technician. But then the matter-transmitter on Terranova ceased to
operate and they called on him.
It happened just like that. One instant the wavering, silvery film
seemed to stretch across the arch in the public square of the principal
but still small settlement on the first planet to be colonized in the
Second Galaxy. The film bulged, and momentarily seemed to form the
outline of a human figure as a totally-reflecting, pulsating cocoon
about a moving object. Then it broke like a bubble-film and a walking
figure stepped unconcernedly out. Instantly the silvery film was formed
again behind it and another shape developed on the film's surface.
Only seconds before, these people and these objects had been on another
planet in another island universe, across unthinkable parsecs of space.
Now they were here. Bales and bundles and parcels of merchandise.
Huge containers of foodstuffs--the colony on Terranova was still not
completely self-sustaining--and drums of fuel for the space-ships busy
mapping the new galaxy for the use of men, and more people, and a huge
tank of viscous, opalescent plastic.
Then came a pretty girl, smiling brightly on her first appearance
on a new planet in a new universe, and crates of castings for more
space-ships, and a family group with a pet zorag on a leash behind
them, and a batch of cryptic pieces of machinery, and a man.
Then nothing. Without fuss, the silvery film ceased to be. One could
look completely through the archway which was the matter-transmitter.
One could see what was on the other side instead of a wavering,
pulsating reflection of objects nearby. The last man to come through
spoke unconcernedly over his shoulder, to someone he evidently believed
just behind, but who was actually now separated from him by the abyss
between island universes and some thousands of parsecs beyond.
Nobody paid any attention to matter-transmitters ordinarily. They had
been in use for ten thousand years. All the commerce of the First
Galaxy now moved through them. Space-ships had become obsolete, and
the little _Starshine_--which was the first handiwork of Man to
cross the gulf to the Second Galaxy--had been a museum exhibit for
nearly two hundred years before Kim Rendell smashed out of the museum
in it, with Dona, and the two of them went roaming hopelessly among the
ancient, decaying civilizations of man's first home in quest of a world
in which they could live in freedom.
But the matter-transmitter had ceased to operate. Five millions of
human beings in the Second Galaxy were isolated from the First. Ades
was the only planet in the home galaxy on which all men were criminals
by definition, and hence were friendly to the people of the new
settlements. Every single other planet--save the bewildered and almost
manless planets which had been subject to Sinab--was a tyranny of one
brutal variety or another.
Every other planet regarded the men of Ades as outlaws, rebels, and
criminals. The people of Terranova, therefore, were not cut off from
the immigrants and supplies and the technical skills of Ades. They were
necessarily isolated from the rest of the human race. And then, besides
that, there were sixteen millions of people left on Ades, cut off from
the hope that Terranova represented.
Kim Rendell was called on immediately. The Colony Organizer of
Terranova, himself, went in person to confer and to bewail.
Kim Rendell was peacefully puttering with an unimportant small gadget
when the Colony Organizer arrived. The house was something of a gem of
polished plastic--Dona had designed it--and it stood on a hill with a
view which faced the morning sun and the rising twin moons of Terranova.
The atmosphere-flier descended, and Dona led the Organizer to the
workshop in which Kim puttered. The Organizer had had half an hour in
which to think of catastrophe. He was in a deplorable state when Kim
looked up from the thing with which he was tinkering.
"Enter and welcome," he said cheerfully in the formal greeting. "I'm
only amusing myself. But you look disturbed."
The Colony Organizer bewailed the fact that there would be no more
supplies from Ades. No more colonists. Technical information, urgently
needed, could not be had. Supplies were necessary for exploring
parties, and new building-machines were desperately in demand, and the
storage-reserves were depleted and could last only so long if no more
came through.
"But," said Kim blankly. "Why shouldn't they come through?"
"The matter-transmitter's stopped working!" The Colony Organizer wrung
his hands. "If they're still transmitting on Ades, think of the lives
and the precious material that's being lost!"
"They aren't transmitting," said Kim. "A transmitter and a receiver are
a unit. Both have to work for either one to operate--except in the very
special case of a transmitter-drive ship. But it's queer. I'll come
take a look."
