stood before it at a gateway. Kim trudged across to him. He came back.
"He's stupid," he said shortly. "He knows what to guard, and the
name of the plant, and where a workman may go to be received into
employment. That's all. We'll try again."
The _Starshine_ rose and moved. She was designed for movement
in space, with parsecs of distance on every hand. She was unhandy
when used as now for an atmosphere-flier. She descended within a
factory quadrangle. There was no one about. Literally no one. The
dwelling-units were occupied, to be sure, but no one moved anywhere.
When Kim opened the airlock there was a dull, grumbling rumble in the
air. It came from the many-storied building which surrounded this
courtyard and stretched away for miles.
Kim and Dona stood blankly in the airlock door. The air had no odor
at all. There was no dust. There was not a single particle of growing
stuff anywhere. To people who had lived on Terranova, it was incredible.
Then bells rang. Hundreds and thousands of bells. They rang stridently
in all the rooms and corridors of all the dwelling-units which reached
away as far as the eye could follow them. It was a ghastly sound,
because every bell was in exactly the same tone and made exactly the
same tintinabulation.
Then there was a stirring in the houses. Folk moved within them.
Figures passed inside the windows. Now and again, briefly, faces
peered out. But none lingered to stare at what must have been the
unprecedented sight of a space-ship resting in the courtyard.
After a little, figures appeared in the doors. Men and women swarmed
out and streamed toward openings in the factory building. Their heads
turned to gaze at the ship, but they did not even slacken speed in
their haste toward the sound of industry.
Kim hailed them. They looked at him blankly and hurried on. He caught
hold of a man.
"Where will I find the leader?" he asked sharply. "The boss! The
government! The king or whatever you have! Where?"
The man struggled.
"I be late," he protested unhappily. "I work. I be late!"
"Where's the government?" Kim repeated more sharply still. "The king or
nobles or whoever makes the laws or whatever the devil--"
"I be late!" panted the man.
He twisted out of Kim's grasp and ran to join the swarming folk now
approaching the great building.
They hurried inside. The quadrangle was again empty. Kim scowled. Then
other workers came out of the factory and plodded wearily toward the
dwelling-units. Kim waylaid a man and shot questions at him. His speech
was slurred with fatigue. Dona could not understand him at all. But he
gazed at the _Starshine_, and groped heavily for answers to Kim's
questions, and at the end trudged exhaustedly into a doorway.
Kim came into the ship, scowling. He seated himself at the
control-board. The ship lifted once more. He headed toward the curve of
the plant's bulging form.
"What did you learn, Kim?"
"This is the work continent," said Kim shortly. "The factories and the
workmen are here. The owners live in a place of their own. I have to
talk to one of the more important merchants. I need information."
Time passed and the ship went on over the rim of the planet. Orbital
speed was impossible. The _Starshine_ stayed almost within
atmosphere and moved eastward at no more than fifteen hundred miles an
hour.
"Here it is," said Kim, at last.
The ship settled down once more. There was a thin, hazy overcast here,
and clear vision came suddenly as they dropped below it. And the
coast and the land before them brought an exclamation from Dona. The
shoreline was magnificent, all beautiful bold cliffs with rolling
hills behind them. There were mountains on farther yet and splendid
vistas everywhere. But more than the land or the natural setting, it
was what men had done which caused Dona to exclaim.
The whole terrain was landscaped like a garden. As far as the eye could
reach--and the _Starshine_ still flew high--every hillside and
every plain had been made into artificial but marvelous gardens. There
were houses here and there. Some were huge and gracefully spreading, or
airily soaring upward, or simple with the simplicity of gems and yet
magnificent beyond compare. There was ostentation here, to be sure, but
there was surely no tawdriness. There was no city in sight. There was
not even a grouping of houses, yet many of the houses were large enough
to shelter communities.
"I--see," said Kim. "The workmen live near the factories or in their
compounds. The owners have their homes safely away from the ugly part
of commerce. They've a small-sized continent of country homes, Dona,
and undoubtedly it is very pleasant to live here. Whom shall we deal
with?"
