steps so it won't happen again."
"Just leave us alone!" said the untidy woman fiercely. "We can get
along without men or Ades or anything else. Go away!"
3
_Dangerous Trip_
Dona plucked at Kim's arm. He turned, seething, and went out. Outside
he vented his bitterness.
"I thought men were crazy!" he said. "If she's the head of the planet
government, I pity the planet."
"She could talk to another woman quite rationally," Dona said with
satisfaction. "But she's had to persuade herself that she hates men,
and you had me with you, and I'm prettier than she is, Kim, and I have
you. So she couldn't talk to you."
"But she's unreasonable," Kim said stubbornly.
"We'll go back to the ship," said Dona brightly. "I'll lock you in it
and then go find out what we want to know."
She smiled comfortably all the way back to the _Starshine_. But
the staring women made Kim acutely uncomfortable. When he was safely
inside the ship, he wiped perspiration from his forehead.
"I wouldn't want to live on this planet!" he said feverishly.
"I wouldn't want you to," said Dona. "Stay inside, darling. You'd
better not even show yourself at a vision-port."
"Heaven forbid!" said Kim.
Dona went out. Kim paced up and down the living quarters of the ship.
There was something in the back of his mind that would not quite come
out. The disappearance of Ades was impossible. Men had conquered one
galaxy and now started on a second, but never yet had they destroyed
a planet. Never yet had they even moved one. But nevertheless, only
thirty-six hours ago the planet Ades had revolved about its sun and
men and women had strolled into its matter-transmitter with no hint of
danger, and between two seconds something had happened.
Even had the planet been shattered into dust, its remnants should have
been discoverable. And surely a device which could destroy a planet
would have had some preliminary testings and the Galaxy would have
heard of its existence! This thing that had happened was inconceivable!
On the basis of the photographs, Ades had not only been destroyed, but
the quintillions of tons of its substance had been removed so far that
sunlight shining upon them did not light them enough for photography.
Which simply could not be.
Kim wrestled with the problem while Dona went about in the world of
women. There was something odd about her in the eyes of women of Khiv
Five. Their faces were unlike the faces of the women of a normal world.
On a world with men and women, all women wear masks. Their thoughts are
unreadable. But where there are no men, masks are useless. The women of
Khiv Five saw plainly that Dona was unlike them, but they were willing
to talk to her.
She came back to the _Starshine_ as Kim reached a state of
complete bewilderment. Ades could not have been destroyed. But it had
vanished. Even if shattered, its fragments could not have been moved
so far or so fast that they could no longer be detected. But they
were undiscoverable. The thing was impossible on any scale of power
conceivable for humans to use. But it had happened.
So Kim paced back and forth and bit his nails until Dona returned.
"We can take off, Kim," she said quietly.
She locked the inner airlock door as if shutting out something. She
twisted the fastening extra tight. Her face was pale.
"What about Ades?" asked Kim.
"They had matter-transmission to it from here, too," said Dona. "You
remember, the original transmitter on Ades was one-way only. It would
receive but not send. Some new ones were built after the war with
Sinab, though. And this planet's communication with Ades cut off just
when ours did, thirty-six hours ago. None of the other twenty planets
had communication with it either. Something happened, and on the
instant everything stopped."
"What caused it?" Kim asked, but Dona paid no attention.
"Take off, Kim," she said. "Men are marching out of the
matter-transmitter. Marching, I said, Kim! Armed men, marching as
soldiers with machine-mounted heavy weapons. Somebody knows Ades can't
protect its own any more and invaders must be crowding in for the
spoils. I'm--afraid, Kim, that Ades has been destroyed and our planets
are part of a tyrant's empire now."
Later, the _Starshine_ swooped down from the blue toward the
matter-transmitter on Khiv Five. Serried ranks of marching figures were
tramping out of the transmitter's silvery, wavering film. In strict
geometric rows they marched, looking neither to the right nor to the
left. They were a glittering stream, moving rhythmically in unison,
proceeding to join an already-arrived mass of armed men already drawn
up in impressive array.
Racing toward the high arch of the transmitter with air screaming
about the _Starshine's_ hull, Kim saw grimly that the figures were
soldiers, as Dona had said. He had never before seen a soldier in
actual life, but pictures and histories had made them familiar enough.
These were figures out of the unthinkably remote past. They wore
helmets of polished metal. They glittered with shining orichalc and
chromium. The bright small flashes of faceted corundum--synthetic
sapphire in all the shades from blue-white to ruby--shone from their
identical costumes and equipment. They were barbarous in their
splendor, and strange in the precision and unison of their movements,
which was like nothing so much as the antics of girl precision dancers,
without the extravagance of the dancers' gestures.
The _Starshine_ dipped lower. It shot along a canyon-like open way
between buildings. The matter-transmitter was upon a hill within the
city and the ship was now lower than the transmitter and the heads of
the soldiers who still tramped out of the archway in a scintillating
stream.
Kim raged. Soldiers were an absurdity on top of a catastrophe.
Something had erased the planet Ades from its orbit around a lonely
sun. That bespoke science and intelligence beyond anything dreamed
of hitherto. But soldiers marching like dancing-girls, bedecked with
jewels and polished metal like the women of the pleasure-world of Dite--
This military display was pure childishness!
"Our pressure-wave'll topple them," said Kim savagely. "At least we'll
smash the transmitter."
There was a monstrous roaring noise. The _Starshine_, which had
flashed through intergalactic space at speeds no science was yet able
to measure, roared between tall buildings in atmosphere. Wind whirled
and howled past its hull. It dived forward toward the soldiers.
There was one instant when the ship was barely yards above the gaping
faces of startled, barbarously accoutred troopers. The following
spreading pressure-wave of the ship's faster-than-sound movement
spread out on every side like a three-dimensional wake. It toppled
the soldiers as it hit. They went down in unison, in a wildly-waving,
light-flashing tangle of waving arms and legs and savage weapons.
But Kim saw, too, squat and bell-mouthed instruments on wheels, in the
act of swinging to bear upon him. One bore on the _Starshine_.
It was impossible to stop or swerve the ship. There was yet another
fraction of a second of kaleidoscopic confusion, of momentary glimpses
of incredibly antique and childish pomp.
And then anguish struck.
It was the hellish torment of a fighting-beam, more concentrated
and more horrible than any other agony known to mankind. For the
infinitesimal fraction of an instant Kim experienced it to the full.
Then there was nothingness.
There was no sound. There was no planet. There was no sunlight on tall
and stately structures built by men long murdered from the skies. The
vision-ports showed remote and peaceful suns and all the tranquil glory
of interstellar space. The _Starshine_ floated in emptiness.
It was, of course, the result of that very small device that Kim had
built into the _Starshine_ before even the invention of the
transmitter-drive. It was a relay which flung on faster-than-light
drive the instant fighting-beams struck any living body in the ship.
The _Starshine_ had been thrown into full interstellar drive while
still in atmosphere.
It had plunged upward--along the line of its aiming--through the air.
The result of its passage to Khiv Five could only be guessed at, but in
even the unthinkably minute part of a second it remained in air, the
ship's outside temperatures had risen two hundred degrees. Moving at
multiples of the speed of light, it must have created an instantaneous
flash of literally stellar heat by the mere compression of air before
it.
Kim was sick and shaken by the agony which would have killed him had it
lasted as long as the hundredth of a second. But Dona stared at him.
"Kim--what--Oh!"
She ran to him. The beam had not touched her. So close to the
projector, it had been narrow, no more than a yard across. It had
struck Kim and missed Dona.
"Oh, my poor Kim!"
He grimaced.
"Forget it," he said, breathing hard. "We've both had it before, but
not as bad as this. It was a mobile fighting-beam projector. I imagine
they'll think we burned up in a flash of lightning. I hope there were
X-rays for them to enjoy."
For a long time Kim Rendell sat still, with his eyes closed. The dosage
of the fighting-beam had been greater than they had ever experienced
together, though. It left him weak and sick.
"Funny," he said presently. "Barbarous enough to have soldiers with
decorative uniforms and shiny dingle-dangles on them, and modern enough
to have fighting-beam projectors, and a weapon that's wiped Ades out of
space. We've got to find out who they are, Dona, and where they came
from. They've something quite new."
"I wonder," said Dona. But she still looked at Kim with troubled eyes.
"Eh?"
"If it's new," said Dona. "If it's a weapon. Even if--if Ades is
destroyed."