He slipped into the conventional out-of-door garments. Dona had
listened. Now she said a word or two to Kim, her expression concerned.
Kim's expression darkened.
"That's what I'm afraid of," he told her. "A transmitter is too simple
to break down. They can get detuned, but we made the pairs for Ades and
Terranova especially. Their tuning elements are set in solid plastite.
They couldn't get out of tune!"
He picked up a small box. He tucked it under his arm.
"I'll be back," he told Dona heavily. "But I suspect you'd better pack."
He went out to the grounded flier. The Colony Organizer took it up and
across the green-clad hills of Terranova. The vegetation of Terranova
is extraordinarily flexible, and the green stuff below the flier swayed
elaborately in the wind. The top of the forests bowed and bent in
the form of billows and waves. The effect was that of an ocean which
complacently remained upraised in hillocks and had no normal surface.
It was not easy to get used to such things.
"I'm terribly worried," said the Organizer anxiously. "There is a
tremendous shortage of textiles, and the ores we usually send back to
balance our account are piling up."
"You're badly worried, eh?" said Kim grimly.
"Of course! How can we keep our economic system now?"
Kim made an angry noise.
"I'm a lot more worried than you are," he snapped. "Nothing should
have stopped this particular pair of transmitters from working but the
destruction of one or the other! This box in my pocket might tell me
the answer, but I'm afraid to find out. I assure you that temporary
surpluses and shortages of ores and textiles are the least of the
things we have to worry about."
The little flier sped on, with the great, waving billows of the forest
beneath it. On one hillock there was a clearing with a group of four
plastic houses shining in the sunlight. They looked horribly lonely in
the sea of green, but the population on Terranova was spread thin. Far
over at the horizon there was another clearing. Sunlight glinted on
water. A pleasure-pool. There was a sizable village about it. Half a
dozen soarers spun and whirled lazily above. Kim said:
"The thing is that Ades and the planets left over after we handled
Sinab are the only places in the whole First Galaxy where there are
no disciplinary circuits. Ades is the only place where a man can
spit in the eye of another man and the two of them settle it between
themselves. There's a government of sorts, on Ades, as there is here,
but there's no ruler. Also there's nobody who can strut around and make
other men bow to him. A woman on Ades, and here, belongs to the man
she wants to belong to. She can't be seized by some lordling for his
own pleasure, and turned over to his guards and underlings when he's
through with her."
"That's true," said the Colony Organizer, who was still worried. "But
the transmitter--"
"Gossip of the admirable state of things on Ades has gone about," said
Kim hardly. "Some of our young men appointed themselves missionaries
and went roaming around the planets, spreading word that Ades wasn't
a bad place. That if you were exiled to Ades you were lucky. They
probably bragged that we whipped the Empire of Sinab in a fight."
At this the mouth of the Organizer dropped open in astonishment.
"Of course, of course! The number of exiles arriving at Ades increased.
It was excellent. We need people for the Second Galaxy, and people who
earn exile are usually people with courage, willing to take risks for
the sake of hope."
"Don't you realize that such things have been dangerous? When people on
Markab Two began to hope?" Kim said impatiently. "When peasants on the
planets of Allioth began to imagine that things might be better? When
slaves on Utbeg began to tell each other in murmurs that there was a
place where people weren't slaves? Don't you see that such things would
alarm the rulers of such planets? How can people be held as slaves
unless you keep them in despair?"
The Colony Organizer corrected his course a trifle. Far away the walls
of the capital city of Terranova glinted in the sunlight.
"And there are the twenty-one planets which fell into our laps when
we had to smash Sinab," said Kim. "Ades became the subject of dreams.
Peasants and commoners think of it yearningly, as a sort of paradise.
But kings and tyrants dream of it either as a nightmare which threatens
the tranquility of their realms, or else as a very pretty bit of loot
to be seized if possible. There are probably ten thousand royal courts
where ambitious men rack their brains for some plausible way to wipe
out Ades as a menace and take over our twenty-one planets for loot.
Ades is already full of spies, sent there in the guise of exiles.
