The Last Spaceship

by Murray Leinster

  “I don't see why they should do anything so cruel."

  “We've struck at the foundation of government,” Kim said savagely. “On Alphin Three there's a pretense that all men are free, and we know it's a lie. But on the other planets they don't even pretend. On Loré Four they have a king. On Markab Two the citizens wear collars of metal—slave collars—and members of the aristocracy have the right to murder social inferiors at pleasure. On Andrometa Nine the Disciplinary Circuit, and so the government, is in the hands of a blood-thirsty lunatic. The Circuit backs all governments alike, the supposedly free and the frankly despotic governments impartially. We're a danger to all of them. Even a decent government, if there is one, would dread having its citizens able to defy the Circuit. Yet in ten words I can tell you how to nullify the one instrument on which all government is based. Once that knowledge gets loose, nothing can suppress it."

  Dona sighed.

  “I was hoping we could go some place where we would be safe,” she said. “Isn't there any such place?"

  Kim's laugh was bitter.

  “I wonder if there's any place where we can be free,” he said. “I planned big, Dona, but it didn't work out. There wasn't another man on Alphin Three who wanted to be free as much as I did. I'm about decided that just the two of us would put on protectors and journey from one planet to another in search of freedom. But then Burt saw you, and you were locked up so you'd go frantic with fear and loneliness. Later they'd have given you a psychological conditioning to cure you of terror, and sent you away to Burt's pleasure-palace."

  “Why didn't you take me away before Burt saw me?” she asked. “Why did you wait?"

  Kim groaned. “Because I wasn't ready. When I realized the danger, I tried to get you, and I was caught. They found out what I had and everything became hopeless. They put me on block to see if anyone would try to befriend me, but I hadn't any friends. I didn't know anyone else who wouldn't have been frightened if I'd told him he was a slave. I threatened the Prime Board with a broadcast, but I'm afraid nobody would have believed me."

  “It all happened because of me,” Dona said. “Forget what I said about wanting to be safe, Kim. I don't care any more, not if I'm with you."

  Kim scowled at the weird pattern of strangely-colored stars upon the vision-plate.

  “We're using a lot of our fuel in trying for Cetis Alpha's planets. I'd like to—well—have a marriage ceremony."

  Despite her anxiety, Dona burst out laughing.

  “It's about time, you big lug!” she cried. “I was beginning to lose hope."

  Kim laughed too. “All right, I'll see if it can be managed. But if warnings have been sent ahead of us, marriage may be difficult."

  * * *

  4

  OUTCASTS OF SPACE

  Like a silver arrow, the Starshine continued to bore on through a weird, synthetic Universe, two hundred times faster than light. In the spaceship Kim worked angrily, making desperate attempts to devise a method of nullifying the non-individualized fighting beams with which—now that he was in free space—any attempt to land upon an inhabited planet might be frustrated.

  In the end he constructed two small wristlets, one for himself and one for Dona to wear. If tuned waved of the Circuit struck them, the wristlets might nullify them. But if the fighting-beams struck, that would be another story.

  Twelve days after turning on the overdrive, which by changing the constants of space about the spaceship, made two hundred light-speeds possible, Kim turned it off. He had previously assured himself that Dona was wearing the little gadget he had built. As he snapped off the overdrive field, the look of the Universe changed with startling suddenness. Stars leaped into being on every side, amazingly bright and astoundingly varicolored. Cetis Alpha looked almost dead ahead, a glaring globe of fire with enormous streamers streaming out on every side.

  There were planets, too. As the Starshine jogged on at a normal interplanetary—rather than interstellar—speed, Dona focused the electron-telescope upon the nearest. It was a great, round disk, with polar ice-caps and extraordinarily interconnected seas, so that there were innumerable small continents distributed everywhere. Green vegetation showed, and patches of clouds, and when Dona turned the magnification up to its very peak, they were certain that they saw the pattern of a magnificent metropolis.

  She looked at it hungrily. Kim regarded it steadily. They did not speak for a long time.

  “It would be nice there,” Dona said longingly, at last. “Do you think we can land, Kim?"

  “We're going to try,” he told her.

  But they didn't. They were forty million miles away when a sudden overwhelming anguish smote them both. All the Universe ceased to be....

  Six weeks later, Kim Rendell eased the Starshine to a landing on the solitary satellite of the red dwarf sun Phanis. It was about four thousand miles in diameter. Its atmosphere was about one-fourth the density needed to support human life. Such vegetation as it possessed was stunted and lichenous. The terrain was tumbled and upheaved, with raw rock showing in great masses which had apparently solidified in a condition of frenzied turmoil. It had been examined and dismissed as useless for human colonization many centuries since. That was why Kim and Dona could land upon it.

