anywhere, but of having no hope at all of being able to come back.
It rose from Terranova though, just three days after the emergency was
made clear. There were a few small gadgets on board--hastily made in
the intervening seventy-two hours--but nothing deadly--nothing that
could really be termed a weapon.
The _Starshine_ climbed beyond the atmosphere of the Second Galaxy
planet. It went on overdrive--at two hundred light-speeds--to a safe
distance from Terranova's planetary system. Then it stopped in normal
space, not stressed to allow for extra speed.
Kim jockeyed it with infinite care until it was aimed straight at the
tiny wisp of nebulous light which was the First Galaxy, unthinkable
thousands of light-years away. At long last he was satisfied. He
pressed the transmitter-field button--and all space seemed to reel
about the ship.
At the moment the transmitter-field went on, the _Starshine_ had a
velocity of twenty miles per second and a mass of perhaps two hundred
tons. The kinetic energy it possessed was fixed by those two facts.
But, when the transmitter-field enveloped it, its mass dropped--divided
by a factor approaching infinity. And its speed necessarily increased
in exact proportion because its kinetic energy was undiminished. It was
enclosed in a stressed space in which an infinite speed was possible.
It approached that infinite speed on its original course.
Instantly, it seemed, alarm-gongs rang and the cosmos reeled again.
Suddenly there was a glaring light pouring in the forward vision-ports.
There were uncountable millions of stars all about and, almost straight
ahead, a monstrous, palpitating Cepheid sun swam angrily in emptiness.
The _Starshine_ had leaped the gulf between galaxies in a time to
be measured in heart-beats and the transmitter-field was thrown off
when the total quantity of radiation impinging upon a sensitive plate
before her had reached a certain total.
Dona watched absorbedly as Kim made his observations and approximately
fixed his position. The Mayor of Steadheim looked on suspiciously.
"What's this?"
"Locating ourselves," Kim explained. "From the Second Galaxy the best
we could hope for was to hit somewhere in the First. We did pretty
well, at that. We're about sixty light-centuries from Ades."
"That's good, eh?" The mayor mopped his face. "Will we have fuel to get
there?"
Kim jockeyed the _Starshine_ to a new line. He adjusted the
radiation-operated switch to a new value, to throw off the field more
quickly than before. He pressed the field-button again. Space reeled
once more and the gongs rang and they were deep within the Galaxy. A
lurid purple sun blazed balefully far to the left.
Kim began another jockeying for line.
"Khiv Five was beamed about a week ago," he said reflectively. "We're
headed for there now. I think there'll be a warship hanging around, if
only to drop into the stratosphere at night and pick up the broadcasts
or to drop off a spy or two. Dona, you've got your wristlet on?"
Dona, unsmiling, held up her hand. A curious bracelet clung tightly to
the flesh. She looked at his forearm, too. He wore a duplicate. The
Mayor of Steadheim rumbled puzzledly.
"These will keep the fighting-beams from killing us," Kim told
him wryly. "And you too. But they'll hurt like the dickens. When
they hit, though, these wristlets trip a relay that throws us into
transmitter-drives and we get away from there in the thousandth of a
second. The beams simply won't have time to kill us. But they'll hurt!"
He made other adjustments--to a newly-installed switch on the
instrument-board.
"Now--we see if we get back to Terranova."
He pressed the transmitter-drive button a third time. Stars swirled
insanely, with all their colors changing. Then they were still. And
there was the ringed sun Khiv with its family of planets about it.
Khiv Five was readily recognizable by the broad, straight bands of
irrigated vegetation across its otherwise desert middle, where the
water of the melted ice-caps was pumped to its winter hemisphere.
It was on the far side of its orbit from the stopping-place of the
_Starshine_, though, and Kim went on overdrive to reach it. This
used as much fuel as all the journey from the Second Galaxy.
The three speed-ranges of the _Starshine_ were--if Kim had but
known it--quaintly like the three speeds of ancient internal-combustion
land-cars. Interplanetary drive was a low speed, necessary for taking
off and landing, but terribly wasteful of fuel.
Overdrive had been the triumph of space-navigation for thousands of
years. It was like the second gear of the ancient land-cars. And the
transmitter-drive of Kim's devising was high speed, almost infinite
speed--but it could not be used within a solar system. It was too fast.