There've been men found murdered after torture,--seized and tortured by
spies hoping to find out the secrets by which we whipped Sinab. There's
one bomb-crater on Ades already, where a bomb smuggled through the
transmitter was set off in an effort to wipe out all the brains on the
planet. It didn't, but it was bad."
2
_Enemy Sabotage_
Skillfully the colony organizer sent the flier into the long shallow
glide that would land it in the planet capital city. There were only
twenty thousand people in that city. It would rate as a village
anywhere except on Ades, but it was the largest settlement on Terranova.
"Then you think," said the harassed Organizer, "that some outrage has
been committed and the transmitter on Ades damaged--perhaps by another
bomb?"
"I hope it's no worse than that," said Kim. "I don't know what I fear,
but there are still sixteen million people on Ades, and some of them
are very decent folk. In a little while I'll know if it's nothing
important, or if it's bad. I could have found out back at home, but I
wanted to hold on to hope."
His lips were tightly compressed. The flier landed. The two men got out
and went along a yielding walk to the central square of the city.
Many persons had collected in the square, more people in that one spot
than Kim had seen together for a long time. Now at least a thousand
men and women and children had gathered, and were standing motionless,
looking at the tall arch of the transmitter.
There would have been nothing extraordinary about the appearance of
the arch to a man from past ages. It would have seemed to be quite
commonplace--gracefully designed, to be sure, and with a smooth purity
of line which the ancient artists only aspired to, but still not at
all a remarkable object. But the throng of onlookers who stared at it,
did so because they could look through it. That had never before been
possible. It had been a matter-transmitter. Now it was only an arch.
The people stared.
Kim went in the technician's door at the base of the arch. The local
matter-technician greeted him with relief.
"I'm glad you have come, Kim Rendell," he said uneasily. "I can find
nothing wrong. Every circuit is correct. Every contact is sound. But it
simply does not work!"
"I'll see," said Kim. "I'm sure you are right, but I'll verify it. Yet
I'm afraid I'm only postponing a test I should have made before."
He went over the test-panel, trying the various circuits. All checked
up satisfactorily. He went behind the test-panel and switched a number
of leads. He returned to the front and worked the panel again. The
results were widely at variance with the original readings, but Kim
regarded them with an angry acceptance.
"I reversed some leads, just in case a checking instrument was out
by the same amount as a circuit," he told the technician. "To be
frank about it, I made sure you hadn't knocked out the transmitter on
purpose. Such things have been done." Then he said grimly, "This one
is all right. The transmitter on Ades is out of action. It not only
doesn't work, but they haven't been able to fix it in--how long?"
"Two hours now," said the technician unhappily.
"Too long!" said Kim.
He unpacked his box. It was very small, a foot by a foot by a foot.
There was a cone-shaped hole in one end which diminished to a small
hole at the other end. Kim sweated a little.
"I should have tried this before," he said. "But I wanted to hope. With
all the First Galaxy fearing and hating Ades, somebody would think of a
way to do us damage, even without space-ships!"
He turned a tiny knob on the box, and looked through the hole. His lips
tautened. He began to make tests. His face grew more and more drawn and
sombre. At last he turned the little knob again, and nothing happened.
His face went quite white.
"What is it?" asked the Colony Organizer.
Kim sat down, looking rather sick.
"It's bad," he said. Then he gestured toward the box. "When we were
fighting Sinab, somebody worked out an idea for the remote control
of ships. Beam control would be too slow. At a few million miles,
the information the robot gathered would take seconds to get back
to the control-board, and more seconds would be needed for the
controlling signals to get back to the robot. In terms of light-years,
communications that way would be impossible."
Kim glanced at the Organizer, who signified by a nod that he understood.
"If it took a year each way, there'd be two years between the robot's
observation of something to be acted on," Kim continued, "and the
signal that would make it act. So this man proposed very tiny
matter-transmitters. One on the robot and one on the home planet. A
solid object would receive all the information the robot's instruments
gathered.