Kim stared at her.
"Now, what do you mean by that?"
"I don't quite know," admitted Dona. "I say things, and you turn them
over in your head, and something quite new comes out. I told you a
story about a dust-grain, once, and you made the transmitter-drive
that took us to Ades in the first place and made everything else
possible afterward."
"_Hmmm_," said Kim meditatively. "If it's new. If it's a weapon.
If Ades is destroyed. Why did you think of those three things?"
"You said no planet had ever been destroyed," she told him. "If
anybody could think of a way to do such a thing, you could. And when
Sinab had to be fought, and there weren't any weapons, you worked out
a way to conquer them with things that certainly weren't weapons.
Just broadcasters of the disciplinary-circuit field. So I wondered if
what they used was a weapon. Of course if it wasn't a weapon, it was
probably something that had been used before for some other purpose,
and it wouldn't be new."
"I've got to think about that," said Kim. He cogitated for a moment.
"Yes, I definitely have to think about that."
Then he stood up.
"We'll try to identify these gentry first. Then we'll go to another of
the twenty-one planets."
4
_Despots Take Over_
He took his observations and swung the little ship about. He adjusted
the radiation-switch to throw off the transmitter-drive on near
approach to a sun. He aimed for the star Thom. Its fourth planet had
been subjugated to the Empire of Sinab ten years before, and freed by
the men of Ades six years since.
The _Starshine_ winked into being some twenty million miles
from it, and two hundred million from the star. Kim looked annoyed,
and then glanced at the relay and adjusted it again. He pointed
the _Starshine_ close to the planet's disk. He pressed the
transmitter-drive button. Instantly the ship was within mere thousands
of miles of the planet.
"Nice!" Kim was pleased. "Saves a lot of overdrive juggling. Those
horrible fighter-beams seem to make one think more clearly. Dona, get
us down to the night-side while I try to work something out. Don't
ground. Just drop into atmosphere enough to pick up any broadcasts."
She took his place at the controls. He got out his writing-materials
and a stylus and began busily to sketch and to calculate. Dona drove
the ship to atmosphere on the dark side of Thom Four, not too far from
the sunset's rim. In the earlier night hours, on a given continent, the
broadcasts should be greater in number.
Communicator-bands murmured in soprano. Thom Four was more than
ninety-five per cent female, too. Kim worked on. After a long time
a speaker suddenly emitted a blast of martial music. Until now the
broadcast programs had gone unheeded by both Kim and Dona, because
from each wave-band only women's voices had come out, and only women's
music. The sound of brazen horns was something new. Dona smiled at Kim
and turned up the volume.
A man's voice said pompously:
"To the People of Thom Four, greeting!
"Whereas His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and
noble lineage, has heard with distress of the misfortunes of the people
of the planet Thom Four, of the injuries they have suffered at the
hands of enemies, and of their present distressful state, and
"Whereas, His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and
noble lineage, is moved to extend his protection to all well-disposed
persons in need of a gallant and potent protector;
"Therefore His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and
noble lineage, has commanded his loyal and courageous troops to occupy
the said planet Thom Four, to defend it against all enemies whatsoever,
and to extend to its people all the benefits of his reign.
"Given at his Palace of Gornith, on the second day of the tenth month
of the sixteenth year of his reign, and signed by His Most Gracious
Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage."
The voice stopped. There was another blare of martial music. The
broadcast ended. Ten minutes later, on another wave-length, the same
proclamation was repeated. That broadcast stopped too. Five minutes
later came still another broadcast. And so on and so on. At long last
there was but a single wave-length coming into the communicators.
It was a broadcast of a drama with only female characters, and in
which there was no reference to the fact that the human race normally
includes two sexes. It was highly emotional and it was very strange
indeed.
Then a pompous male voice read the silly proclamation and the broadcast
cut off.
"The question," said Kim, "is whether I'd better try to catch a soldier
and make him tell us where Gornith is and what planet is ruled by Elim
the Fortieth of high and noble lineage. I think I'd better find out."
"Darling," said Dona, "I'm afraid of soldiers bothering you, but I
certainly won't let you venture out on a planet full of women. And
there's something else."
"What?"
"There are twenty-one planets which Ades used to protect. What
planetary ruler could send troops to occupy twenty-one other planets?
Do you think this King Elim the Fortieth has tried to seize all of
them, or do you think he arranged a coöperative steal with the rulers
of other planets, and an arrangement for them all to help protect each
other? Hadn't we better make sure?"
Kim looked up at her from the desk where he worked.
"You're an uncomfortably brainy woman, Dona," he said drily. "Do you
think you could find Sinab? Sinab Two was the capital planet of the
Empire we had to take over."
Dona looked carefully on a star-chart. Kim went back to his task.
He had drawn, very carefully, an electronic circuit. Now he began
to simplify it. He frowned from time to time, however, and by his
expression was thinking of something else than the meticulous placing
of symbols on paper.
It was symptomatic of his confidence in Dona, though, that he remained
absorbed while she worked the ship. Presently there were mutterings in
the speakers. Dona had navigated to another solar system and entered
the atmosphere of another planet.
"Listen, Kim!" she said suddenly.
From a communicator blared a heavy male voice.
"People of Sinab Two!" the voice said. "You are freed from the tyranny
of the criminals of Ades.
"From this time forth, Sinab Two is under the protection of the Dynast
of Tabor, whose mercy to the meek, justice to the just, and wrath
toward the evil-doer is known among all men.
"People of Sinab Two! The soldiers now pouring in to defend you are to
be received submissively. You will honor all requisitions for food,
lodgings, and supplies. Such persons as have hitherto exercised public
office will surrender their authority to the officials appointed by the
Dynast to replace them.
"For your protection, absolute obedience is essential. Persons seeking
to prevent the protection of Sinab Two by the troops of the Dynast of
Tabor will be summarily dealt with. They can expect no mercy.
"People of Sinab Two! You are freed from the tyranny of the criminals
of Ades!"
"So Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage, has a competitor,"
Kim said grimly. "The Dynast of Tabor, eh? But there are twenty-one
planets that used to belong to Sinab. I'm afraid we'll have to check
further."
They did. While Kim scowlingly labored over the drawing of a new
device, Dona drove the _Starshine_ to six worlds in succession.
And four of the six worlds had been taken over by the Sardathian
League, by King Ulbert of Arth, by the Emperor and Council of the
Republic of Sind--which was a remarkable item--and by the Imperator
of Donet. On the last two worlds there was confusion. On one the
population was sternly told by one set of voices that it now owed
allegiance to Queen Amritha of Megar, and by another set that King Jan
of Pirn would shortly throw out the Megarian invaders and protect them
forever. On the sixth planet there were four armies proclaiming the
exclusive nobility of their intentions.
"That's enough, Dona," Kim said in a tired voice. "Ades vanished or was
destroyed, and instantly thereafter gracious majesties and dynasts and
imperators and such vultures pounced on the planets we'd freed. But I'd
like to know how they made sure it was safe to pounce!"
Dona punched buttons on the _Starshine's_ control-board. The ship
lifted. The great black mass which was the night-side of the last
planet faded behind and the _Starshine_ drove on into space. And
Dona turned back to Kim from her post at the controls.
"Now what?"
Kim stared at nothing, his features sombre.
"It's bad," he said sourly. "There's the gang on Terranova. They're
fair game if they land on any planet in the whole First Galaxy--and
Terranova isn't self-sustaining yet. They'll starve if they stay
isolated. There are the people on Ades. Sixteen millions of them. Not
a big population for a planet, but a lot of people to be murdered so a
few princelings can feast on the leavings of Sinab's Empire.
"There are all the people who'd started to dream because Ades had come
to mean hope. And there are all the people in generations to come who'd
like to dream of hope and now won't be able to, and there are all the
nasty little surprise-attacks and treacheries which will be carried out
by matter-transmitters, now that these gentry of high and noble lineage
have been able to snatch some loot for themselves. It's pretty much of
a mess, Dona."
Dona gave an impatient toss of her head.
"You're not responsible for it, Kim," she protested.
"Maybe I should simply concentrate on finding a solution for Terranova,
eh? Let decency as something to fight for go by the board and be
strictly practical?"
"You shouldn't try to take all the problems of two galaxies on your
shoulders," said Dona.
Kim shook his head impatiently.