Dona shook her head. Kim picked a magnificent residence at random. He
slanted the _Starshine_ down. Presently it landed lightly upon
smooth lawn of incredible perfection, before a home that Dona regarded
with shining eyes.
"It's--lovely!" she said breathlessly.
"It is," agreed Kim.
"It even has a feeling all its own," he said. "The palace of a king or
a tyrant always has something of arrogance about it. It's designed to
impress the onlooker. A pleasure-palace is always tawdry. It's designed
to flatter the man who enters it. These houses are solid. They're
the homes of men who are thinking of generations to follow them and,
meanwhile, only of themselves. I've heard of the merchant princes of
Spicus Five, and I'm prejudiced. I don't like those factories with the
workmen's homes inside. But--I like this house. Do you want to come
with me?"
Dona looked at the house--yearningly. At the view all about; every tree
and every stone so placed as to constitute perfection. The effect was
not that of a finicky estheticism, but of authentic beauty and dignity.
But after a moment Dona shook her head.
"I don't think I'd better," she said slowly. "I'm a woman, and I'd
want one like it. I'll stay in the ship and look at the view. You've a
communicator?"
Kim nodded. He opened the airlock door and stepped out. He walked
toward the great building.
Dona watched his figure grow small in its progress toward the mansion.
She watched him approach the ceremonial entrance. She saw a figure in
formalized rich clothing appear in that doorway and bow to him. Kim
spoke, with gestures. The richly clothed servant bowed for him to go
first into the house. Kim entered and the door closed.
Dona looked at her surroundings. Dignity and tranquility and beauty
were here. Children growing up in such an environment would be very
happy and would feel utterly safe. Wide, smooth, close-cropped lawns,
with ancient trees and flowering shrubs stretched away to the horizons.
There was the gleam of statuary here and there--rarely. A long way off
she could see the glitter of water, and beside it a graceful colonnade,
and she knew that it was a pleasure-pool.
Once she saw two boys staring at the space-ship. There was no trace of
fear in their manner. But a richly-dressed servant--much more carefully
garbed than the boys--led up two of the slim riding-sards of Phanis,
and the boys mounted and their steeds started off with that sinuous
smooth swiftness which only sards possess in all the First Galaxy.
Time passed, and shadows lengthened. Finally Dona realized how many
hours had elapsed since Kim's departure. She was beginning to grow
uneasy when the door opened again and Kim came out followed by four
richly clad servants. Those servants carried bundles. Kim's voice came
over the communicator.
"Close the inner airlock door, Dona, and don't open it until I say so."
Dona obeyed. She watched uneasily. The four servants placed their
parcels inside the airlock at a gesture from Kim. Then there was an
instant of odd tension. Dona could not see the servants, but she saw
Kim smiling mirthlessly at them. He made no move to enter. He spoke
sharply and she heard them file out of the airlock. Dona could see them
again.
Kim stepped into the space-ship and closed the door.
"Take her up, Dona--fast!"
The _Starshine_ shot upward, with the four servants craning their
necks to look at it. It was out of sight of the ground in seconds. It
was out of the atmosphere before Kim came into the control-room from
the lock.
"Quite a civilization," he said. "You'd have liked that house, Dona.
There's a staff of several hundred servants, and it is beautiful
inside. The man who owns it is also master of one of the bigger
industrial plants. He doesn't go to the plant, of course. He has his
offices at home, with a corps of secretaries and a television-screen
for interviews with his underlings. Quite a chap."
"Were those four men servants?" Dona asked.
"No, they were guards," said Kim drily. "There are no proletarians
around that place, and none are permitted. Guards stand watch night
and day. I'd told my friend that the _Starshine_ was packed with
lethal gadgets with which Ades had won at least one war, and he's in
the munitions business, so I wasn't going to let his guards get inside.
They wanted to, badly, insisting they had to put their parcels in the
proper place. He'd have paid them lavishly if they could have captured
a ship like the _Starshine_."
He laughed a little.
"I was lucky to pick a munitions maker. There aren't many wars in the
ordinary course of events, but he turns out weapons for palace guards,
mobile fighting-beam projectors, and so on. All the equipment for a
planet ruler who wants a fancy army for parades or a force with a punch
to fight off any sneak attack via matter-transmitter. That's what your
average ruler is afraid of, and what he keeps an army to defend himself
against. Of course the Disciplinary Circuit takes care of his subjects."
