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 garment. 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 be 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 one 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 was extraordinarily flexible, and the green stuff below the flier swayed elaborately in the wind. The tops 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 is not 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 spaceships!"
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 somber. 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 would 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 ever 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 millions 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 mystical 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 spaceships 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 world.
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 population 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 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 spaceship had driven some hundreds of thousands of miles. Even nearby stars at distances of light-years 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 spaceship 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.
The Last Spaceship Page 10