"Look!" he said in vexation. "There's some way out of the mess! I just
contrived a way to make a very desirable change in all the governments
of the First Galaxy, given time. It was one of those problems that seem
too big to handle, but it worked out very easily. But I absolutely
can't think of the ghost of an idea of how to find a friendly world for
Terranova!"
Dona waited.
"It occurs to me that I haven't slept for forty hours," Kim said. "I
doubt that you've done any better. I think we should go to bed. There's
one puzzle on which all the rest is based, and it's got me. What the
devil happened to Ades? There's a whole planet, seven thousand miles in
diameter, vanished as if it had never been. Maybe after some sleep I'll
be able to work it out. Let's go to sleep!"
The space-ship _Starshine_ drove on through emptiness at mere
interplanetary speed, its meteor-repellers ceaselessly searching space
for any sign of danger. But there was no danger. In the midst of space,
between the stars, there was safety. Only where men were was there
death.
The ship swam in the void, no lights showing in any of its ports.
Then, in the midst of the darkness inside, Kim sat up in his bunk.
"But hang it, Ades _couldn't_ be destroyed," he cried, in
exasperation.
5
_Industrial World_
Planet Spicus Five was an industrial world. According to the prevailing
opinion in the best circles, its prosperity was due to an ample
and adequate supply of raw materials, plus a skilled and thrifty
population. There were sixteen matter-transmitters on the planet, and
their silvery films were never still.
From abecedaria for infants to zyolites (synthetic) for industrial use,
its products ran in endless streams to the transmitters, and the other
products and raw materials obtained in exchange came out in streams no
less continuous. The industrial area covered a continent of sprawling
rectangular buildings designed for the ultimate of efficiency, with
living-areas for the workmen spreading out between.
The _Starshine_ descended through morning sunlight. Kim, newly
shaved and rested, forgot to yawn as he stared through the vision-ports
at the endless vista of structures made with a deliberate lack of
grace. From a hundred-mile height they could be seen everywhere to
north and south, to the eastward where it was already close to midday,
and to where shadows beyond the dawn hid them. Even from that altitude
they were no mere specks between the cloud masses. They were definite
shapes, each one a unit.
The ship went down and down and down. Kim felt uncomfortable and
realized why. He spoke drily.
"I don't suppose we'll ever land on any new planet without being
ready to wince from a fighting-beam and find ourselves snatched to
hell-and-gone away."
Dona did not answer. She gazed at the industrial plants as they swelled
in size with the _Starshine's_ descent. Buildings two miles to a
side were commonplace. Great rectangles three and even four miles long
showed here and there. And there were at least half a dozen buildings,
plainly factory units, which were more than ten miles in extent on each
of their ground dimensions. When the _Starshine_ was below the
clouds, Dona focused the electron telescope on one of them and gestured
to call Kim's attention to the sight.
This factory building enclosed great quadrangles, with gigantic
courtyards to allow--perhaps--of light. And within the courtyards were
dwelling-units for workmen. The telescope showed them plainly. Workmen
in factories like this would have no need and little opportunity ever
to go beyond the limits of their place of employment. The factory in
which they labored would confront them on every hand, at every instant
of their life from birth until death.
"That's something I don't like, without even asking questions about
it," said Kim.
He took the controls. The _Starshine_ dived. He remembered to
flick on the communicators. A droning filled the interior of the
space-ship. Dona looked puzzled and tuned in. A male voice mumbled
swiftly and without intonation through a long series of numerals and
initial letters. It paused. Another voice said tensely, "_Tip._"
The first voice droned again. The second voice said, "_Tip._" The
first voice droned.
Dona looked blank. She turned up another wave-length. A voice barked
hysterically. The words ran so swiftly together that they were almost
indistinguishable, but certain syllables came out in patterns.
"It's something about commerce," said Kim. "Arranging for some material
to be routed on a matter-transmitter."
None of the wavelengths carried music. All carried voices, and all
babbled swiftly, without expression, with a nerve-racking haste.
The _Starshine_ landed before a gigantic building. An armed guard
stood before it at a gateway. Kim trudged across to him. He came back.
"He's stupid," he said shortly. "He knows what to guard, and the
name of the plant, and where a workman may go to be received into
employment. That's all. We'll try again."
The _Starshine_ rose and moved. She was designed for movement
in space, with parsecs of distance on every hand. She was unhandy
when used as now for an atmosphere-flier. She descended within a
factory quadrangle. There was no one about. Literally no one. The
dwelling-units were occupied, to be sure, but no one moved anywhere.
When Kim opened the airlock there was a dull, grumbling rumble in the
air. It came from the many-storied building which surrounded this
courtyard and stretched away for miles.
Kim and Dona stood blankly in the airlock door. The air had no odor
at all. There was no dust. There was not a single particle of growing
stuff anywhere. To people who had lived on Terranova, it was incredible.
Then bells rang. Hundreds and thousands of bells. They rang stridently
in all the rooms and corridors of all the dwelling-units which reached
away as far as the eye could follow them. It was a ghastly sound,
because every bell was in exactly the same tone and made exactly the
same tintinabulation.
Then there was a stirring in the houses. Folk moved within them.
Figures passed inside the windows. Now and again, briefly, faces
peered out. But none lingered to stare at what must have been the
unprecedented sight of a space-ship resting in the courtyard.
After a little, figures appeared in the doors. Men and women swarmed
out and streamed toward openings in the factory building. Their heads
turned to gaze at the ship, but they did not even slacken speed in
their haste toward the sound of industry.
Kim hailed them. They looked at him blankly and hurried on. He caught
hold of a man.
"Where will I find the leader?" he asked sharply. "The boss! The
government! The king or whatever you have! Where?"
The man struggled.
"I be late," he protested unhappily. "I work. I be late!"
"Where's the government?" Kim repeated more sharply still. "The king or
nobles or whoever makes the laws or whatever the devil--"
"I be late!" panted the man.
He twisted out of Kim's grasp and ran to join the swarming folk now
approaching the great building.
They hurried inside. The quadrangle was again empty. Kim scowled. Then
other workers came out of the factory and plodded wearily toward the
dwelling-units. Kim waylaid a man and shot questions at him. His speech
was slurred with fatigue. Dona could not understand him at all. But he
gazed at the _Starshine_, and groped heavily for answers to Kim's
questions, and at the end trudged exhaustedly into a doorway.
Kim came into the ship, scowling. He seated himself at the
control-board. The ship lifted once more. He headed toward the curve of
the plant's bulging form.
"What did you learn, Kim?"
"This is the work continent," said Kim shortly. "The factories and the
workmen are here. The owners live in a place of their own. I have to
talk to one of the more important merchants. I need information."
Time passed and the ship went on over the rim of the planet. Orbital
speed was impossible. The _Starshine_ stayed almost within
atmosphere and moved eastward at no more than fifteen hundred miles an
hour.
"Here it is," said Kim, at last.
The ship settled down once more. There was a thin, hazy overcast here,
and clear vision came suddenly as they dropped below it. And the
coast and the land before them brought an exclamation from Dona. The
shoreline was magnificent, all beautiful bold cliffs with rolling
hills behind them. There were mountains on farther yet and splendid
vistas everywhere. But more than the land or the natural setting, it
was what men had done which caused Dona to exclaim.
The whole terrain was landscaped like a garden. As far as the eye could
reach--and the _Starshine_ still flew high--every hillside and
every plain had been made into artificial but marvelous gardens. There
were houses here and there. Some were huge and gracefully spreading, or
airily soaring upward, or simple with the simplicity of gems and yet
magnificent beyond compare. There was ostentation here, to be sure, but
there was surely no tawdriness. There was no city in sight. There was
not even a grouping of houses, yet many of the houses were large enough
to shelter communities.
"I--see," said Kim. "The workmen live near the factories or in their
compounds. The owners have their homes safely away from the ugly part
of commerce. They've a small-sized continent of country homes, Dona,
and undoubtedly it is very pleasant to live here. Whom shall we deal
with?"
Dona shook her head. Kim picked a magnificent residence at random. He
slanted the _Starshine_ down. Presently it landed lightly upon
smooth lawn of incredible perfection, before a home that Dona regarded
with shining eyes.
"It's--lovely!" she said breathlessly.
"It is," agreed Kim.
