MURRAY LEINSTER
Last
A Breathtaking Power Packed Full Length Novel
GALAXY
PUBLISHING CORP.
421 HUDSON STREET NEW YORK 14,
N. Y.
Copyright 1949 by Witt F. Jenkin*
Reprinted by arrangement with the publishers,
FREDERICK FEU,
INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE GUINN COMPANY, INC
NEW YORK 14, N. T.
part one
1.
Victim
of Tyrants 4
2.
Break
for Freedom 9
3.
Rays
of Destruction 14
4.
Outcasts
of Space 21
5.
Super-Science 26
6.
Haven
at Last 33
Victim of
Tyrants
Kim rendell stood
by the propped-up Starshlne
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 spaceship 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 root 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 th«
railing and approached the Starshine.
The
entrance-port was open, and a flush ladder led up to it. Kim, hollowjcheeked
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 unin-structive. 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 ex-
plained 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.*
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
* 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, Re-conquest of. For typical developments of government
based upon the Disciplinary Circuit, see articles on Sinus VIII, Algol II,
Noxten V and the almost unbelievable but authenticated history of government on
Voorten II.]
Encyclopaedia
of History, Vol. XXIV, Cosmopolis, 2nd Galaxy,
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 Jay 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 whfch 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 babbled 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 m 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 psycho-gram, 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!" sa'id 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 y,ou'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, riow. 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 spaceship, 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 mind. "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 grav. 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 thev'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
controlboard 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.
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 cleared 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 air-lock.
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 womatf 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 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 halfnium 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 fust.
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 Tast
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 air-lock 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! Tt 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 't 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 be^n a train, at an angle
to the former line of motion.
Ten
minutes later there was another moment of intolerable pain. Everv 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 sneeding.coffin.
But again the searing torment lasted for only the fr^tion
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
psychoeraphic 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 arid 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 Lore 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, \yould
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 oh at a
normal interplanetary—rather than intersteller—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, Tat 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 intp_ 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 wh,at?" 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 aboujt 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 spaceship, 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-coordinates, 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 sato. 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
exuberently.
"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, iti 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 veld, 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-plariet 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 *he 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 o years. When a specific total of radiation had struck it, a relaj would cut off the drive
field. Among other features, such a contro
would make it impossible for a speeding
ship to venture too clost 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 water-fall 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 tht 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 mllions 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. Tne 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 thousands 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. Tift 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-coordinates. 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. . . .
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 1» 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 oonquered 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 vhe 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 beiore 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 40
2.
The
Deadly Beams 43
3.
Contact! 47
4.
Encounter
in the Void 50
5.
The
Needed Fuel 55
6.
Man-Made
Meteor 61
7.
Ready
for Action 68
8.
Pitched
Battle 72
9.
Homecoming 77
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.1"
"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. Natmally! 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 cn 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—Thorn 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 Thorn 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 Thorn
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 Thorn 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 Thorn 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 hy 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
Staishine, 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 Sinah>ians 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 haye 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,"
^aid 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
over-drive—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 Starshlne 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 chey 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 tc
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 Khfiv 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 m'ake 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—rand 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 mad*: 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 tolcf 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 passageways amid contorted, glaring
figures—would be at the tender mercy of the crew.
And
when the three of them were dead the drive of the Starshine would be at the disposal of the Empire of
Greater Sinab if they only chose to look at it. The beastly scheme of conquest
would spread and spread and spread throughout the Galaxy and enslave all
women—and murder all human men not parties to the criminality.
The lights flickered again. They almost died
and on the Star-shine, 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 *wo
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 mast 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 SteadrTeim 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 theTfarthest 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 Star-shine's course. On
the relatively short jumps within a galaxy, and especially those of a few
light-years only, he could simply turn the ship about and come very close to
his original position—the line of it, anyhow.
But
he did not know within many many billions of light-years how far he had come
and he did know that an error of a hundredth of a second of arc would amount to
millions of light-years at the distance of the First Galaxy.
The positions of galaxies about the First were
plotted only within a radius of something like two million light-years. There
had never been a point in even that! At fifteen hundred thousand times that
distance he was not likely to strike the tiny mapped area by accident.
He
set to work. Presently he was examining the photographs by enlarger for a sign
of structure in one of the galaxies in view. One showed evidences of
super-giant stars—which proved it the nearest. He aimed the Starshine for it. He threw the ship into transmitter-drive.
The
galaxy was startlingly familiar when they reached it- The stellar types were
normal ones and there were star-clusters and doubtless star-drifts too and Kim
was wholly accustomed to astro-navigation now.
He
simply chose a sol-type sun, set the radiation-switch to stop the little
space-ship close by, aimed for it and pressed a button. Instantly they were
there. They visited six solar systems.
They
found a habitable planet in the last—a bit on the small side, but with good
gravity, adequate atmosphere and polar icecaps to assure its climate.
They
landed and its atmosphere was good. The Mayor of Stead-heim 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 whioh 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 postwar 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 Jp 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 loyah 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
cdhtraction 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 guardships
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 fuer 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 .he 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 jwithout 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 foi 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 newlv-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 '■warming
after him. The direction of the message was clear. It had come from a point a bare two thousand miles above' the surface of Khiv Five and with
coordinates which made its location easy.