6
_Vanished World_
Ahead of them loomed the sun, Spicus, many millions of miles away,
while beneath them lay the planet, Spicus Five, a vast hemisphere which
was rapidly shrinking into the distance. Kim moved over beside Dona and
stared reflectively at the instrument-board.
"I got frightened, Kim," the girl said. "You were gone so long."
"I was bargaining," Kim answered. "I told him I came from Ades. I'd
a space-ship, so he could believe that. Then I told him what had
happened. Selling munitions, he should have known about it beforehand,
and I think he did. He doubted that I'd come from Ades as quickly as
I said, though, until I recited the names of some of the gracious
majesties who are making a grab of planets. Then he was sure. So he
wanted to strike a bargain with me for Terranova. He'd supply it with
arms, he said, in exchange for a star-cluster of his own in the Second
Galaxy. If I'd set up a private matter-transmitter for him...."
Kim laughed without mirth.
"He could colonize a couple of planets himself, and make a syndicate
to handle the rest. He saw himself changing his status from that of a
merchant princeling to that of a landed proprietor with half a dozen
planets as private estates, and probably a crown to wear on week-ends
and when he retired from business on Spicus Five. There are precedents,
I gather."
"But, Kim!" protested Dona. "What did you do?"
"I did one thing that's been needed for a long time," said Kim grimly.
"It seems to me that I do everything backwards. I should have attended
to the matter of Ades first, but I had a chance and took it. I think I
put something in motion that will ultimately smash up the whole cursed
system that's made slaves of every human being but those on Ades and
Terranova--the Disciplinary Circuit. Back on Ades we've talked about
the need to free the people of this galaxy. It's always seemed too big
a job. But I think it's started now. It will be a profitable business,
and my friend who wanted to bargain for some planets in the Second
Galaxy will make a pretty penny of the beginning, and it will carry on
of itself."
The planet below and behind was now only a globe. It soon dwindled into
a tiny ball. Kim touched Dona on the shoulder.
"I'll take over," he said. "We've got work to do, Dona."
Dona stood up and stamped her foot.
"Kim! You're misunderstanding me on purpose! What about Ades? Did you
find out what happened to it?"
Kim began the process of sighting the _Starshine's_ nose upon a
single, distant, minute speck of light which seemingly could not be
told from a million other points of light, all of which were suns.
"I think I found out something," he told her. "I thought a merchant
planet would be the place to hear all the gossip of the Galaxy. My
friend back yonder put his research organization to work finding out
what I wanted to know. What they dug up looks plausible. Right now I'm
going to get even for it. That's a necessity! After that, we'll see.
There were sixteen million people on Ades. We'll try to do something
about them. They aren't likely to be all dead--yet."
The sun of Ades swam in emptiness. For uncountable billions of years
it had floated serenely with its single planet circling it in the
companionability of bodies separated only by millions of miles, when
their next nearest neighbors are light-years away. A sun with one
planet is a great rarity.
A sun with no satellites--save for giant pulsing Cepheids and
close-coupled double suns--is almost unknown. But for billions upon
billions of years that sun and Ades had kept each other company. Then
men had appeared. For a thousand years great space-ships had grimly
trundled back and forth to unload their cargoes of criminals upon the
chilly small world.
Ades was chosen as a prison planet from the beginning. Later,
matter-transmitters made the journeys of space-craft useless. For
six, seven, eight thousand years there was no traffic but the one-way
traffic of its especially contrived transmitter, which would receive
criminals from all the Galaxy but would return none or any news of them
to the worlds outside.
During all that time a lonely guard-ship hung drearily about, watching
lest someone try to rescue a man doomed to hopeless exile, and return
him to happier scenes. And finally the guard-ship had gone away,
because the space-ways were no longer used by anybody, and there were
no ships in the void save those of the Patrol itself. Accordingly the
Patrol was disbanded.