"It even has a feeling all its own," he said. "The palace of a king or
a tyrant always has something of arrogance about it. It's designed to
impress the onlooker. A pleasure-palace is always tawdry. It's designed
to flatter the man who enters it. These houses are solid. They're
the homes of men who are thinking of generations to follow them and,
meanwhile, only of themselves. I've heard of the merchant princes of
Spicus Five, and I'm prejudiced. I don't like those factories with the
workmen's homes inside. But--I like this house. Do you want to come
with me?"
Dona looked at the house--yearningly. At the view all about; every tree
and every stone so placed as to constitute perfection. The effect was
not that of a finicky estheticism, but of authentic beauty and dignity.
But after a moment Dona shook her head.
"I don't think I'd better," she said slowly. "I'm a woman, and I'd
want one like it. I'll stay in the ship and look at the view. You've a
communicator?"
Kim nodded. He opened the airlock door and stepped out. He walked
toward the great building.
Dona watched his figure grow small in its progress toward the mansion.
She watched him approach the ceremonial entrance. She saw a figure in
formalized rich clothing appear in that doorway and bow to him. Kim
spoke, with gestures. The richly clothed servant bowed for him to go
first into the house. Kim entered and the door closed.
Dona looked at her surroundings. Dignity and tranquility and beauty
were here. Children growing up in such an environment would be very
happy and would feel utterly safe. Wide, smooth, close-cropped lawns,
with ancient trees and flowering shrubs stretched away to the horizons.
There was the gleam of statuary here and there--rarely. A long way off
she could see the glitter of water, and beside it a graceful colonnade,
and she knew that it was a pleasure-pool.
Once she saw two boys staring at the space-ship. There was no trace of
fear in their manner. But a richly-dressed servant--much more carefully
garbed than the boys--led up two of the slim riding-sards of Phanis,
and the boys mounted and their steeds started off with that sinuous
smooth swiftness which only sards possess in all the First Galaxy.
Time passed, and shadows lengthened. Finally Dona realized how many
hours had elapsed since Kim's departure. She was beginning to grow
uneasy when the door opened again and Kim came out followed by four
richly clad servants. Those servants carried bundles. Kim's voice came
over the communicator.
"Close the inner airlock door, Dona, and don't open it until I say so."
Dona obeyed. She watched uneasily. The four servants placed their
parcels inside the airlock at a gesture from Kim. Then there was an
instant of odd tension. Dona could not see the servants, but she saw
Kim smiling mirthlessly at them. He made no move to enter. He spoke
sharply and she heard them file out of the airlock. Dona could see them
again.
Kim stepped into the space-ship and closed the door.
"Take her up, Dona--fast!"
The _Starshine_ shot upward, with the four servants craning their
necks to look at it. It was out of sight of the ground in seconds. It
was out of the atmosphere before Kim came into the control-room from
the lock.
"Quite a civilization," he said. "You'd have liked that house, Dona.
There's a staff of several hundred servants, and it is beautiful
inside. The man who owns it is also master of one of the bigger
industrial plants. He doesn't go to the plant, of course. He has his
offices at home, with a corps of secretaries and a television-screen
for interviews with his underlings. Quite a chap."
"Were those four men servants?" Dona asked.
"No, they were guards," said Kim drily. "There are no proletarians
around that place, and none are permitted. Guards stand watch night
and day. I'd told my friend that the _Starshine_ was packed with
lethal gadgets with which Ades had won at least one war, and he's in
the munitions business, so I wasn't going to let his guards get inside.
They wanted to, badly, insisting they had to put their parcels in the
proper place. He'd have paid them lavishly if they could have captured
a ship like the _Starshine_."
He laughed a little.
"I was lucky to pick a munitions maker. There aren't many wars in the
ordinary course of events, but he turns out weapons for palace guards,
mobile fighting-beam projectors, and so on. All the equipment for a
planet ruler who wants a fancy army for parades or a force with a punch
to fight off any sneak attack via matter-transmitter. That's what your
average ruler is afraid of, and what he keeps an army to defend himself
against. Of course the Disciplinary Circuit takes care of his subjects."
6
_Vanished World_
Ahead of them loomed the sun, Spicus, many millions of miles away,
while beneath them lay the planet, Spicus Five, a vast hemisphere which
was rapidly shrinking into the distance. Kim moved over beside Dona and
stared reflectively at the instrument-board.
"I got frightened, Kim," the girl said. "You were gone so long."
"I was bargaining," Kim answered. "I told him I came from Ades. I'd
a space-ship, so he could believe that. Then I told him what had
happened. Selling munitions, he should have known about it beforehand,
and I think he did. He doubted that I'd come from Ades as quickly as
I said, though, until I recited the names of some of the gracious
majesties who are making a grab of planets. Then he was sure. So he
wanted to strike a bargain with me for Terranova. He'd supply it with
arms, he said, in exchange for a star-cluster of his own in the Second
Galaxy. If I'd set up a private matter-transmitter for him...."
Kim laughed without mirth.
"He could colonize a couple of planets himself, and make a syndicate
to handle the rest. He saw himself changing his status from that of a
merchant princeling to that of a landed proprietor with half a dozen
planets as private estates, and probably a crown to wear on week-ends
and when he retired from business on Spicus Five. There are precedents,
I gather."
"But, Kim!" protested Dona. "What did you do?"
"I did one thing that's been needed for a long time," said Kim grimly.
"It seems to me that I do everything backwards. I should have attended
to the matter of Ades first, but I had a chance and took it. I think I
put something in motion that will ultimately smash up the whole cursed
system that's made slaves of every human being but those on Ades and
Terranova--the Disciplinary Circuit. Back on Ades we've talked about
the need to free the people of this galaxy. It's always seemed too big
a job. But I think it's started now. It will be a profitable business,
and my friend who wanted to bargain for some planets in the Second
Galaxy will make a pretty penny of the beginning, and it will carry on
of itself."
The planet below and behind was now only a globe. It soon dwindled into
a tiny ball. Kim touched Dona on the shoulder.
"I'll take over," he said. "We've got work to do, Dona."
Dona stood up and stamped her foot.
"Kim! You're misunderstanding me on purpose! What about Ades? Did you
find out what happened to it?"
Kim began the process of sighting the _Starshine's_ nose upon a
single, distant, minute speck of light which seemingly could not be
told from a million other points of light, all of which were suns.
"I think I found out something," he told her. "I thought a merchant
planet would be the place to hear all the gossip of the Galaxy. My
friend back yonder put his research organization to work finding out
what I wanted to know. What they dug up looks plausible. Right now I'm
going to get even for it. That's a necessity! After that, we'll see.
There were sixteen million people on Ades. We'll try to do something
about them. They aren't likely to be all dead--yet."
The sun of Ades swam in emptiness. For uncountable billions of years
it had floated serenely with its single planet circling it in the
companionability of bodies separated only by millions of miles, when
their next nearest neighbors are light-years away. A sun with one
planet is a great rarity.
A sun with no satellites--save for giant pulsing Cepheids and
close-coupled double suns--is almost unknown. But for billions upon
billions of years that sun and Ades had kept each other company. Then
men had appeared. For a thousand years great space-ships had grimly
trundled back and forth to unload their cargoes of criminals upon the
chilly small world.
Ades was chosen as a prison planet from the beginning. Later,
matter-transmitters made the journeys of space-craft useless. For
six, seven, eight thousand years there was no traffic but the one-way
traffic of its especially contrived transmitter, which would receive
criminals from all the Galaxy but would return none or any news of them
to the worlds outside.
During all that time a lonely guard-ship hung drearily about, watching
lest someone try to rescue a man doomed to hopeless exile, and return
him to happier scenes. And finally the guard-ship had gone away,
because the space-ways were no longer used by anybody, and there were
no ships in the void save those of the Patrol itself. Accordingly the
Patrol was disbanded.
For hundreds of years nothing happened at all. And then Kim Rendell
came in the _Starshine_, and shortly thereafter tiny ships
began to take off from Ades, and they fought valorously on distant
star-systems, and at last a squadron of war-craft came to subjugate
Ades for the beastly Empire of Sinab. Finally there was a battle in
the bright beams of the lonely sun itself. And after that, for a time,
little space-ships swam up from the planet and darted away, and darted
back, and darted away, and back.
But never before had there been any such situation as now. The sun,
which had kept company with Ades for so long, now shone in lonely
splendor, amid emptiness, devoid of its companion. And that emptiness
was bewildering to a small ship--sister to the _Starshine_--which
flicked suddenly into being nearby.