It
was too close for the use of transmitter-drive, of course. Even over-drive 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 Fiv 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 bevond."
"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."
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 me.et 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 j
fraction of an instant it was plunging furiously for
the Sinabiai
monster.
The Starshine also flung itself into head-long attack, though
il 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 spacecraft 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.
«.
Pitched
Battle
Every
man in every city of the capital planet of the empire was instantly struck motionless. From the gross and
cor-t*ulent 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 un-approachability 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 over-drive 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 over-drive—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 defectors 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 appealed 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 Terra-nova. He sounded
unhappy and full of forebodihgs. "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
Igood 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
Si'nab 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 warcraft 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 82
2.
Enemy
Sabotage 86
3.
Dangerous
Trip 92
4.
Despots
Take Over 97
5.
Industrial
World 101
6.
Vanished
World 107
7.
One
Chance in a Million 112
8.
Dark
Barrier 117
9.
Gadget
of Hope 122
1
Damaged
Transitter
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 arcrrin 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 spaceships, 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. Spaceships 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 foik. 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 spaceships!"
He
turned a tiny knob on the box, and looked through the hole. His lips tautened.
He began to make fests. 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
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 afe 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
nighest 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 jn hopeless exile, was no longer a symbol for isolation and
despair. Its citizens—if criminals could be citizens anywhere—had revived the
art of space-travel by means of ships.
The rest of the Galaxy had abandoned
space-ships long ago as antiquities. Matter-transmitters far surpassed them.
But Ades had revived them and fought a war with the Empire of Sinab, and won
it, and twenty-one planets with all their cities and machines had fallen to
them. But the men of Sinab had been sent to an unimaginable fate, leaving wives
and daughters behind. The fact that the women of the Sinabian Empire were
mostly the widows of men massacred for the Empire's spread was not clearly
told* in the rumors which ran about among the world.
If
you became a criminal and were exiled to Ades, you were lucky. There were not
enough men on Ades to accomplish the high triumphs awaiting them on every hand.
There was hope for any man who dared to become a rebel. Exile to Ades was the
-most fortunate of adventures instead of the most dreadful of fates.
Those
whispers were fascinating, but they were seditious. The oligarchs and tyrants
and despots and politicians who ruled their planets by the threat of the
disciplinary circuit, found this new state of affairs deplorable. Populations
grew restive. There was actually hope among the common people, who could be
subjected to unbearable torment by the mere pressure of a button. And of course
hope could not be permitted. Allow the populace to hope, and it would aspire to
justice. Grant it justice and it might look for liberty! Something had to be
done!
So
something was done. Many things were done. Royal courts debated the question,
alike of the danger and of possible loot in the empire to which Ades had fallen
heir. And in consequence the despots had acted.
The Starshine winked into existence near the sun which had
been the luminary of Ades. It was a small, cold sun, and Ades had been its only
planet. The Starshine
had made the journey from
Terranova in four leaps, of which the first was the monstrous one from the
Second Galaxy to the First. Accuracy of aim could not be expected over such an
expanse.
The
little ship had come out of its first leap near that preposterous group of the
blue-white suns of Dheen, whose complicated orbits about each other still
puzzled mathematicians. And Kim had come to the sector of the Galaxy he desired
on his second leap, and to the star-cluster in the third, and the fourth
brought him to the small sun he looked for.
But
space was empty about it. A sun without planets is a rarity so strange that it
is almost impossible. This sun had possessed Ades. Nevertheless Kim searched
for Ades. He found nothing. He searched for debris of an exploded planet. He
found nothing. He set cameras to photograph all the cosmos about him, and drove
the
Starshine at highest interplanetary speed for twelve
hours.
Then he looked at the plates.
In that twelve hours the space-ship had driven some hundreds of
thousands of miles. Even nearby stars at distances of light-years, would not
have their angles change appreciably, and so would show upon the plates as
definite, tiny dots. But any planet or any debris within a thousand million miles would make a streak instead of a dot upon the photographic plate.
There was nothing. Ades had
vanished.
He
aimed for the star Khiv and flashed to its vicinity. The banded planet Khiv
Five swam sedately in emptiness. Kim drove for it, at first on mere overdrive,
and then on the interplanetary drive used for rising from and landing on the
surface of worlds. He landed on Khiv Five.
Women
looked at him strangely. A space-ship which landed on Khiv Five—or anywhere
else, for that matter—must certainly come from Ades, but. ships
were not commonplace sights. Kim was no commonplace sight, either. Six years
before, the men on Khiv Five had died in one rotation of the planet. Every man
and boy was murdered by the killing-beams of the now defunct Sinabian Empire.
Now there were only women, save for the very few men who had migrated to it in
quest of wives, and had remained to rear families.
The population of Khiv Five was
overwhelmingly female.
Kim
found his way to the governing center of the capital city. Dona walked with him
through the city streets. There were women everywhere. They turned to stare at
Kim. They looked at Dona with veiled eyes.
