"Are you going to give up, Kim?"
"Give up what?" Then he said bitterly, "No, Dona. I'm going to find
some excuse for hoping. Some lie I can tell myself. But I'll know I'm
simply trying to deceive myself."
There was a long silence. Hopelessness. Futility.
"I've been thinking, Kim," Dona said softly, at last. "There are three
hundred million inhabited planets. There are trillions and quintillions
of people in the Galaxy. If they knew about us, some of them at least
would want to help us. There are some, probably, who'd hope we could
help them. If we were to think of a new approach to the problem we
face, and reach the people who would want to help us, it might mean
eventual rescue."
"Signals travel at the speed of light," Kim said. "We'd be dead long
before even a tight-beam signal could reach another star-cluster, if
there were anybody there to receive or act on it. But there aren't any
space-ships except the _Starshine_. It was the last ship used in
the Galaxy."
Dona said stoutly:
"We've been regarding our predicament as if it were unique, as if
nobody else in the Universe wanted to be free. As if there was only
one problem--ours! I heard a story once, Kim. It was about a man who
had to carry a certain particular grain of dust to another place. A
silly story, of course. But this was the top grain in a dust-pile. The
man tried to find something that would pick up the one grain of dust,
and something that would hold it quite safe. But he couldn't solve the
problem. There wasn't any box that would hold a single grain of dust.
He couldn't even pick up a solitary dust-grain. And how could he carry
it if he couldn't pick it up?"
"That's a fable," Kim said, harshly. "There's a moral?"
Dona smiled. "Yes," she said. "There is. He picked up the dust-grain.
With a shovel. He picked up a lot of others, too, but that didn't
matter. And he could find a box to hold a hundred thousand dust-grains,
when he couldn't find a box to hold one."
Kim was silent. Dona nodded and smiled at him.
"If you want a new way to think, how about thinking not just of us and
our problem, but the problem of all the people like us who have gone
into revolt?" she said. "How about all the people who've been sent to
Ades? How about all those who will go in years to come? I don't know
the answer, Kim, but it's another way to think. Since we've failed to
solve a little problem by itself, suppose we look at it as part of a
big one? It's a new approach, anyhow."
There was silence. The bright, many-colored stars overhead moved
perceptibly toward what would be called the west by age-old custom.
Weird shapes of frozen rock loomed above the space-ship, and the
starlight glimmered up on thin hoarfrost which settled everywhere upon
this small planet in the dark hours.
Kim stirred suddenly, and was still again. Dona continued to watch
him. She could not see his face, but it seemed to her that he stood
straighter, somehow. Then, suddenly, he spoke gruffly.
"Let's go back in the ship," he said. "Space-suits are admirable
inventions, Dona, but they have limitations. I can't kiss you through a
space-helmet."
He did not wait until they were out of the airlock, and she clung to
him. Then he grinned for the first time in many days.
"My dear," he said contentedly. "Not only are you the best-looking
female I ever saw, but you've got brains. Now watch me!"
"What are you going to do?" she asked breathlessly.
"Too much to waste time talking about it," he told her. "Want to
help? Look up Ades in the Pilot. I had completely forgotten I was a
matter-transmitter technician."
He kissed her again, exuberantly, and strode for the _Starshine_
record-room, shedding the parts of his space-suit as he went. He pulled
down the microfilm reels covering the ship's construction and zestfully
set to work to review them, making notes and sketches from time to
time. The reels, of course, contained not only the complete working
drawings of the entire ship, showing every bolt and rivet, but also
every moving part in stereoscopic relationship to its fellows, with
full data so that no possible breakdown could take place without full
information being available for its repair.
Dona watched him furtively as she began the tedious task of hunting
through the Galactic Pilot of this sector, two-hundred-odd volumes, for
even a stray reference to the planet Ades.
Ultimately she did find Ades mentioned. Not in the bound volumes of the
Pilot, but in the microfilm abbreviated Galactic Directory. Ades rated
just three lines of type--its space-coördinates, the spectral type of
its sun, a climate-atmosphere symbol which indicated that three-fourths
of its surface experienced sub-Arctic conditions, and the memo:
"Its borderline habitability caused it to be chosen as a penal
colony at a very early date. Landing upon it is forbidden under all
circumstances. A patrol-ship is on guard."