The ship had come back from a journey among the virgin stars of the
Second Galaxy with honorable scars upon its hull and a zestful young
crew who wished to boast of their journeying. They had come back to
Ades--so they thought--direct, not even stopping at Terranova. And
there was no Ades.
The little ship flashed here and there about the bereft sun in
bewilderment. It searched desperately for a planet some seven thousand
miles in diameter, which had apparently been misplaced. And as it
hunted, a second ship whisked into sight from faster-than-light drive.
The detectors of the two ships told them of each other's presence, and
they met and hung in space together. Then they searched in unison, but
in vain. At long last they set out in company for one of the planets of
the former Sinabian Empire, on which there must be some news of what
had happened to Ades.
On transmitter-drive they inevitably separated and one was much closer
to the chosen planet when they came out of stressed space. One drove
down into atmosphere while the other was still thousands of miles away.
The leading ship went down at landing-speed, toward a city. The other
ship watched by electron telescope and prepared to duplicate its
course. But the man of the second ship saw--and there could be no doubt
about it--that suddenly the landing ship vanished from its place as if
it had gone into intergalactic drive in atmosphere. There was a flash
of intolerable, unbearable light. And then there was an explosion of
such monstrous violence that half of the planet's capital city vanished
or was laid in ruins.
The crew of the second ship were stunned. But the second ship went
slowly and cautiously down into atmosphere, and its communicators
picked up voices issuing stern warnings that troops must be welcomed
by all citizens, and that absolute obedience must be given to all men
wearing the uniform of His Magnificence the Despot of Lith. And then
there was babbling confusion and contradictory shoutings, and a hoarse
voice ordered all soldiers of His Magnificence to keep a ceaseless
watch upon the sky, because a ship had come down from overhead, and
when the fighting-beams struck it--to kill its crew--it appeared to
have fired some devastating projectile which had destroyed half a great
city. All ships seen in the sky were to be shot down instantly. His
Magnificence, the Despot of Lith, would avenge the outrage.
The lonely surviving ship went dazedly away from the planet which once
had been friendly to the men of Ades. It went back to Ades' sun, and
searched despairingly once again, and then fled to the Second Galaxy
and Terranova, to tell of what it had seen.
That was an event of some importance. At least all of one planet had
been rocked to its core from the detonation of a space-ship which
flashed into collision with it at uncountable multiples of the speed of
light, and was thereby raised to the temperature of a hot sun's very
heart. And besides, there was agitation and suspicion and threats and
diplomatic chaos among the planetary governments who had joined to loot
the dependencies of Ades, once Ades was eliminated from the scene.
But a vastly, an enormously more significant event took place on a
planet very far away, at almost the same instant. The planet was Donet
Three, the only habitable planet of its system. It was a monstrous,
sprawling world, visibly flattened by the speed of its rotation and
actually habitable only by the fact that its rotation partly balanced
out its high gravity.
The _Starshine_ approached over a polar region and descended
to touch atmosphere. Then, while Dona looked curiously through the
electron telescope at monstrous ice-mountains below, Kim donned a
space-suit, went into the airlock, and dropped a small object out of
the door. He closed the door, returned to the control-room, and took
the _Starshine_ out to space again.
That was the most significant single action, in view of its ultimate
meaning, that had been performed in the First Galaxy in ten thousand
years. And yet, in a sense, it was purely a matter of form. It was not
necessary for Kim to do it. He had arranged for the same effect to be
produced, in time yet to come, upon every one of the three hundred
million inhabited planets of the First Galaxy. The thing was automatic;
implicit in the very nature of the tyrannical governments sustained by
the disciplinary circuit.
Kim had simply dropped a small metal case to the surface of Donet
Three. It was very strong--practically unbreakable. It contained an
extremely simple electronic circuit. It fell through the frigid air of
the flattened pole of Donet Three, and it struck the side of a sloping
ice-mountain, and bounced and slid down to a valley and buried itself
in snow, and only instants later, the small hole left by its fall was
filled in and covered up completely by snow riding on a hundred-mile
gale. It was undiscoverable. It was irretrievable. No device of man
could detect or recover it. Kim himself could not have told where it
fell.
Kim then sighted the _Starshine_ on another distant target, and
found the planet Arth, and dropped a small metal object into the
depths of the humid and festering jungles along its equator. Human
beings could live only in the polar regions of Arth. Then he visited a
certain planet in the solar system of Tabor and a small metal case went
twisting through deep water down to the seabed of its ocean.
He dropped another on the shifting desert sands which cover one-third
of Sind where an Emperor and Council rule in the name of a non-existent
republic, and yet another on a planet of Megar, where an otherwise
unidentified Queen Amritha held imperial power, and others....
He dropped one small metal case, secured from a merchant-prince on
Spicus Five, on each of the planets whose troops had moved into the
planets left defenseless by the vanishment of Ades.
"I wanted to do that myself, because what we've got to do next is
dangerous and we may get killed," he told Dona drily. "But now we're
sure that men won't stay slaves forever and now we can try to do
something about Ades. I'm afraid our chances are pretty slim."
7
_One Chance in a Million_
In spite of his pessimism, Kim settled down to the fine calculations
required for a voyage to a blue-white dwarf star not readily
distinguished from others. Most inhabited planets, of course, circled
sol-type suns. Light much different from that in which the race had
developed was apt to have produced vegetation inimical to humanity,
and useful vegetation did not thrive. And of course sol-type stars are
most readily spotted by space navigators. As he checked his course with
star-charts, Dona spoke softly.
"Thanks, Kim."
"For what?"
"For not wanting to put me in safety when you're going to do something
dangerous. I wouldn't let you, but thanks for not trying."
"_Mmmmh!_" said Kim. "You're too useful."
He lined up his course and pressed the transmitter-drive stud on the
control-panel. Space danced a momentary saraband,--and there was a
blue-white dwarf two hundred million miles away, showing barely a
planet-sized disk, but pouring out a pitiless white glare that hurt the
eyes.
"That's it," said Kim. "That's the sun Alis. There should be four
planets, but we're looking for Number One. It goes out beyond Two at
aphelion, so we have to check the orbit--if we can find it--before we
can be sure. No--we should be able to tell by the rotation. Very slow."
"And what are you going to do with it?" demanded Dona.
There were bright spots in emptiness which the electron telescope
instantly declared to be planets. Kim set up cameras for pictures.
"Alis One is the only really uninhabitable planet in the Galaxy that's
inhabited," he observed painstakingly. "It belongs to Pharos Three. I
understand it's the personal property of the king. It has no atmosphere
in spite of an extremely high specific gravity and a reasonable mass.
But the plutonium mines have been worked for five thousand years."
"Plutonium mines with that half-life?" Dona said skeptically. "You must
be joking!"
"No," said Kim. "It's a very heavy planet, loaded with uranium and
stuff from bismuth on out. It has an extremely eccentric orbit. As
I told you, at aphelion it's beyond the orbit of Pharos Two. At
perihelion, when it's nearest to its sun, it just barely misses Roche's
Limit--the limit of nearness a satellite can come to its primary
without being torn apart by tidal strains. And at its nearest to its
sun, it's bombarded with everything a sun can fling out into space from
its millions of tons of disintegrating atoms. Alpha rays, beta rays,
gamma particles, neutrons, and everything else pour onto its surface
as if it were being bombarded by a cyclotron with a beam the size of a
planet's surface. You see what happens?"
Dona looked startled.
"But, Kim, every particle of the whole surface would become
terrifically radioactive. It would kill a man to land on it!"
"According to my merchant-prince friend on Spicus Five, it did kill the
first men to set foot on it. But the point is that its heavy elements
have been bombarded, and most of its uranium has gone on over to
plutonium and americium and curium. In ancient days, when it went out
on the long sweep away from its sun, it cooled off enough for men to
land on it at its farthest-out point. With shielded space-suits they
were able to mine its substance for four to five months before heat and
rising induced radio-activity drove them off again. Then they'd wait
for it to cool off once more on its next trip around.
"They went to it with space-ships, and the last space-line in the First
Galaxy ran plutonium and americium and the other radio-actives to a
matter-transmitter from which they could be distributed all over the
Galaxy. But it wasn't very efficient. They could only mine for four
or five months every four years. All their equipment was melted and
ruined when they were able to land again. A few hundred years ago,
however, they solved the problem."
Dona stared out the vision-ports. There were two planets which might be
the one in question. But there were only three in sight.
"How did they solve it?" Dona asked.