"The transmitter would send it back to the control-board at
transmitter-speed, and the board would impress orders on it and send
it to the robot again. It could shuttle across the width of a galaxy
a hundred times a second, and make robot-control at any distance
practical. A few of them were made, but not used. This is one of them.
"I had it for measuring the actual speed of transmitter-travel between
here and Ades. We thought the distance would be enough for a good
measurement. It wasn't. But this is a transmitter like the big one, and
it has a mate on Ades, and its mate is a hemisphere away from Ades'
main transmitter. And neither one works. Something's happened on Ades,
that involves both hemispheres. And the transmitter couldn't have been
knocked out by something that only killed people. It looks as if Ades
may have been destroyed."
There was an instant's uncomprehending silence. Then the realization
struck home. In all of human history no planet had ever been completely
destroyed. Dozens, even hundreds, had been devastated, before wars
came to an end by the discovery of a weapon too terrible to be used.
Four had been depopulated by that weapon, the fighting-beam. But never
before had it even been imagined that a planet could be wiped out of
existence.
"There are theoretic considerations," said Kim, dry-throated, "which
make a material weapon like atomic explosive unthinkable. There are
other considerations which make it certain that any immaterial weapon
that could destroy a planet would have infinite speed and therefore
infinite range. _If_ Ades has been destroyed, all the human race,
including us, must sooner or later be subject to those who control
such a weapon." Kim Rendell paused and cleared his throat. "If they
start off by destroying the only world on which men are free, I don't
think I like it. Now I must go back home. I'd better get over to the
First Galaxy in the _Starshine_ and find out what's happened."
* * * * *
The thousand million suns of the First Galaxy swam in space, attended
by their families of planets. Three hundred million worlds had
been populated by the human race. For thirty thousand years the
descendants of the people of Earth--that almost mythical first home of
humanity--had spread through the vastness of what once had seemed to
them the very cosmos itself.
In the older, long-settled planets, civilization rose to incredible
heights of luxury and of pride, and then took the long dive down into
decadence and futility while newer, fresher worlds still struggled
upward from the status of frontier settlements.
But at long last humanity's task in the First Galaxy was ended. The
last planet suitable for human occupancy had been mapped and colonized.
The race had reached the limit of its growth. It had reached,
too--or so it seemed--its highest possible point of development.
Matter-transmitters conveyed parcels and persons instantly and easily
from rim to rim of the Galaxy.
Disciplinary Circuits enforced the laws of planetary governments beyond
any hope of evasion or defiance. There were impregnable defenses
against attacks from space. There could be no war, there could be no
revolt, there could be no successful crime--save by those people who
controlled governments--and there could be no hope. So humanity settled
back toward barbarism.
Perhaps it was inevitable that conquest should again become possible,
revolt conceivable, and crime once more feasible even to individuals,
so that hope could return to men. And perhaps it was the most natural
thing imaginable that hope first sprang from the prison world of Ades.
Whispers spread from planet to planet. Ades, to which all rebels and
nonconformists had been banished in hopeless exile, was no longer a
symbol for isolation and despair. Its citizens--if criminals could be
citizens anywhere--had revived the art of space-travel by means of
ships.
The rest of the Galaxy had abandoned space-ships long ago as
antiquities. Matter-transmitters far surpassed them. But Ades had
revived them and fought a war with the Empire of Sinab, and won
it, and twenty-one planets with all their cities and machines had
fallen to them. But the men of Sinab had been sent to an unimaginable
fate, leaving wives and daughters behind. The fact that the women of
the Sinabian Empire were mostly the widows of men massacred for the
Empire's spread was not clearly told in the rumors which ran about
among the worlds.
If you became a criminal and were exiled to Ades, you were lucky. There
were not enough men on Ades to accomplish the high triumphs awaiting
them on every hand. There was hope for any man who dared to become a
rebel. Exile to Ades was the most fortunate of adventures instead of
the most dreadful of fates.
Those whispers were fascinating, but they were seditious. The oligarchs
and tyrants and despots and politicians who ruled their planets by the
threat of the disciplinary circuit, found this new state of affairs
deplorable. Populations grew restive. There was actually hope among the
common people, who could be subjected to unbearable torment by the mere
pressure of a button. And of course hope could not be permitted. Allow
the populace to hope, and it would aspire to justice. Grant it justice
and it might look for liberty! Something had to be done!