For hundreds of years nothing happened at all. And then Kim Rendell
came in the _Starshine_, and shortly thereafter tiny ships
began to take off from Ades, and they fought valorously on distant
star-systems, and at last a squadron of war-craft came to subjugate
Ades for the beastly Empire of Sinab. Finally there was a battle in
the bright beams of the lonely sun itself. And after that, for a time,
little space-ships swam up from the planet and darted away, and darted
back, and darted away, and back.
But never before had there been any such situation as now. The sun,
which had kept company with Ades for so long, now shone in lonely
splendor, amid emptiness, devoid of its companion. And that emptiness
was bewildering to a small ship--sister to the _Starshine_--which
flicked suddenly into being nearby.
The ship had come back from a journey among the virgin stars of the
Second Galaxy with honorable scars upon its hull and a zestful young
crew who wished to boast of their journeying. They had come back to
Ades--so they thought--direct, not even stopping at Terranova. And
there was no Ades.
The little ship flashed here and there about the bereft sun in
bewilderment. It searched desperately for a planet some seven thousand
miles in diameter, which had apparently been misplaced. And as it
hunted, a second ship whisked into sight from faster-than-light drive.
The detectors of the two ships told them of each other's presence, and
they met and hung in space together. Then they searched in unison, but
in vain. At long last they set out in company for one of the planets of
the former Sinabian Empire, on which there must be some news of what
had happened to Ades.
On transmitter-drive they inevitably separated and one was much closer
to the chosen planet when they came out of stressed space. One drove
down into atmosphere while the other was still thousands of miles away.
The leading ship went down at landing-speed, toward a city. The other
ship watched by electron telescope and prepared to duplicate its
course. But the man of the second ship saw--and there could be no doubt
about it--that suddenly the landing ship vanished from its place as if
it had gone into intergalactic drive in atmosphere. There was a flash
of intolerable, unbearable light. And then there was an explosion of
such monstrous violence that half of the planet's capital city vanished
or was laid in ruins.
The crew of the second ship were stunned. But the second ship went
slowly and cautiously down into atmosphere, and its communicators
picked up voices issuing stern warnings that troops must be welcomed
by all citizens, and that absolute obedience must be given to all men
wearing the uniform of His Magnificence the Despot of Lith. And then
there was babbling confusion and contradictory shoutings, and a hoarse
voice ordered all soldiers of His Magnificence to keep a ceaseless
watch upon the sky, because a ship had come down from overhead, and
when the fighting-beams struck it--to kill its crew--it appeared to
have fired some devastating projectile which had destroyed half a great
city. All ships seen in the sky were to be shot down instantly. His
Magnificence, the Despot of Lith, would avenge the outrage.
The lonely surviving ship went dazedly away from the planet which once
had been friendly to the men of Ades. It went back to Ades' sun, and
searched despairingly once again, and then fled to the Second Galaxy
and Terranova, to tell of what it had seen.
That was an event of some importance. At least all of one planet had
been rocked to its core from the detonation of a space-ship which
flashed into collision with it at uncountable multiples of the speed of
light, and was thereby raised to the temperature of a hot sun's very
heart. And besides, there was agitation and suspicion and threats and
diplomatic chaos among the planetary governments who had joined to loot
the dependencies of Ades, once Ades was eliminated from the scene.
But a vastly, an enormously more significant event took place on a
planet very far away, at almost the same instant. The planet was Donet
Three, the only habitable planet of its system. It was a monstrous,
sprawling world, visibly flattened by the speed of its rotation and
actually habitable only by the fact that its rotation partly balanced
out its high gravity.
The _Starshine_ approached over a polar region and descended
to touch atmosphere. Then, while Dona looked curiously through the
electron telescope at monstrous ice-mountains below, Kim donned a
space-suit, went into the airlock, and dropped a small object out of
the door. He closed the door, returned to the control-room, and took
the _Starshine_ out to space again.
That was the most significant single action, in view of its ultimate
meaning, that had been performed in the First Galaxy in ten thousand
years. And yet, in a sense, it was purely a matter of form. It was not
necessary for Kim to do it. He had arranged for the same effect to be
produced, in time yet to come, upon every one of the three hundred
million inhabited planets of the First Galaxy. The thing was automatic;
implicit in the very nature of the tyrannical governments sustained by
the disciplinary circuit.