"Somebody invented a shield," said Kim, as drily as before. "It
was a force-field. It has the property of a magnetic field on a
conductor with a current in it, except that it acts on mass as such. A
current-carrying conductor in a magnetic field tends to move at right
angles both to the current and the field. This force-field acts as if
mass were an electric charge.
"Anything having mass, entering the field, tries to move sidewise.
The faster it moves, the stronger the sidewise impulse. Neutrons,
gamma particles, met rays and even electrons have mass. So has light.
Everything moving that hits the shielding field moves sidewise to its
original course. Radiation from the sun isn't reflected, at right
angles.
"So, with the shield up, men can stay on the planet when it is less
than three diameters from its sun. No heat reaches it. No neutrons. No
radiations at all. It doesn't heat up. And that's the answer. For three
months in every four-year revolution, they have to keep the shield up
all the time. For three months more, they keep it up intermittently,
flashing it on for fractions of a second at a time, just enough to
temper the amount of heat they get.
"They live on great platforms of uranium glass, domed in. When they
go out mining they wear shielded space-suits and work in shielded
machines. The whole trick was worked out about five hundred years ago,
they say, and the last space-line went out of existence, because they
could use a matter-transmitter for all but six of our months of that
planet's year."
"And did you find out how it's done?" asked Dona.
"Hardly," said Kim. "The planet belongs to the king of Pharos Three.
Even five hundred years ago the governments of all the planets were
quite tight corporations. Naturally Pharos wouldn't let the secret get
out. There are other planets so close to their primaries that they're
radioactive. If the secret were to be disclosed there'd be competition.
There'd be other plutonium mines in operation. So he's managed to keep
it to himself. But we've got to find out the trick."
There was silence. Kim began to check over the pictures the cameras had
taken and developed. He shook his head. Then he stared at a photograph
which showed the blue-white dwarf itself. His face looked suddenly very
drawn and tired.
"Kim," said Dona presently. "It's stupid of me, but I don't see how
you're going to learn the secret."
Kim put the picture on the enlarger, for examination in a greater size.
"They made the shield to keep things out," he said wearily. "Radiation,
charged particles, neutrons--everything. The planet simply can't be
reached, not even by matter-transmitters, when the shield is up. But by
the same token nothing can leave the planet either. It can't even be
spotted from space, because the light of the sun isn't reflected. It's
deflected to a right-angled course. You might pick it up if it formed
a right-angled triangle with you and the sun, or you might spot it in
transit across the sun's disk. But that's all."
"Yes."
"The shield was a special job," said Kim. "For a special purpose.
It was not a weapon. But there were all those planets that could be
grabbed if only Ades were knocked out. So why shouldn't King Pharos
sneak a force-field generator on to Ades? When the field went on, Ades
would be invisible and unreachable from outside. And the outside would
be unreachable from it. Space-ships couldn't get through the field.
Matter-transmitters couldn't operate through it. If a few technicians
were sneaked to Ades as supposed exiles and promised adequate reward,
don't you think they'd hide out somewhere and turn on that field, and
leave it on until the folk on Ades had starved or gone mad?"
Horrified, Dona stared at him. She went pale.
"Oh--horrible! The sky would be black--always! Never a glimmer of
light. No stars. No moons. No sun. The plants would die and rot, and
the people would grow bleached and pale, and finally they'd starve."
"All but the little gang hidden away in a well-provisioned hide-out,"
said Kim grimly. "I think that's what's happened to Ades, or is
happening. And this is the solar system where the little trick was
worked out. I'd hoped simply to raid the generator and find out how it
worked, which would be dangerous enough. Look!"
He pointed to the projected image of the sun. There was a tiny dot
against its surface. It was almost, it seemed, bathed in the tentacular
arms of flaming gases flung up from the sun's surface.
"There's the planet," said Kim. "At its closest to the sun! With the
shield up, so that nothing can reach its surface. Nothing! And that
includes space-ships such as this. And at that distance, Dona, the hard
radiation from the sun would go right through the _Starshine_ and
kill us in seconds before we could get within millions of miles of the
planet. If there's any place in the Universe that's unapproachable,
there it is. It may be anything up to three months before the shield
goes down even for fractions of a second at a time. And my guess is
that the people on Ades won't last that long. They've had days in which
to grow hopeless already. Want to gamble?"
Dona looked at him. He regarded her steadily.
"Whatever you say, Kim."
"Sixteen million lives on Ades, besides other aspects of the
situation," said Kim. "The odds against us are probably about the same,
sixteen million to one. That makes it a fair bet. We'll try."
He got up and began to tinker with the radiation-operated relay which
turned off the transmitter-drive. Presently he looked up.
"I'm glad I married you, Dona," he said gruffly.
As the _Starshine_ moved closer in, the feeling in the
control-room grew tense. The little ship had advanced to within twenty
millions of miles of the blue-white sun, and even at that distance
there was a detectable X-ray intensity.
Kim had turned on a Geiger counter, and it was silent simply because
there was no measurable interval between its discharges. A neutron
detector showed an indication very close to the danger mark. But Kim
had the _Starshine's_ nose pointed to the intolerably glaring sun.
The electron telescope showed the sun's surface filling all its field,
and because the illumination had been turned so low, raging sun-storms
could be seen on the star's disk. Against it, the black silhouette of
the planet was clear. It was small. Kim estimated its diameter at no
more than six thousand miles. The _Starshine's_ gyros hummed softly
and the field of the telescope swayed until the planet was centered
exactly.
There was a little sweat on Kim's forehead.
"I--don't mind taking the chance myself, Dona," he said, dry-throated.
"But I hate to think of you.... If we miss, we'll flash into the sun."
"And never know it," said Dona, smiling. "It'll be all over in the
skillionth of a second--if we miss. But we won't."
"We're aiming for the disk of the planet," he reminded her. "We have
to go in on transmitter-speed to cut the time of our exposure to hard
radiation. That speed will make the time of exposure effectively zero.
But we have to move at a huge multiple of the speed of light, and we
have to stop short of that planet. It may not be possible!"
"Do you want me to press the button, Kim?" Dona said softly.
He took a deep breath.
"I'll do it. Thanks, Dona."
He put his finger on the stud that would throw the ship into
transmitter-drive, aimed straight at the disk of planet against the
inferno of sun beyond. There was nothing more certain than that to
miss the planet would fling them instantly into the sun. And there was
nothing more absurd than to expect to come out of transmitter-drive
within any given number of millions of miles, much less within a few
thousands. But--
Kim pressed the stud.
Instantly there was blackness before them. A monstrous, absolute
blackness filled half the firmament. It was the force-field-shielded
planet, blotting out its sun and half the stars of the Galaxy. Kim had
made a bull's-eye on a target relatively the size of a dinner-plate
at eleven hundred yards. More than that, he had stopped short of his
target, equivalent to stopping a bullet three inches short of that
place.
He said in a queer voice:
"The--relay worked--even backward, Dona."
8
_Dark Barrier_
For a time Kim sat still and sweat poured out on his skin. Because
their chances had seemed slight indeed. To stop a space-ship at
transmitter-speed was impossible with manual means, anyhow. It could
cross a galaxy in the tenth of a millisecond. So Kim had devised a
radiation-operated relay which threw off the drive when the total
radiation reaching a sensitive plate in the bow had reached an
adjustable total.
If in an ordinary flight the _Starshine_ headed into a
sun--unlikely as such an occurrence was--the increased light striking
the relay-plate would throw off the drive before harm came. But this
time they had needed to approach fatally close to a star. So Kim had
reversed the operation of the relay. It would throw off the drive when
the amount of light reaching it dropped below a certain minimum. That
could happen only if the ship came up behind the planet, so the sun was
blacked out by the world's shadowed night-side.
It had happened. The glare was cut off. The transmitter-drive followed.
The _Starshine_ floated within a bare few million miles--perhaps
less than one million--of a blue-white dwarf star, and the two humans
in the ship were alive because they had between them and the sun's
atomic furnaces, a planet some six thousand miles in diameter.
"We don't know how our velocity matches this thing," said Kim after an
instant. "We could be drifting toward the edge of the shadow. You watch
the stars all around. Make sure I head directly for that blackness.
When we touch, I'll see what I can find out."
He reversed the ship's direction. He let the _Starshine_ float
down backward. The mass of unsubstantial darkness seemed to swell. It
engulfed more and more of the cosmos....