So something was done. Many things were done. Royal courts debated the
question, alike of the danger and of possible loot in the empire to
which Ades had fallen heir. And in consequence the despots had acted.
The _Starshine_ winked into existence near the sun which had been
the luminary of Ades. It was a small, cold sun, and Ades had been its
only planet. The _Starshine_ had made the journey from Terranova
in four leaps, of which the first was the monstrous one from the Second
Galaxy to the First. Accuracy of aim could not be expected over such an
expanse.
The little ship had come out of its first leap near that preposterous
group of the blue-white suns of Dheen, whose complicated orbits about
each other still puzzled mathematicians. And Kim had come to the sector
of the Galaxy he desired on his second leap, and to the star-cluster in
the third, and the fourth brought him to the small sun he looked for.
But space was empty about it. A sun without planets is a rarity so
strange that it is almost impossible. This sun had possessed Ades.
Nevertheless Kim searched for Ades. He found nothing. He searched for
debris of an exploded planet. He found nothing. He set cameras to
photograph all the cosmos about him, and drove the _Starshine_ at
highest interplanetary speed for twelve hours. Then he looked at the
plates.
In that twelve hours the space-ship had driven some hundreds of
thousands of miles. Even nearby stars at distances of light-years,
would not have their angles change appreciably, and so would show upon
the plates as definite, tiny dots. But any planet or any debris within
a thousand million miles would make a streak instead of a dot upon the
photographic plate.
There was nothing. Ades had vanished.
He aimed for the star Khiv and flashed to its vicinity. The banded
planet Khiv Five swam sedately in emptiness. Kim drove for it, at first
on mere overdrive, and then on the interplanetary drive used for rising
from and landing on the surface of worlds. He landed on Khiv Five.
Women looked at him strangely. A space-ship which landed on Khiv
Five--or anywhere else, for that matter--must certainly come from Ades,
but ships were not commonplace sights. Kim was no commonplace sight,
either. Six years before, the men on Khiv Five had died in one rotation
of the planet. Every man and boy was murdered by the killing-beams of
the now defunct Sinabian Empire. Now there were only women, save for
the very few men who had migrated to it in quest of wives, and had
remained to rear families.
The population of Khiv Five was overwhelmingly female.
Kim found his way to the governing center of the capital city. Dona
walked with him through the city streets. There were women everywhere.
They turned to stare at Kim. They looked at Dona with veiled eyes.
Long years on an exclusively feminine world does strange things to
psychology. There were women wearing the badges of mourning for
husbands dead more than half a decade.
In a sense it was a dramatization of their loss, because all women,
everywhere, take a melancholy pleasure in the display of their
unhappiness. But in part to boast of grief for a lost husband was an
excuse for not having captured one of the few men who had arrived since
the mass murder. As a matter of fact, Kim did not see a single man in
the capital city of Khiv Five, but its streets swarmed with women.
He asked for the head of the planet government, and at long last found
an untidy woman at a desk. He asked what was known of Ades.
"I was on Terranova," he explained. "The matter-transmitter went off
and it did not come back on. I came back by space-ship to find out
about it, and went to where Ades should have been. I'm Kim Rendell, and
I used to be a matter-transmitter technician. I thought I might repair
the one on Ades if it needed repairing. But I could find no planet
circling Ades' sun."
The woman regarded him with what was almost hostility.
"Kim Rendell," she said. "I've heard of you. You are a very famous man.
But we women on Khiv Five can do without men!"
"No doubt," Kim said patiently. "But has there been any word of Ades?"
"We are not interested in Ades," she said angrily. "We can do without
Ades."
"But I'm interested in Ades," said Kim. "And after all, it was Ades
which punished the murderers of the men of Khiv Five. A certain amount
of gratitude is indicated."
"Gratitude!" said the untidy woman harshly. "We'd have been grateful if
you men of Ades had turned those Sinabians over to us! We'd have killed
them--every one--slowly!"