The Last Spaceship

by Murray Leinster

  “For your protection, absolute obedience is essential. Persons seeking to prevent the protection of Sinab Two by the troops of the Dynast of Tabor will be summarily dealt with. They can expect no mercy.

  “People of Sinab Two! You are freed from the tyranny of the criminals of Ades!"

  “So Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage, has a competitor,” Kim said grimly. “The Dynast of Tabor, eh? But there are twenty-one planets that used to belong to Sinab. I'm afraid we'll have to check further."

  They did. While Kim scowlingly labored over the drawing of a new device, Dona drove the Starshine to six worlds in succession. And four of the six worlds had been taken over by the Sardthian League, by King Ulbert of Arth, by the Emperor and Council of the Republic of Sind—which was a remarkable item—and by the Imperator of Donet. On the last two worlds there was confusion. On one the population was sternly told by one set of voices that it now owed allegiance to Queen Amritha of Megar, and by another set that Kin Jan of Pirm would shortly throw out the Megarian invaders and protect them forever. On the sixth planet there were four armies proclaiming the exclusive nobility of their intentions.

  “That's enough, Dona,” Kim said in a tired voice. “Ades vanished or was destroyed, and instantly thereafter gracious majesties and dynasts and imperators and such vultures pounced on the planets we'd freed. But I'd like to know how they made sure it was safe to pounce!"

  Dona punched buttons on the Starshine's control-board. The ship lifted. The great black mass which was the night-side of the last planet faded behind and the Starshine drove on into space. And Dona turned back to Kim from her post at the controls.

  “Now what?"

  Kim stared at nothing, his features somber.

  “It's bad,” he said sourly. “There's the gang on Terranova. They're fair game if they land on any planet in the whole First Galaxy—and Terranova isn't self-sustaining yet. They'll starve if they stay isolated. There are the people on Ades. Sixteen millions of them. Not a big population for a planet, but a lot of people to be murdered so a few princelings can feast on the leavings of Sinab's Empire.

  “There are all the people who'd started to dream because Ades had come to mean hope. And there are all the people in generations to come who'd like to dream of hope and now won't be able to, and there are all the nasty little surprise-attacks and treacheries which will be carried out by matter-transmitters, now that these gentry of high and noble lineage have been able to snatch some loot for themselves. It's pretty much a mess, Dona."

  Dona gave an impatient toss of her head.

  “You're not responsible for it, Kim,” she protested.

  “Maybe I should simply concentrate on finding a solution for Terranova, eh? Let decency as something to fight for go by the board and be strictly practical?"

  “You shouldn't try to take all the problems of two galaxies on your shoulders,” said Dona.

  Kim shook his head impatiently.

  “Look!” he said in vexation. “There's some way out of the mess! I just contrived a way to make a very desirable change in all the governments of the First Galaxy, given time. It was one of those problems that seem too big to handle, but it worked out very easily. But I absolutely can't think of the ghost of an idea of how to find a friendly world for Terranova!"

  Dona waited.

  “It occurs to me that I haven't slept for forty hours,” Kim said. “I doubt that you've done any better. I think we should go to bed. There's one puzzle on which all the rest is based, and it's got me. What the devil happened to Ades? There's a whole planet, seven thousand miles in diameter, vanished as if it had never been. Maybe after some sleep I'll be able to work it out. Let's go to sleep!"

  The spaceship Starshine drove on through emptiness at mere interplanetary speed, its meteor-repellers ceaselessly searching space for any sign of danger. But there was no danger. In the midst of space, between the stars, there was safety. Only where men were was there death.

  The ship swam in the void, no lights showing in any of its ports.

  Then, in the midst of the darkness inside, Kim sat up in his bunk.

  “But hang it, Ades couldn't be destroyed,” he cried in exasperation.

  * * *

  5

  INDUSTRIAL WORLD

  Planet Spicus Five was an industrial world. According to the prevailing opinion in the best circles, its prosperity was due to an ample and adequate supply of raw materials, plus a skilled and thrifty population. There were sixteen matter-transmitters on the planet, and their silvery films were never still.

  From abecedaria for infants to zyolites (synthetic) for industrial use, its products ran in endless streams to the transmitters, and the other products and raw materials obtained in exchange came out in streams no less continuous. The industrial area covered a continent of sprawling rectangular buildings designed for the ultimate of efficiency, with living-areas for the workmen spreading out between.

  The Starshine descended through morning sunlight. Kim, newly shaved and rested, forgot to yawn as he stared through the vision-ports at the endless vista of structures made with a deliberate lack of grace. From a hundred-mile height they could be seen everywhere to north and south, to the eastward where it was already close to midday, and to where shadows beyond the dawn hid them. Even from that altitude they were no mere specks between the cloud-masses. They were definite shapes, each one a unit.

  The ship went down and down and down. Kim felt uncomfortable and realized why. He spoke dryly.

  “I don't suppose we'll ever land on any new planet without being ready to wince from a fighting-beam and find ourselves snatched to hell-and-gone away."

  Dona did not answer. She gazed at the industrial plants as they swelled in size with the Starshine's descent. Buildings two miles to a side were commonplace. Great rectangles three and even four miles long showed here and there. And there were at least half a dozen buildings, plainly factory units, which were more than ten miles in extent on each of their ground dimensions. When the Starshine was below the clouds, Dona focused the electron telescope on one of them and gestured to call Kim's attention to the sight.

  This factory building enclosed great quadrangles, with gigantic courtyards to allow—perhaps—for light. And within the courtyards were dwelling-units for workmen. The telescope showed them plainly. Workmen in factories like this would have no need and little opportunity ever to go beyond the limits of their place of employment. The factory in which they labored would confront them on every hand, at every instant of their life from birth until death.

  “That's something I don't like, without even asking questions about it,” said Kim.

  He took the controls. The Starshine dived. He remembered to flick on the communicators. A droning filled the interior of the spaceship. Dona looked puzzled and tuned in. A male voice mumbled swiftly and without intonation through a long series of numerals and initial letters. It paused. Another voice said tensely, “Tip.” The first voice droned again. The second voice said, “Tip.” The first voice droned.

  Dona looked blank. She turned up another wavelength. A voice barked hysterically. The words ran so swiftly together that they were almost indistinguishable, but certain syllables came out in patterns.

  “It's something about commerce,” said Kim. “Arranging for some material to be routed on a matter-transmitter."

  None of the wavelengths carried music. All carried voices, and all babbled swiftly, without expression, with a nerve-racking haste.

  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 for miles.

  Kim and Dona sto
od 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 of thousands of bells. They rang suddenly 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 tintinnabulation.

  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 spaceship 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 shrugged.

  “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 of whatever the devil—"

  “I be late!” panted the man.

  He twisted out of Kim's grasp and ran to join the swarming mob 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 spreading 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 a 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 was placed so 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 it was a pleasure-pool.

  Once she saw two boys staring at the spaceship. There was no trace of fear in their manner. But a richly-dressed servant—much more carefully garbed than the boys—led up two the of slim riding-sards of Phanis, and the boys mounted and their steeds started off with the 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 spaceship 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 office at home, with a corps of secretaries and a television-screen for interview with his underlings. Quite a chap."

  “Were those four men servants?” Dona asked.

  “No, they were guards,” Kim said dryly. “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, i
nsisting 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 spaceship, 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 weekends and when he retired from business on Spicus Five. There are precedents, I gather."