The memorandum was quaint, now that no space-line had operated in five
centuries, no exploring ship in nearly two, and the Space Patrol itself
had been disbanded three hundred years since.
"Mmmm!" Kim said. "If we need it, not too bad. People could survive on
Ades. People probably have. And they won't be sheep, anyhow."
"How far away is it?" Dona asked uneasily. "We have enough fuel for
twenty-five light-years' travel, you said."
"Ades is just about halfway across the Galaxy," he told her. "We
couldn't really get started there if our tanks were full. The only way
to reach it is by matter-transmitter."
But he did not look disheartened. Dona watch his face.
"It's ruled out. What did you hope from it, Kim?"
"A wedding," he said, and grinned. "But it isn't ruled out, Dona.
Nothing's ruled out, if an idea you gave me works. Your story about
the dust-grain hit my mind just right. I was trying to figure out how
to travel a hundred light-years on twenty-five light-years' fuel, even
though the Prime Board may have sent warnings three times that far. But
if you can't solve a little problem, make it a big one and tackle that.
That's what your story meant. It's a nice trick!"
5
_Super-Science_
Dona was puzzled by what Kim had said. She stared at him, wide-eyed,
trying to figure out his meaning. For a moment or two he made no
attempt to explain. He just stood there, grinning at her.
"Listen, Dona," he said, finally. "Why did they stop making
space-ships?"
"Matter-transmitters are quicker and space-ships aren't needed any
more."
"Right!" Kim said. "But why was the _Starshine_ used by my revered
great-grandfather to bring the first colonists to Alphin Three?"
"Because--well--because you have to have a receiver for a
matter-transmitter, and you have to carry it. Alphin Three was almost
the last planet in the Galaxy to be colonized, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Why do you have to carry a receiver? No, don't bother. But do
answer this one. If two places are both too far to get to, what's the
difference?"
"Why, none."
"Oh, there's a lot!" he told her. "The next star-cluster is too far
away for the _Starshine_ with her present drive and fuel. To the
next galaxy is no farther. But when I stopped trying to think of ways
to stretch our fuel, and started trying to think of a way to get to the
next galaxy, I got it."
She stared.
"Are we going there to live?" she said submissively. But her eyes were
sparkling with mirth.
He kissed her exuberantly.
"My dear, I wouldn't put anything past the two of us together. But let
me show you how it works."
He spread out the drawings he had made from the construction-records
while she searched the Pilot. He expounded their meaning
enthusiastically and she listened and made admiring comments, but it
is rather doubtful if she really understood. She was too much occupied
with the happy knowledge that he was again confident and hopeful.
But the idea was not particularly complicated. Every fact was familiar
enough. Space-ships, in the old days, and the _Starshine_, in
this, were able to exceed the speed of light by enclosing themselves in
an overdrive field, which was space so stressed that in it the velocity
of light was enormously increased. Therefore the inertia of matter,
its resistance to acceleration, or its mass, was reduced by the same
factor, y.
The kinetic energy of a moving space-ship, of course, had to remain
the same when an overdrive field was formed about it. Thus when its
inertia was decreased by the field, its velocity had to increase.
Mathematically, the relationship of mass to velocity with a given
quantity of kinetic energy is, for normal space, MV=E. In an overdrive
field, where the factor y enters, the equation is M/y, yV=E. The
value of y is such that speeds up to two hundred times that of light
result from a space-ship at normal interplanetary speed going into an
overdrive field.
A matter-transmitter field, as everyone knows now, simply raises the
value of y to infinity. The formula then becomes M/infinity, infinity
V=E. The mass is divided by infinity and the velocity multiplied by
infinity. The velocity, in a planet-to-planet transmitter, is always
directly toward the receiver to which the transmitter is tuned.
In theory, then, a man who enters such a transmitter passes through
empty space unprotected, but his exposure is so exceedingly
brief--across the whole First Galaxy transit was estimated to require
.0001 second--that not one molecule of the air surrounding him has time
to escape into emptiness.