Kim drove to the farther orbit of Khiv Five and then went into a long,
slow, free fall toward the banded planet below. In the old days it
would have been changed to a landing-parabola at an appropriate moment.
"Now," said Kim grimly, "my guess is that we haven't enough fuel to
make anything but a crash-landing. Which would mean that we should all
get killed. So we will hope very earnestly that a warship is still
hanging about Khiv Five, and that it comes and tries to wipe us out."
Dona pointed to a tiny dial. Its needle quivered ever so slightly from
its point of rest.
"Mmmmm," said Kim. "Right at the limit of the detector's range.
Something using power. We should know how a worm on a fish-hook feels,
right now. We're bait."
He waited--and waited--and waited.
The small hundred-foot hull of the space-ship seemed motionless, seen
from without. The stars were infinitely far away. The great ringed sun
was a hundred and twenty million miles distant. Even the belted planet
Khiv Five was a good half-million miles below.
Such motion as the _Starshine_ possessed was imperceptible.
It floated with a vast leisureliness in what would be a parabolic
semi-orbit. But it would take days to make sure. And meanwhile....
Meanwhile the _Starshine_ seemed to spawn. A small object appeared
astern. Suddenly it writhed convulsively. Light glinted upon it. It
whirled dizzily, then more dizzily still, and abruptly it was a shape.
It was, in fact, the shape of a space-ship practically the size of the
_Starshine_ itself, but somehow it was not quite substantial. For
minutes it shimmered and quivered.
"You'll find it instructive," said Kim drily to the Mayor of Steadheim,
"to look out of a stern-port."
The Mayor lumbered toward a stern-port. A moment later they heard him
shout. Minutes later, he lumbered back.
"What's that?" he said angrily. "I thought it was another ship! When I
first saw it, I thought it was ramming us!"
"It's a gadget," said Kim abstractedly. His eyes were on the indicator
of one of the detectors. The needle was definitely away from its point
of rest. "There's something moving toward us. My guess is that it's a
warship with fighting-beams--and hafnium and fuel."
4
_Encounter in the Void_
The mayor of Steadheim looked from one to the other of them. Dona was
pale. She looked full of dread. Kim's lips were twisted wryly, but his
eyes were intent on the dial. The mayor opened his mouth, and closed
it, then spoke wrathfully.
"I don't understand all this! Where'd that other ship come from?"
"It isn't a ship," said Kim, watching the dial that told of the
approach of something that could only be an enemy--and it had been a
matter of faith that only the _Starshine_ roamed the space-ways.
"I got it made back on Terranova.
"We took a big reel of metal spring-wire, and wound it round and round
a shape like that of the _Starshine_. When it was in place we
annealed and tempered it so it would always resume that shape. And then
we wound it back on its reel. I just dumped it out in space from a
special lock astern.
"It began to unroll, and of course to go back to the form it had been
tempered in. Here, with no gravity to distort it, it went perfectly
back into shape. Close to, of course, you can see it's only a shell and
a thin one. But a few miles away it would fool you."
The needle on the detector-dial crept over and over. Kim wet his lips.
Dona's face was white.
Then Kim winced and the Mayor of Steadheim roared furiously and the
Universe without the viewports swayed and dissolved into something
else. Alarm-gongs rang and the _Starshine_ was in a brand-new
place, with a blue-white giant sun and a dwarf companion visible
nearby. The ringed sun Khiv had vanished.
"K-kim!" said Dona, choking.
"I'm quite all right," he told her. But he wiped sweat off his face.
"Those beams aren't pleasant, no matter how short the feeling is."
He turned back to the controls. The faint whine of the gyros began. The
_Starshine_ began to turn about. Kim applied power. But it took a
long time for the ship's nose to be turned exactly and precisely back
in the direction from which it had come.
"It's getting ticklish," he said abruptly. "There's less than a cupful
of fuel left."
"_Space!_" said the Mayor of Steadheim. He looked sick and weak
and frightened. "What happened?"
"We were in a sort of orbit about Khiv Five," said Kim, succinctly.
"We had a decoy ship out behind us. A warship spotted our arrival. It
sneaked up on us and let go a blast of its beams--the same beams that
killed all the men on Khiv Five.
"They didn't bother Dona--she's a girl--but they would have killed us
had not a relay flung the _Starshine_ away from there. The beams
got left behind. So did the dummy ship. I think they'll clamp on to
it to look it over. And if our engines keep turning over long enough,
we'll be all right. Now, let's see!"