Kim had simply dropped a small metal case to the surface of Donet
Three. It was very strong--practically unbreakable. It contained an
extremely simple electronic circuit. It fell through the frigid air of
the flattened pole of Donet Three, and it struck the side of a sloping
ice-mountain, and bounced and slid down to a valley and buried itself
in snow, and only instants later, the small hole left by its fall was
filled in and covered up completely by snow riding on a hundred-mile
gale. It was undiscoverable. It was irretrievable. No device of man
could detect or recover it. Kim himself could not have told where it
fell.
Kim then sighted the _Starshine_ on another distant target, and
found the planet Arth, and dropped a small metal object into the
depths of the humid and festering jungles along its equator. Human
beings could live only in the polar regions of Arth. Then he visited a
certain planet in the solar system of Tabor and a small metal case went
twisting through deep water down to the seabed of its ocean.
He dropped another on the shifting desert sands which cover one-third
of Sind where an Emperor and Council rule in the name of a non-existent
republic, and yet another on a planet of Megar, where an otherwise
unidentified Queen Amritha held imperial power, and others....
He dropped one small metal case, secured from a merchant-prince on
Spicus Five, on each of the planets whose troops had moved into the
planets left defenseless by the vanishment of Ades.
"I wanted to do that myself, because what we've got to do next is
dangerous and we may get killed," he told Dona drily. "But now we're
sure that men won't stay slaves forever and now we can try to do
something about Ades. I'm afraid our chances are pretty slim."
7
_One Chance in a Million_
In spite of his pessimism, Kim settled down to the fine calculations
required for a voyage to a blue-white dwarf star not readily
distinguished from others. Most inhabited planets, of course, circled
sol-type suns. Light much different from that in which the race had
developed was apt to have produced vegetation inimical to humanity,
and useful vegetation did not thrive. And of course sol-type stars are
most readily spotted by space navigators. As he checked his course with
star-charts, Dona spoke softly.
"Thanks, Kim."
"For what?"
"For not wanting to put me in safety when you're going to do something
dangerous. I wouldn't let you, but thanks for not trying."
"_Mmmmh!_" said Kim. "You're too useful."
He lined up his course and pressed the transmitter-drive stud on the
control-panel. Space danced a momentary saraband,--and there was a
blue-white dwarf two hundred million miles away, showing barely a
planet-sized disk, but pouring out a pitiless white glare that hurt the
eyes.
"That's it," said Kim. "That's the sun Alis. There should be four
planets, but we're looking for Number One. It goes out beyond Two at
aphelion, so we have to check the orbit--if we can find it--before we
can be sure. No--we should be able to tell by the rotation. Very slow."
"And what are you going to do with it?" demanded Dona.
There were bright spots in emptiness which the electron telescope
instantly declared to be planets. Kim set up cameras for pictures.
"Alis One is the only really uninhabitable planet in the Galaxy that's
inhabited," he observed painstakingly. "It belongs to Pharos Three. I
understand it's the personal property of the king. It has no atmosphere
in spite of an extremely high specific gravity and a reasonable mass.
But the plutonium mines have been worked for five thousand years."
"Plutonium mines with that half-life?" Dona said skeptically. "You must
be joking!"
"No," said Kim. "It's a very heavy planet, loaded with uranium and
stuff from bismuth on out. It has an extremely eccentric orbit. As
I told you, at aphelion it's beyond the orbit of Pharos Two. At
perihelion, when it's nearest to its sun, it just barely misses Roche's
Limit--the limit of nearness a satellite can come to its primary
without being torn apart by tidal strains. And at its nearest to its
sun, it's bombarded with everything a sun can fling out into space from
its millions of tons of disintegrating atoms. Alpha rays, beta rays,
gamma particles, neutrons, and everything else pour onto its surface
as if it were being bombarded by a cyclotron with a beam the size of a
planet's surface. You see what happens?"
Dona looked startled.
"But, Kim, every particle of the whole surface would become
terrifically radioactive. It would kill a man to land on it!"