Thus the one device is simply an extension of the principle of
the other. A matter-transmitter is merely an enormously developed
overdrive-field generator with a tuning device attached. But until
this moment, apparently it had not happened that a matter-transmitter
technician was in a predicament where the only way out was to put those
facts together. Kim was such a technician, and on the _Starshine_
he had probably the only overdrive field generator of space-ship
pattern still in working order in the Universe.
"All I've got to do is to add two stages of coupling and rewind the
exciter-secondary," he told her zestfully. "Doing it by hand may take
a week. Then the _Starshine_ will be a matter-transmitter which
will transmit itself! The toughest part of the whole job will be the
distance-gauge. And I've got that."
Worshipfully, Dona looked up at him. She probably hoped that he would
kiss her again, but he mistook it for interest.
He explained at length. There could be, of course, no measure of
distance traveled in emptiness. Astrogation has always been a matter
of dead reckoning plus direct observation. But at such immeasurably
high speeds there could be no direct observation. At matter-transmitter
speeds, no manual control could stop a ship in motion within any given
galaxy!
So Kim had planned a photo-gauge, which would throw off the
transmitter-field when a specific amount of radiation had reached it.
At thousands of light-speeds, the radiation impinging on the bow of
a ship, would equal in seconds the normal reception of years. When
a specific total of radiation had struck it, a relay would cut off
the drive field. Among other features, such a control would make it
impossible for a speeding ship to venture too close to a sun.
Kim set joyously to work to make three changes in the overdrive
circuit, and to build a radiation-operated relay.
Outside the space-ship the sky turned deep-purple. Presently the
dull-red sun arose, and the white hoarfrost melted and glistened wetly,
and most of it evaporated in a thin white mist. The frozen waterfall
dripped and dripped, and presently flowed freely. The lichenous plants
rippled and stirred in the thin chill winds that blew over the small
planet, and even animals appeared, stupid and sluggish things, which
lived upon the lichens.
Hours passed. The dull-red sun sank low and vanished. The little
waterfall flowed more and more slowly, and at last ceased altogether.
The sky became a deep dense black and multitudes of stars shone down on
the grounded space-ship.
It was a small, starved world, this planet, swinging in lonely
isolation around a burned-out sun. About it lay the Galaxy in which
were three hundred million inhabited worlds, circling brighter, hotter,
much more splendid stars. But the starveling little planet was the only
place in all the Galaxy, save one, where no Disciplinary Circuit held
the human race in slavery.
Nothing happened visibly upon the planet during many days. There were
nights in which the hoarfrost glistened whitely, and days in which the
frozen waterfall thawed and splashed valiantly. The sluggish, stupid
animals ignored the space-ship. It was motionless and they took it
for a rock. Only twice did its two occupants emerge, to gather the
vegetation which was raw material for their food-synthesizer. On the
second expedition, Kim seized upon an animal to add to the larder, but
its helpless futile struggles somehow disgusted him. He let it go.
"I prefer test-tube meat," he said distastefully. "We've food enough
anyhow for a long, long time. At worst we can always come back for
more."
They went into the ship and stored the vegetable matter in the
synthesizer-bins. They returned, then, to the control-room.
"I think it's right," Kim said soberly, as he took the seat before the
control-panel. "But nobody ever knows. Maybe we have a space-ship now
which makes matter-transmitters absurd. Maybe we've something we can't
control at all, which will land us hundreds of millions of light-years
away, so that we'll never be able to find even this galaxy again."
"Maybe we might have something which will simply kill us instantly,"
Dona said quietly. "That's right, isn't it?"
He nodded.
"When I push this button we find out."
She put her hand over his. She bent over and kissed him. Then she
pressed down his finger on the control-stud.
Incredible, glaring light burst into the viewports, blinding them.
Relays clicked loudly. Alarms rang stridently. The _Starshine_
bucked frantically, and the vision-screens flared with a searing light
before the light-control reacted....
There was a sun in view to the left. It was a blue-white giant which
even at a distance which reduced its disk to the size of a water-drop,
gave off a blistering heat. To the right, within a matter of a very few
millions of miles, there was a cloud-veiled planet.
"At least we traveled," Kim said. "And a long way, too. Cosmography's
hardly a living science since exploration stopped, but that star surely
wasn't in the cluster we came from."