A long, long time later, there was a strange sensation in the feel of
things. Dona gave a little cry.
"Kim! I feel queer! So queer!"
Kim moved heavily. His body resisted any attempt at motion, and yet
he felt a horrible tension within him, as if every molecule were
attempting to fly apart from every other molecule. The controls of the
ship moved sluggishly. Each part of each device seemed to have a vast
inertia. But the controls did yield. The drive did come on. A little
later the sensation ended. But both Kim and Dona felt utterly exhausted.
"It--was getting dark, too," said Dona. She trembled.
"When we tried to move," said Kim, "our arms had a tendency to move at
right angles to the way we wanted them to--at all the possible right
angles at once. That was the edge of the shield, Dona. Now we'll see
what we've got."
He uncovered the recording cabinet. There had been no need to set up
instruments especially for the analysis of the field. They had been a
part of the _Starshine's_ original design for exploration. Now Kim
read the records.
"Cosmic-ray intensity went down," he reported, studying the tapes.
"The dielectric constant of space changed. It just soared up. The
relationship of mass to inertia. That particular gadget never
recorded anything significant before, Dona. In theory it should have
detected space-warps. Actually, it never amounted to anything but a
quantitative measure of gravitation on a planet one landed on. But it
went wild in that field! And here! Look!"
He exultantly held out a paper recording.
"Glance at that, Dona! See? A magnetometer to record the strength of
the magnetic field on a new planet. It recorded the ship's own field in
the absence of any other. And the ship's field dropped to zero! Do you
see? Do you?"
"I'm afraid not," admitted Dona. But she smiled at the expression on
Kim's face.
"It's the answer!" said Kim zestfully. "Still I don't know how that
blasted field is made, but I know now how it works. Neutrons have no
magnetic field, but this thing turns them aside. Alpha and beta and
gamma radiation do have magnetic fields, but this thing turns them
aside, too. And the point is that it neutralizes their magnetic fields,
because otherwise it couldn't start to turn them aside. So if we make
a magnetic field too strong for the field to counter, it won't be able
to turn aside anything in that magnetic area. The maximum force-field
strength needed for the planet is simply equal to the top magnetic
field the sun may project so far. If we can bury the _Starshine_
in magnetic flux that the force-field can't handle--" He grinned. He
hugged her.
"And there's a loop around the _Starshine's_ hull for space-radio
use," he cried. "I'll run a really big current through that loop and
we'll try again. We should be able to put quite a lot of juice through
a six-turn loop and get a flux-density that will curl your hair!"
He set to work, beaming. It took him less than half an hour to set up a
series-wound generator in the airlock, couple in a thermo-cell to the
loop, so it would cool the generator as the current flowed and thereby
reduce its internal resistance.
"Now!" he said. "We'll try once more. The more juice that goes through
the outfit, the colder the generator will get and the less its
resistance will be, and the more current it will make and the stronger
the magnetic field will be."
He flipped a switch. There was a tiny humming noise. A meter-needle
swayed over, and stayed.
The _Starshine_ ventured into the black globe below.
Nothing happened. Nothing happened at all.
"The stars are blotted out, Kim," Dona at last said uneasily.
"But you feel all right, don't you?" He grinned like an ape in his
delight.
"Why, yes."
"I feel unusually good," said Kim happily.
The vision-screens were utterly blank. The ports opened upon absolute
blackness--blackness so dead and absorbent that it seemed more than
merely lack of light. It seemed like something horrible pressing
against the ports and trying to thrust itself in.
And, suddenly, a screen glowed faintly, and then another....
Then there was a greenish glow in the ports, and Dona looked out and
down.
Above was that blackness, complete and absolute. But below, seen with
utter clarity, because of the absence of atmosphere, lay a world.
Nothing grew upon it. Nothing moved. It was raw, naked rock with
an unholy luminescence. Here and there the glow was brighter where
mineral deposits contained more highly active material. The surface was
tortured and twisted, in swirled stained writhings of formerly melted
rock.
They looked. They saw no sign of human life nor any sign that humans
had ever been there. But after all, even five thousand years of mining
on a globe six thousand miles through would not involve the disturbance
of more than a fraction of its surface.
"We did it," said Kim. "The shield can be broken through by anything
with a strong enough magnetic field. We won't disturb the local
inhabitants. They undoubtedly have orders to kill anybody who
incredibly manages to intrude. We can't afford to take a chance. We've
got to get back to Ades!"
He pointed the _Starshine_ straight up. He drove her,
slowly, at the ceiling of impenetrable black. He worked upon the
transmitter-drive relay. He adjusted it to throw the _Starshine_
into transmitter-speed the instant normal starlight appeared ahead.
The ship swam slowly upward. Suddenly there was a momentary impression
of reeling, dancing stars. Kim swung the bow about.
"Now for Ades!" he said gleefully. "Did you know, Dona, that once upon
a time the word Ades meant hell?"
The stars reeled again....
They found Ades. Knowing how, now, it was not too difficult. There were
two positions from which it could be detected. One was a position in
which it was on a line between the _Starshine_ and the sun. The
other was a position in which the invisible planet, the space-ship, and
the sun formed the three points of a right-angled triangle with Ades in
the ninety-degree corner.
Kim sent the little ship in a great circle beyond the planet's normal
orbit, watching for it to appear where such an imaginary triangle
would be formed. The deflected light of the sun would spread out
in a circular flat thin plane, and somewhere about the circuit the
_Starshine_ had to run through it. It would be a momentary sight
only, and it would not be bright; it would be utterly unlike the steady
radiance of a normal planet. Such flashes, if seen before, would have
been dismissed as illusions or as reflections from within the ship.
Even so, it was a long, long time before Dona called out quickly.
"There!" she said, and pointed.
Kim swung the _Starshine_ back. He saw the dim, diffused spectre
of sun's reflection. They drove for it, and presently a minute dark
space appeared. It grew against the background of a radiant galaxy, and
presently was a huge blackness, and the _Starshine's_ space-radio
loop was once more filled with a highly improbable electrical amperage
by the supercooled generator in the airlock.
The ship ventured cautiously into the black.
And later there were lonely, unspeakably desolate little lights of the
lost world down below.
Kim drove for them with a reckless exultation. He landed in the very
centre of a despairing small settlement which had believed itself dead
and damned--or at any rate doomed. He shouted out his coming, and Dona
cried out the news that the end of darkness was near, and men came
surging toward her to listen. But it was Dona who explained, her eyes
shining in the light of the torches men held up toward her.
Kim had gone back into the ship and was using the communicators to
rouse out the mayors of every municipality, and to say he had just
reached the planet from Terranova--there was no time to tell of
adventures in between--and he needed atmosphere fliers to gather around
him at once, with armed men in them, for urgent business connected with
the restoration of a normal state of affairs.
They came swiftly, flittering down out of the blackness overhead, to
land in the lights of huge bonfires built by Kim's orders. And Kim,
on the communicators, asked for other bonfires everywhere, to help in
navigation, and then he went out to be greeted by the bellowing Mayor
of Steadheim.
"What's this?" he roared. "No sunlight! No stars! No
matter-transmitter! No ships! Our ships took off and never came back!
What the devil happened to the Universe?"
Kim grinned at him.
"The Universe is all right. It's Ades. Somewhere on the planet there's
a generator throwing out a force-field. It will have plenty of power,
that generator. Maybe I can pick it up with the instruments of the
_Starshine_. But we'll be sure to find it with magnetic compasses.
What we want is for everyone to flick their compasses and note the
time of swing. We want to find the place where the swings get slower
and slower. When we find a place where the compasses point steadily,
without a flicker--not even up and down--we'll be at the generator. And
everybody put on navigation-lights or there'll be crashes!"
He lifted the _Starshine_ and by communicator kept track of the
search. Toward the polar regions was the logical hiding-place for the
generator, because there the chilly climate of Ades became frigid and
there were no inhabitants. But it was a long search. Hours went by
before a signal came from a quarter-way around the globe.
Then the _Starshine_ drove through darkness--but cautiously--with
atmosphere fliers all about. And there was an area where the planet's
magnetic field grew weaker and weaker, and then a space in which there
was no magnetic field. But in the darkness they could find no sign of a
depot!
9
_Gadget of Hope_
Grimly Kim set the "_Starshine_" on the ground, in the very
centre of the dark area, and started the generator in the airlock.