His jaw was set as the transmitter-drive came on and the familiar
crazy gyration of all the stars again took place and the gongs rang
once more. But his astrogation was perfect. There was the ringed sun
Khiv again with its banded fifth planet and its polar ice-cap and
its equatorial belt of desert with the wide bands of irrigated land
crossing it. Kim drove for the planet. He looked at the fuel-gauge.
"Our tanks," he said evenly, "read empty. What fuel's left is in the
catalyzer."
A needle stirred on the bank of indicators. Dona caught her
breath. Kim sweated. The indication on the dial grew stronger. The
electron-telescope field sparkled suddenly, where light glinted on
glistening metal. Kim corrected course subtly.
There was the tiny form which looked so amazingly like a duplicate
of the _Starshine_. It was actually a thin layer of innumerable
turns of spring-wire. On any planet it would have collapsed of its own
weight. Here in space it looked remarkably convincing.
But the three in the _Starshine_ did not look at it. They looked
at the shape that had come alongside it and made fast with magnetic
grapples that distorted the thin decoy wildly--the shape that gave no
sign of any activity or any motion or any life.
That shape was a monster space-ship a thousand feet long. It looked as
if it bulged with apparatus of death. It was gigantic. It was deadly.
"Our trick worked," said Kim uneasily. "We should begin to feel
uncomfortable, you and I, in minutes--if only our engines keep running!"
He spoke to the Mayor of Steadheim. Almost as he spoke, a tiny tingling
began all over his body. As the ship went on, that tingling grew
noticeably stronger.
"What--"
"We've no weapons," said Kim, "nor time to devise them. But when we
were slaves on the planets we came from we were held enslaved by a
circuit that could torture us or paralyze us at the will of our rulers.
The Disciplinary Circuit. Remember?
"I put a Disciplinary-Circuit generator in that little decoy ship. I
took a suggestion from what our friends yonder did to the fighting
beams. I tuned the Disciplinary Circuit to affect any man--but no
woman--within its range.
"The generator went on when she grappled the decoy. Every man in it
should be helpless. If it stands like that, we'd be paralyzed too if we
went near. But not Dona."
The tingling was quite strong. It was painful. Presently it would be
excruciating. It would be completely impossible for any man within
fifty miles of the decoy space-ship to move a muscle.
"However," said Kim, "I've arranged that. I had Disciplinary-Circuit
projectors fitted on the _Starshine_. We turn them on that ship.
Automatically, the generator on the decoy will cut off. Our friends
will still be helpless, and we can go up and grapple--if our engines
keep going!"
He threw a switch. A relay snapped over somewhere and a faint humming
noise began. The tingling of Kim's body ceased. The decoy and the enemy
space-ship grew large before them. The enemy was still motionless.
Its crew, formerly held immobile by the circuit in the decoy, was now
held helpless by the beams from the _Starshine_. But neither Kim
nor the Mayor of Steadheim could enter the enemy ship without becoming
paralyzed too.
Dona slipped quietly from the control-room. She came back, clad in a
space-suit with the helmet face-plate open.
"All ready, Kim," she said quietly.
Sweat stood out in droplets on Kim's face. The _Starshine_
drifted ever so gently into position alongside the pair of motionless
shapes--the one so solid and huge, the other so flimsy and
insubstantial. Kim energized the grapples. There was a crushing impact
as the _Starshine_ anchored itself to the enemy.
Kim reached over and pulled out a switch.
"That's the wristlet relay switch," he told Dona. "We stay here until
you come back--even if a fighting-beam hits us. You've got to go
on board that monster and get some fuel and, if you can, a hafnium
catalyzer. If another battleship's around and comes up--you drive the
_Starshine_ home with what fuel you can get. We'll be dead, but
you do that. You hear?"
"I'll--hurry, Kim," Dona said.
"Be careful!" commanded Kim fiercely. "There shouldn't be a man on that
ship who can move, but be careful!"
She kissed him quickly and closed the face-plate of her helmet. She
went into the airlock and closed the inner door.
There was silence in the _Starshine_. Kim sweated. The outer
airlock door opened. The two ships were actually touching. The clumping
of the magnetic shoes of Dona's space-suit upon the other ship's hull
was transmitted to the _Starshine_.
Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim heard the clankings as she opened the
other ship's outer airlock door--the inner door. Then they heard
nothing.