He cut off the alarms and the meteor-repeller beams which strove
to sheer the _Starshine_ away from the planet, as they had
once driven it backward away from Alphin III. He touched a stud
which activated the relay which would turn on overdrive should a
fighting-beam touch its human occupants.
He waited, expectant, tense. The space-ship was no more than ten
million miles from the surface of the cloud-wreathed world. If there
were an alarm-system at work, the detectors on the planet should
be setting up a terrific clamor, now, and a fighter-beam should be
stabbing out at any instant to destroy the two occupants of the
_Starshine_. Kim found himself almost cringing from anticipation
of the unspeakable agony which only an instant's exposure to a
pain-beam involved.
But nothing happened. They watched the clouds. Dona trained the
electron telescope upon them. They were not continuous. There were
rifts through which solidity could be glimpsed, sometimes clearly, and
sometimes as through mist.
She put in an infra-red filter and stepped up the illumination. The
surface of the planet came into view on the telescope-screen. They
saw cities. They saw patches of vegetation of unvarying texture,
which could only be cultivated areas providing raw material for the
food-synthesizers. They saw one city of truly colossal size.
"We'll go in on planetary drive," Kim said quietly. "We must have gone
beyond news of us, or they'd have stabbed at us before now. But we'll
be careful. I think we'd better sneak in on the night-side. We'll turn
on the communicator, by the way. We may get some idea of the identity
of this sun."
He put the little ship into a power-orbit, slanting steeply inward in a
curve which would make contact with the planet's atmosphere just beyond
the sunset line. He watched the hull-thermometers for their indications.
They touched air very high up, and went down and down, fumbling and
cautious. The vision-screens were blank for a long time, but the
instruments told of solidity two hundred miles below, then one hundred,
then fifty, twenty-five, ten--
Suddenly the communicator-speaker spoke in a gabble of confusing
voices. Dona tuned it down to one. All the Galaxy spoke the same
language, of course, but this dialect was strangely accented. Presently
they grew accustomed and could understand.
"We all take pride in the perfection of our life," the voice said
unctuously. "Ten thousand years ago perfection was attained upon this
planet, and it is for us to maintain that perfection. Unquestioningly,
we obey our rulers, because obedience is a part of perfection.
Sometimes our rulers give us orders which, to all appearances, are
severe. It is not always easy to obey. But the more difficult obedience
may be, the more necessary it is for perfection. The Disciplinary
Circuit is a reminder of that need as it touches us once each day to
spur us to perfection. The destruction of a family, even to first and
second cousins, for the disobedience of a single member, is necessary
that every seed of imperfection shall be eliminated from our life."
Kim and Dona looked at each other. Dona turned to another of the voices.
"People of Uvan!" The tones were harsh and arrogant. "I am your new
lord. These are your orders. Your taxes are increased by one-tenth. I
require absolute obedience not only to myself, but to my guards. If
any man, woman or child shall so much as think a protest against my
lightest command, he or she shall writhe in agony in a public place
until death comes, and it will not come quickly! Before my guards
you will kneel. Before my personal attendants you will prostrate
yourselves, not daring to lift your eyes. That is all for the present."
Dona cut it off quickly. A dry, crisp voice came in on a higher
wave-length.
"This is Matix speaking. You will arrange at once to procure from
Khamil Four a shipment of fighting animals for the Lord Sohn's festival
four days hence. Fliers will arrive at the matter-transmitter to take
them on board tomorrow afternoon two hours before sunset. Lord Sohn
was most pleased with the gheets in the last shipment. They do not
fight well against men, but against women they are fairly deadly. In
addition--"
"Somehow, I don't think we'll land, Dona," Kim said very quietly. "But
turn back to the first voice."
Her hand shook, but she obeyed. The unctuous voice had somehow the air
of ending its speech.
"Before going on, I repeat we are grateful for the perfection of our
way of life, and we resolve firmly that so long as our planet shall
circle Altair, in no wise will we depart from it."
Kim turned the nose of the _Starshine_ upward. The stars of the
Galaxy seemed strangely bright and monstrously indifferent. The little
space-ship drove back into the heavens.