  They had spent half their store of fuel in the desperate effort to find a planet on which they could land.

  Their attempt to approach Cetis Alpha VI had been the exact type of all their fruitless efforts. They came in for a landing, and while yet millions of miles out, recently reinstalled detector-screens searched them out. Newly stepped-up long distance psychographic finders had identified the Starshine as containing living human beings. Then projectors, taken out of museums, had hurled at them the deadly pain-beams which had made war futile a thousand years before. They might have died within one second, from the bursting of their hearts and the convulsive rupture of every muscular anchorage to every bone, except for one thing.

  Kim's contrived wristlets had saved them. The wristlets, plus a relay on a set of controls to throw the Starshine into overdrive travel through space. The wristlets contained a morsel of hafnium so that any previous psychographic record of them as individuals would not longer check with the psychogram a search-beam would encounter. But also, on the first instant of convulsive contraction of muscles beneath the wristlets, they emitted a frantic, tiny signal. That signal kicked over the control-relay. The Starshine flung itself into overdrive escape, faster than light, faster than the pain-beams could follow.

  They had suffered, of course. Horribly. But the pain-beams could not play upon them for more than the tenth of a millisecond before the Starshine vanished into faster-than-light escape. They had tried each of the six planets of Cetis Alpha. They had gone rather desperately to Cetis Gamma, with four inhabited planets, and Sorene, with three. Then the inroads of their scant fuel-supply and their dwindling store of vegetation from Alphin II made them accept defeat. The massed volumes now, had told them of vegetations on the useless planet of the dwarf star Phanis. They came to it. Kim was stunned and bitter. And they landed.

  After the ship had settled down in a weird valley with fantastic overhanging cliffs and a frozen small waterfall nearby, the two of them went outside. They wore spacesuits, of course, because of the extreme thinness of the air.

  “I suppose we can call this home, now,” Kim said bitterly.

  It was night. The sky was cloudless, and all the stars of the Galaxy looked down upon them as they stood in the biting cold. His voice went by space-phone to the helmet of Dona, by his side.

  “I guess I can stand it if you can, Kim,” she said quietly.

  “We've got fuel for six weeks’ drive,” he said ironically. “That means we can go any place within twenty-five light-years. We've tried every solar system in that range. They're all warned against us. They all had their projectors in operation. We couldn't land. And we'd have starved unless we got to some new material for the synthesizer. This was the only place we could land on.
So we have to stand it, if we stand anything.

  Dona was silent for a little while.

  “We've got each other, Kim,” she said slowly.

  “For a limited time,” he said. “If we use our fuel only for heat and to run the synthesizer for food, it will probably last several years. But ultimately it will run out and we'll die."

  “Are you sorry you threw away everything for me, Kim?” asked Dona. “I'm not sorry I'm with you. I'd rather be with you for a little while and then die. Certainly death is better than what I faced."

  Dona watched him furtively as she began the tedious task of hunting through the Galactic Pilot of this sector, two-hundred-odd volumes, for even a stray reference to the planet Ades.

  Ultimately she did find Ades mentioned. Not in the bound volumes of the Pilot, but in the microfilm abbreviated Galactic Directory. Ades rated just three lines of type—its space-coordinates, the spectral type of its sun, a climate-atmosphere symbol which indicated that three-fourths of its surface experienced sub-Arctic conditions, and the memo:

  “Its borderline habitability caused it to be chosen as a penal colony at a very early date. Landing upon it is forbidden under all circumstances. A patrol-ship is on guard."

  The memorandum was quaint, now that no space-line had operated in five centuries, no exploring ship in nearly two, and the Space Patrol itself had been disbanded three hundred years since.

  “Mmmm!” Kim said. “If we need it, not too bad. People could survive on Ades. People probably have. And they won't be sheep, anyhow."

  “How far away is it?” Dona asked uneasily. “We have enough fuel for twenty-five light-years’ travel, you said."

  “Ades is just about halfway across the Galaxy,” he told her. “We couldn't really get started there if our tanks were full. The only way to reach it is by matter-transmitter."

  But he did not look disheartened. Dona watched 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 I have works. 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. 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 spaceships?"

  “Matter-transmitters are quicker and spaceships 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 the 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 drawing 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 was 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. Spaceships, 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 spaceship, 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 speed up to two hundred times that of light results from a spaceship 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 he 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 spaceship 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 immeasurable 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 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 spaceship 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 spaceship.

&nb
sp; It as 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 spaceship. 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 the 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 spaceship 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.

  Incredibly, glaring light burst into the view-ports, 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....