Dona was in an enemy space-ship, unarmed. Subjects of the Empire of
Greater Sinab manned it. They or their fellows had murdered half the
population of the banded planet below. They were helpless, now, to be
sure, held immobile by fields maintained by the precariously turning
engines of the _Starshine_.
But the fuel-gauge showed the fuel-tanks absolutely dry. The
_Starshine_ was running on fuel in the pipeline and catalyzers.
It had been for an indefinite time. Its engines would cut off at any
instant.
When the lights flickered Kim groaned. This meant that the last few
molecules of fuel were going from the catalyzer. He feverishly cut
off the heaters which kept the ship warm in space. He cut off the
air-purifier.
He became desperately economical of every watt of energy. He used power
for the Disciplinary-Circuit beams which kept the enemy crew helpless
and for the grapples which kept the two ships in contact--for nothing
else.
But still the lights flickered. The engines gasped for power. They
started and checked and ran again, and again checked.
The second they failed finally, the immobile monster alongside
would become a ravening engine of destruction. The two men in the
_Starshine_ would die in an instant of unspeakable torment.
Dona--now fumbling desperately through unfamiliar passage-ways amid
contorted, glaring figures--would be at the tender mercy of the crew.
And when the three of them were dead the drive of the _Starshine_
would be at the disposal of the Empire of Greater Sinab if they only
chose to look at it. The beastly scheme of conquest would spread and
spread and spread throughout the Galaxy and enslave all women--and
murder all human men not parties to the criminality.
The lights flickered again. They almost died and on the
_Starshine_, Kim clenched his hands in absolute despair. On the
enemy warship the immobile crew made agonized raging movements.
But the engine caught fugitively once more, and Dona worked desperately
and then fled toward the airlock with her booty while the Disciplinary
Circuit field which froze the Sinabian crew wavered, and tightened, and
wavered once more.
And died!
Dona dragged open the enemy's inner airlock door as a howl rose behind
her. She flung open the outer as murderous projectors warmed. She
clattered along the outer hull of the Sinabian ship on her magnetic
shoes, and saw the _Starshine_ drifting helplessly away, even the
grapples powerless to hold the two bodies together.
At that sight, Dona gasped. She leaped desperately, with star-filled
nothingness above and below and on every hand. She caught the
_Starshine's_ airlock door.
And Kim cut out the Disciplinary-Circuit beams and the flow of current
to the grapples and, with a complete absence of hope, pressed the
transmitter-drive button. He had no shred of belief that it would work.
But it did. The equalizer-batteries from the engines gave out one
last surge of feeble power--and were dead. But that was enough, since
nothing else drew current at all. The stars reeled.
This was a test.
Almost anything could happen. Kim held his breath, anxiously watching
and waiting for the worst, his senses attuned to the delicate
mechanisms about him.
And then, slowly, the reaction was fully determined, and he smiled.
5
_The Needed Fuel_
The "_Starshine_" had a mass of about two hundred tons and an
intrinsic velocity of so many miles per second. When the field went on,
her mass dropped almost to zero, but her kinetic energy remained the
same. Her velocity went up almost to infinity. And the Universe went
mad.
The vision-ports showed stark lunacy. There were stars, but they
were the stars of a madman's dream. They formed and dissolved into
nothingness in instants too brief for estimate. For fractions of
micro-seconds they careered upon impossible trajectories across the
vision-ports' field of view.
Now a monstrous blue-white sun glared in terribly, seemingly almost
touching the ship. An instant later there was utter blackness all
about. Then colossal flaring globes ringed in the _Starshine_, and
shriveling heat poured in.
Then there was a blue watery-seeming cosmos all around like the vision
of an underwater world and dim shapes seemed to swim in it, and then
stars again, and then....
It was stark, gibbering madness!
But Kim reached the instrument-board. With the end of the last morsel
of power he had ceased to have weight and had floated clear of the
floor and everything else.
By the crazy, changing light he sighted himself and, when he touched
a sidewall, flung himself toward the now-dark bank of instruments. He
caught hold, fumbled desperately and threw the switch a radiation-relay
should have thrown. And then the madness ended.
There was stillness. There was nothing anywhere. There was no weight
within the ship, nor light, nor any sound save the heavy breathing of
Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim. The vision-ports showed nothing.