After a pause, Kim turned to Dona.
"Look up Altair," he said. "We came a very long way indeed."
There was silence save for the rustling of the index-volume as Dona
searched for Altair in the sun-index. Presently she read off the
space-coördinates. Kim calculated, ruefully.
"That wasn't space-travel," he said drily. "That was
matter-transmission. The _Starshine_ is a matter-transmitter,
Dona, transmitting itself and us. I wasn't aware of any interval
between the time I pressed the stud and the time the altered field shut
off. But we came almost a quarter across the Galaxy."
"It was--horrible," Dona said, shivering. "I thought Alphin Three was
bad, but the tyranny here is ghastly."
"Alphin Three is a new planet," Kim told her grimly. "This one below us
is old. Alphin Three has been occupied for barely two hundred years.
Its people have relatively the vigor and the sturdy independence of
pioneers, and still they're sheep! We're in an older part of the Galaxy
now and the race back here has grown old and stupid and cruel. And I
imagine it's ready to die."
He bent forward and made a careful adjustment of the light-operated
distance-gauge. He cut it down enormously.
"We'll try it again," he said. He pressed the stud....
6
_Haven at Last_
An increasing sense of futility and depression crept over Kim and Dona
during the next few days.
They visited four solar systems, separated by distances which would
have seemed unthinkable before the alteration of the overdrive.
There was no longer any sensation of travel, because no distance
required any appreciable period of time. Once, indeed, Kim commented
curtly on the danger that would exist if they went too close to the
Galaxy's edge. With only the amount of received light to work the
cut-out switch, under other circumstances they might have plunged
completely out of the Galaxy and to unimaginable distances before the
switch could have acted.
"I'm going to have to put a limiting device of some sort on this
thing," he observed. "With a limiting device, the transmitter-drive
can't stay on longer than a few micro-seconds. If we don't, we might
find ourselves lost from our own Galaxy and unable to find it again.
Not that it would seem to matter so much."
His skepticism seemed justified. The _Starshine_ was the only
vessel now plying among the stars. It had been of the last and best
type, though by no means the largest, ever constructed, and by three
small changes in its overdrive mechanism Kim had made it into something
of which other men had never dreamed.
For the first time in the history of the human race, other galaxies
were open to the exploration and the colonization of men. It was
probably possible for the cosmos itself to be circumnavigated in the
_Starshine_. But its crew of two humans could find no planet of
their own race on which they dared to land.
They approached Voorten II, and found a great planet seemingly empty of
human beings. There were roads and cities, but the roads were empty and
the cities full of human skeletons. Kim and Dona saw only three living
beings of human form, and they were skin and bones and shook clenched
fists and gibbered at the slim space-craft as it hovered overhead. The
_Starshine_ soared away.
It hovered over Makab VI, and there were towers which had been
power-houses rusting into ruin, and human beings naked and chained,
pulling ploughs while other human beings flourished whips behind them.
The great metropolis where the matter-transmitter should have been was
ruins. Unquestionably the matter-transmitter here had been destroyed
and the planet was cut off from the rest of civilization.
They came fearfully to rest above the planet center upon Moteh VII and
saw decay. The people reveled in the streets, but listlessly, and the
communicator brought only barbarous, sensual music and howled songs of
a beastliness that was impossible to describe.
The vessel actually touched ground upon Xanin V. Kim and Dona actually
talked to two citizens. But those folk were blank-faced and dull. Yet
what they told Kim and Dona, apathetically, in response to questioning,
was so disheartening that Dona impulsively offered to take them away.
But the two citizens were frightened at the idea. They fled when Dona
would have urged them.
Out in clear space again, on interplanetary drive, Kim looked at Dona
with brooding eyes.
"It looks as if we can't find a home, Dona," he said quietly. "The
human race is finished. We completed a job, we humans. We conquered a
galaxy and we occupied it, and the job was done. Then we went downhill.
You and I, we came from the newest planet of all, and we didn't
fit. We're criminals there. But the older planets, like these, are
indescribably horrible." He stopped, and asked wryly, "What shall we
do, Dona? I'd have liked a wedding ceremony. But what are we going to
do?"
Dona smiled at him.