When it worked at its utmost, and nothing happened, Kim threw in the
leads of the ship's full engine-power. There was a surging of all the
terrific energy the ship's engines could give. Then the radio-loop went
white-hot and melted, with a sputtering arc as the circuit broke.
Abruptly the stars appeared overhead, and simultaneously came the
leaping flame of a rumbling explosion. Then followed the flare of fuel
burning savagely in the night. The _Starshine's_ full power had
burned out the force-field generator, an instant before the loop melted
to uselessness.
Kim was with the men who ran toward the scene of the explosion, and he
would have tried to stop the killing of the other men who ran out of
underground burrows, but the victims would not have it. They expected
to be killed, and they fought wildly. All died.
Later Kim inspected the shattered apparatus which now lay in pieces,
but he thought it could be reconstructed and perhaps in time understood.
"Night's nearly over," he announced to those who prowled through the
wreckage. "It shouldn't be much more than an hour until dawn. If I
hadn't seen sunlight for a week or more, I think, I'd go for a look at
the sunrise."
In seconds the first atmosphere-flier took off. In minutes the last of
them were gone. They flew like great black birds beneath the starlight,
headed for the east to greet a sun they had not expected to see again.
But the Mayor of Steadheim stayed behind.
"Hah!" he said, growling. "It's over my head. I don't know what
happened and I never expect to understand. How are my sons in the new
Galaxy?"
"Fine when last we heard," said Dona, smiling. "Come into the ship."
He tramped into the living space of the _Starshine_. He eased
himself into a seat.
"Now tell me what's gone on, and what's happened, and why!" he
commanded dictatorially.
Kim told him, as well as he could. The Mayor of Steadheim fumed.
"Took over the twenty-one planets, eh?" he sputtered. "We'll attend to
that. We'll take a few ships, go over there, and punish 'em."
"I suspect they've pulled out," said Kim. "If they haven't, they will.
And soon! The Gracious Majesties and Magnificents, and the other
planetary rulers who essayed some easy conquests, have other need for
their soldiers now. Plenty of need!"
"Eh, what?" cried the mayor. "What's the matter? Those rulers have got
to have a lesson! We didn't try to free the whole Galaxy because it was
too big a job. But it looks like we'll have to try!"
"I doubt the need," said Kim, amused. "After all, it's the Disciplinary
Circuit which has enslaved the human race. When the psychogram of
every citizen is on file, and a disciplinarian has only to put his
card in the machinery and press a button to have that man searched out
by Disciplinary-Circuit waves and tortured, wherever he may be--when
that's possible--any government is absolute. Men can't revolt when
the whole population or any part of it can be tortured at the ruler's
whim."
Dona's expression changed.
"Kim!" she said accusingly. "Those things you got on Spicus Five and
dropped on the planets the soldiers came from--what were they?"
"I'll tell you," said Kim. "The Disciplinary Circuit is all right to
keep criminals in hand--not rebels like us, but thieves and such--and
it does keep down the number of officials who have to be supported by
the state. Police and guards aren't really needed on a free planet
with the Disciplinary Circuit in action. It's a useful machine for the
protection of law and order. The trouble is that, like all machines,
its use has been abused. Now it serves tyranny. So I made a device to
defend freedom."
The Mayor of Steadheim cocked a suspicious eye upon him.
"I procured a little gadget," said Kim. "I dropped the gadget in
various places where it wasn't likely to be found. If one man is under
Disciplinary Circuit punishment, or two or three or four--that's not
unreasonable on a great planet--nothing happens. But if twenty-five or
fifty or a hundred are punished at once, the Disciplinary Circuit is
blown out as I just blew out that force-field generator."
The Mayor of Steadheim considered this information.
"_Ha-hmmm!_" he said profoundly.
"Criminals can be kept down, but a revolt can't be suppressed," Kim
went on. "The soldiers who are occupying the twenty-one planets will
be called back to put down revolts, as soon as the people discover the
Disciplinary Circuits on their planets are blowing out, and that they
blow out again as fast as they're re-made and used."
"_Hm!_" said the Mayor of Steadheim. "Not bad! And the rebels will
have some very tasty ideas of what to do to the folk who've tyrannized
over them. No troops can stop a revolt nowadays. Not for long!"
"No, not for long," said Kim. "No government will be able to rule
with a dissatisfied population. Not if it has a little gadget hidden
somewhere that will blow out the Disciplinary Circuit, if it's used to
excess."
"Good enough, good enough," grumbled the mayor. "When rulers are kept
busy satisfying their people, they won't have time to bother political
offenders. That's sensible enough! But it's too fiendish bad that only
those twenty planets have the gadgets on them! I suppose we criminals
will have to set up a factory and make them, and then visit all the
three hundred million inhabited planets, one by one, and drop one
little contrivance on every one. But it'll take us centuries! Space!
That's a pity!"
"It won't take centuries," said Kim drily. "I made a deal with a
factory-owner on Spicus Five. He turned out the ones I personally
dropped, in exchange for the design. He's going to manufacture them in
quantity. He'll make a fortune out of them!"
"How? Who'll buy them?" demanded the mayor. "Every king will outlaw
them! Space, yes! They'll be scared to death--"
"The kings," said Kim more drily than before, "the kings and despots
and emperors will be the ones to buy them. They'll want them to drop
in their neighbors' dominions. Every king or ruler will buy a few to
put where they will weaken his enemies--and every one has enemies! We
don't have to plant the gadgets that make the Disciplinary Circuit
into a boomerang! We'll let the kings weaken each other and bring back
freedom. And they will!"
The Mayor of Steadheim puffed in his breath until it looked as if he
would explode. Then he bellowed with laughter.
"Make the tyrants dethrone each other," he roared delightedly. "They'll
weaken each other until they find they've their own people to deal
with. There'll be a fine scramble! I give it five years, no more,
before there's not a king in the Galaxy who dares order an execution
without a jury-trial first!"
"A consummation devoutly to be wished," said Kim, smiling. "I rather
like the idea myself."
The mayor heaved himself up.
"Hah!" he said, still chuckling. "I'll go back to my wife and tell her
to come outdoors and look at the stars. What will you two do next?"
"Sleep, I suspect," said Kim. It was all over. The realization made him
aware of how tired he was. "We'll probably put in twenty-four hours of
just plain slumber. Then we'll see if anything more needs to be done,
and then I guess Dona and I will head back to Terranova. The Organizer
there is worried about a shortage of textiles."
"To the devil with him," grunted the Mayor of Steadheim. "We've had
a shortage of sunlight! You're a good man, Kim Rendell. I'll tell my
grandchildren about you, when I have them."
He waved grandly and went out. A little later his flier took off,
occulting stars as it rose.
Kim closed the airlock door. He yawned again.
"Kim," said Dona, "We had to break that shield, but it was dangerous."
"Yes," said Kim. He yawned again. "So it was. I'll be glad to get back
to our house on Terranova."
"So will I," said Dona. Her face had become determined. "We shouldn't
even think of leaving it again, Kim! We should--anchor ourselves to it,
so nobody would think of asking us to leave."
"A good idea," said Kim. "If it could be done."
Dona looked critically at her fingers, but she flushed suddenly.
"It could," she said softly. "The best way would be--children."
THE END
* * * * *
THE LAST SPACE SHIP
_By Murray Leinster_
Put yourself in the place of Kim Rendell, a handsome, idealistic young
man living on a distant planet ruled by a super-efficient government.
Here is industrialization carried to its illogical conclusion.
Kim Rendell lives in the shadow of mechanized terror, for machines have
taken over, and the disciplinary circuit keeps the inhabitants in check.
Rendell is an outlaw because he tried to strike at the very foundations
of this so-called civilization. He will not yield to the tyranny of the
power-mad, sensuously warped rulers of the astral body Alphin III. He
and his girl friend are in danger of psychological torture worse than
death.
Kim Rendell goes to the antique museum of Alphin III, which houses
_Starshine_, an outmoded space-ship. He conceives the daring
plan of using the _Starshine_ to save his girl and himself from
the dictators of Alphin III. In this world, teleportation of matter
has taken the place of transportation from planet to planet, and
solar system to solar system, via rocket and atomic-powered vessels.
Nevertheless, Kim decides to steal the last space-ship from the antique
museum and flee with his girl.
Thus starts this most stirring novel of love, adventure and the
fight against tyranny, by the well-known author of hundreds of adult
science-fiction stories.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The last space ship" ***
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