Looking carefully, with eyes losing the dazzle of now-vanished suns,
one could see infinitely faint, infinitely distant luminosities. The
_Starshine_ was somewhere between galaxies, somewhere in an
unspeakable gulf between islands of space, in the dark voids which are
the abomination of desolation.
There were small clankings aft. The outer airlock door went shut. A
little later the inner door opened. And then Kim swam fiercely through
weightlessness and clung to Dona, still in her space-suit, unable to
speak for his emotion.
The voice of the Mayor of Steadheim arose in the darkness which was
the interior of the _Starshine_--and the outer cosmos for tens of
thousands of light-years all about.
Dona now had the face-plate of her helmet open. She kissed Kim hungrily.
"--brought you something," she said unsteadily. "I'm not sure what,
but--something. They've separate engines to power their generators on
that ship, and there were tanks I thought were fuel-tanks."
"Space!" roared the Mayor of Steadheim, forward. "Who's that talking?
Am I dead? Is this Hades?"
"You're not dead yet," Kim called to him. "I'll tell you in a minute if
you will be."
There were no emergency-lights in the ship, but Dona's suit was
necessarily so equipped. She turned on lights and Kim looked at the two
objects she had brought.
"My dear," he told her, "you did it! A little fuel-tank with gallons in
it and a complete catalyzer. By the size of it, one of their beams uses
an engine big enough for fifty ships like this!"
Clutching at every projection, he made his way to the engine-room. Dona
followed.
"I'm glad, Kim," she said unsteadily, "that I was able to do something
important. You always do everything."
"The heck I do," he said. "But anyhow...."
He worked on the tank. She'd sheared it off with a tiny atomic torch
and the severed fuel-line had closed of itself, of course. He spliced
it into the _Starshine's_ fuel-line, and waited eagerly for the
heavy, viscid fluid to reach the catalyzer and then the engines.
"We'll--be all right now?" asked Dona hopefully.
"We were on transmitter-drive for five minutes, at a guess. You know
what that means!"
She caught her breath.
"_Kim!_ We're lost!"
"To say that we're lost is a masterpiece of understatement," he said
wryly. "At transmitter-speed we could cross the First Galaxy in a
ten-thousandth of a second. Which means roughly a hundred thousand
light-years in a ten-thousandth of a second. And we traveled for three
hundred seconds or thereabouts. What are our chances of finding our way
back?"
"Oh, Kim!" she cried softly. "It's unthinkable!"
He watched the meters. Suddenly, the engines caught. For the fraction
of a second they ran irregularly. Then all was normal. There was light.
There was weight. An indignant roar came from forward.
"If this is Hades--"
They went to the control-room. The Mayor of Steadheim sat on the floor,
staring incredulously about him. As they entered he grinned sheepishly.
"I was floating in the air and couldn't see a thing, and then the
lights came on and the floor smacked me! What happened and where are
we?"
Kim went to the instrument-board and plugged in the heaters--already
the vision-ports had begun to frost--and the air-purifier and the other
normal devices of a space-ship.
"What happened is simple enough," said Kim. "The last atom of power on
board the ship here threw us into transmitter-field drive. And when
that field is established it doesn't take power to maintain it.
"So we started to move! There's a relay that should have stopped us,
but there wasn't enough power left to work it. So we traveled for
probably five minutes on transmitter-drive."
"We went a long way, eh?" said the mayor, comfortably.
"We did," said Kim grimly. "To Ades from its sun is ninety million
miles--eight light-minutes. Minutes, remember! The First Galaxy is a
hundred thousand light-years across. Light travels a hundred thousand
years, going ninety million miles every eight minutes to cross it.
"The _Starshine_ travels a hundred thousand light-years in the
ten-thousandth part of a second. In one second--a billion light-years.
The most powerful telescope in the Galaxy cannot gather light from so
far away. But we went at least three hundred times farther.
"Three hundred billion light-years, plus or minus thirty billions more!
We went beyond the farthest that men have ever seen, and kept on beyond
the farthest that men have ever thought of!
"The light from the island universes we can see through the ports has
never yet reached the First Galaxy since time began. It hasn't had
time! We're not only beyond the limits that men have guessed at, we're
beyond their wildest imagining!"
The Mayor of Steadheim blinked at him. Then he got up and peered out
the vision-ports. Dim, remote luminosities were visible, each one a
galaxy of a thousand million suns!
"Hah!" grunted the mayor, "Not much to look at, at that! Now what?"