The Last Spaceship

by Murray Leinster

  “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'd talked about the need to free the people of the galaxy. It's always seemed too big a job. But I think it's started now. It will be 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 are sixteen million people of Ades. We'll try to do something about them. They aren't likely to be 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 spaceships had grimly trudged 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 spacecraft 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 least 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 from 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 spaceships 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 to 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 Magnificent the Despot of Lith. And then there was babbling confusion and contradictory shoutings, and a harsh voice ordered all the 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 the 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 spaceship 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, and 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 spacesuit, 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 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 t
hrough 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 covered one-third of Sind where an Emperor and Council ruled 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 dryly. “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, its 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 terribly radioactive. It would kill a man to land on it!"

  “According to my merchant-prince friend on Spicus Five, it did kill the first men to set foot on it. But the point is that its heavy elements have been bombarded, and most of its uranium has gone over to plutonium and americium and curium. In ancient days, when it went out on the long sweep away from its sun, it cooled off enough for men to land on it at its farthest-out point. With shielded spacesuits they were able to mine its substance for four or five months before heat and rising induced radioactivity drove them off again. Then they'd wait for it to cool off once more on its next trip around.

  “They went to it with spaceships, and the last space-line in the First Galaxy ran plutonium and americium and the other radioactives to a matter-transmitter from which they could be distributed all over the Galaxy. But it wasn't very efficient. They could only mine for four or five months every four years. All their equipment was melted and ruined when they were able to land again. A few hundred years ago, however, they solved the problem."

  “How did they solve it?” Dona asked.

  “Somebody invented a shield,” said Kim, as dryly as before. “It was a force-field. It has the property of a magnetic field on a conductor with a current in it, except that it acts on mass as such. A current-carrying conductor in a magnetic field tends to move at right angles both to the current and the field. This force-field acts as if mass were an electric charge.

  “Anything having mass, entering the field, tries to move sidewise. The faster it moves, the stronger the sidewise impulse. Neutrons, gamma particles, beta rays and even electrons have mass. So has light. Everything moving that hits the shielding field moves sidewise to its original course. Radiation from the sun isn't reflected at right angles.

  “So, with the shield up, men can stay on the planet when it is less than three diameters from its sun. No heat reaches it. No neutrons. No radiations at all. It doesn't heat up. And that's the answer. For three months in every four-year revolution, they have to keep the shield up all the time. For three months more, they keep it up intermittently, flashing it on for fractions of a second at a time, just enough to temper the amount of heat they get.

  “They live on great platforms of uranium glass, domed in. When they go out mining they wear shielded spacesuits and work in shielded machines. They whole trick was worked out about five hundred years ago, they say, and the last space-line went out of existence, because they could use a matter-transmitter for all but six of our months of the planet's year."

  “And did you find out how it's done?” asked Dona.

  “Hardly,” said Kim. “The planet belongs to the king of Pharos Three. Even five hundred years ago the governments of all the planets were quite tight corporations. Naturally Pharos wouldn't let the secret get out. Thee are other planets so close to their primaries that they're radioactive. If the secret were to be disclosed there'd be competition. There'd be other plutonium mines in operation. So he's managed to keep it to himself. But we've got to find out the trick."

  There was silence. Kim began to check over the pictures the camera had taken and developed. He shook his head. Then he stared at a photograph which showed the blue-white dwarf itself. His face looked suddenly very drawn and tired.

  “Kim,” said Dona presently. “It's stupid of me, but I don't see how you're going to learn the secret."

  Kim put the picture on the enlarger, for examination in a greater size.

  “They made the shield to keep things out,” he said wearily. “Radiation, charged particles, neutrons—everything. The planet simply can't be reached, not even by matter-transmitters, when the shield is up. But by the same token nothing can leave the planet either. It can't even be spotted from space, because the light of the sun isn't reflected. It's deflect
ed to a right-angled course. You might pick it up if it formed a right-angled triangle with you and the sun, or you might spot it in transit across the sun's disk. But that's all."

  “Yes."

  “The shield was a special job,” said Kim. “For a special purpose. It was not a weapon. But there were all those planets that could be grabbed if only Ades were knocked out. So why shouldn't King Pharos sneak a force-field generator onto Ades? When the field went on, Ades would be invisible and unreachable from outside. And the outside would be unreachable from it. Spaceships couldn't get through the field. Matter-transmitters couldn't operate through it. If a few technicians were sneaked to Ades as supposed exiles and promised adequate reward, don't you think they'd hide out somewhere and turn on that field, and leave it on until the folk on Ades had starved or gone mad?"

  Horrified, Dona stared at him. She went pale.

  “Oh—horrible! They sky would be black—always. Never a glimmer of light. No stars. No moon. No sun. The plants would die and rot, and the people would grow bleached and pale, and finally they'd starve."

  “All but the little gang hidden away in a well-provisioned hideout,” said Kim grimly. “I think that's what happened to Ades, or is happening. And this is the solar system where the little trick was worked out. I'd hoped simply to raid the generator and find out how it worked, which would be dangerous enough. Look!"

  He pointed to he projected image of the sun. There was a tiny dot against the surface. It was almost, it seemed, bathed in the tentacular arms of flaming gases flung up from the sun's surface.

  “There's the planet,” said Kim. “At its closest to the sun! With the shield up, so that nothing can reach its surface. Nothing! And that includes spaceships such as this. And at that distance, Dona, the hard radiation from the sun would go right through the Starshine and kill us in seconds before we could get within millions of miles of the planet. If there's any place in the Universe that's unapproachable, there it is. It may be anything up to three months before the shield goes down even for fractions of a second at a time. And my guess is that the people on Ades won't last that long. They've had days in which to grow hopeless already. Want to gamble?"