Long years on an exclusively feminine world does strange things to psychology. There were
women wearing the badges of mourning for husbands dead more than half a decade.
In a sense it was a dramatization of their loss, because all women,
everywhere, take a melancholy pleasure in the display of their unhappiness. But
in part to boast of grief for a lost husband was an excuse for not having
captured one of the few men who had arrived since the mass murder. As a matter of fact, Kim did not see a single man in the capital city of Khiv
Five, but its streets swarmed with women.
He
asked for the head of the planet government, and at long last found an untidy
woman at a desk. He asked what was known of Ades.
"I was on Terranova," he explained.
"The matter-transmitter went off and
it did not come back on. I came back by space-ship to find out about it, and
went to where Ades should have been. I'm Kim Rendell, and I used to be a
matter-transmitter technician. I thought I might repair the one on Ades if it
needed repairing. But I could find no planet circling Ades* sun."
The woman regarded him with what was almost
hostility.
"Kim
Rendell," she said. "I've heard of you. You are a very famous man.
But we women on Khiv Five can do without men!"
"No
doubt," Kim said patiently. "But has there been any word of
Ades?"
"We
are not interested in Ades," she said angrily. "We' can do without
Ades."
"But
I'm interested in Ades," said Kim. "And after all, it was Ades which
punished the murderers of the men of Khiv Five. A certain amount of gratitude
is indicated."
"Gratitude!"
said the untidy woman harshly. "We'd have been grateful if you men of Ades
had turned those Sinabians over to us! We'd have killed them—every
one—slowly!"
"But
the point is," said Kim, "that something has happened to Ades. It
might happen to Khiv Five. If we can find out what it was, we'll take steps so
it won't happen again."
"Just
leave us alone!" said the untidy woman fiercely. "We can get along
without men or Ades or anything else. Go away!"
3
Dangerous
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 oneway
only. It would receive but not send. Some new ones were built after the war
with Sinabia, though. And this planet's communication with Ades cut off just
when ours did, thirty-six hours ago. None of the other twenty planets 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 I 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 marohing 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 Starsliine 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 Starshlne 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 unfhinkably
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 thprp 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 exn^rJenced 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 t-hat's wiped Ades out of space.
We've got to find out who they are, Dnna. and
where they came from. They've something quite new."
"I
wonder," said Dona. But she still looked at Kim with troubled eves.
"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?" v
"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 vou a story about
a dust-grain, once, and you made the transmitterdrive 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, t»nd 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
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 Thorn. Its fourth planet had been
subjugated to the Empire of Sinab ten years before, and freed by the men of
Sinab six years since.
The Starshlne 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 Thorn 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. Thorn 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 Thorn 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 Thorn 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 Thorn Four,
to defend it against all enemies whatsoever, and to extend to its people all
the benefits of his reign.
"Given
at his Palace of Gornith, on the second day of the tenth month of the sixteenth
year of his reign, and signed by His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth,
of high and noble lineage."
The
voice stopped. There was another blare of martial music. The broadcast ended.
Ten minutes later, on another wavelength, the same proclamation was repeated.
That broadcast stopped too. Five minutes later came still another broadcast.
And so on and so on. At long last there was but a single wavelength coming into
the communicators. It was a broadcast of a drama with only female characters,
and in which there was no reference to the fact that the human race normally
includes two sexes. Jt 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
cooperative 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 Sin-ab'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 cloudmasses. 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 air-lock 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 air-lock 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 I 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 of 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 oh 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 w3? 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 ot
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 ree 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 air lock. 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 tyorld
Aheab 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, end 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-iUght which seemingly could not be told
from a million other points of light, all of which were suns.
"I
think I found out something," he told her. "I thought a merchant
planet would be the place to hear all the gossip of the Galaxy. My friend back
yonder put his research organization to work finding out what I wanted to
know. What they dug up looks plausible. Right now I'm going to get even for it.
That's a necessity! After that, we'll see. There were sixteen million people on
Ades. We'll try to do something about them. They aren't likely to be all dead
—yet."
The sun of Ades swam in emptiness. For
uncountable billions of years it had floated serenely with its single planet
circling it in the companionability of bodies separated only by millions of
miles, when their next nearest neighbors are light-years away. A sun with one
planet is a great rarity.
A
sun with no satellites—save for giant pulsing Cephids and close-coupled double
suns—is almost unknown. But for billions upon billions of years that sun and
Ades had kept each other company. Then men had appeared. For a thousand years
great spaceships 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 thouand 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 least 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 b,ere
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 face 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 air-lock, 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 >cean.
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." "tt
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 side-wise. 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
hideout," said Kim grimly. "I think that's what's happened to Ades,
or is happening. And this is the. solar system where
the little trick was worked out. IM 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 Star-shine 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 Srarshfne'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 Starahine'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 comiHg, 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 forcefield. 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 per* sonally 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 t 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.
126 THE LAST SPACE
SHIP
"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 Rendall, 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 Rendall
lives in the shadow of mechanized terror, for machines have taken over, and the
disciplinary circuit keeps the inhabitants in check.
Rendall 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 Rendall 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.