Dona looked at him. He regarded her steadily.
“Whatever you say, Kim."
“Sixteen million lives on Ades, besides other aspects of the situation,” said Kim. “The odds against us are probably about the same, sixteen million to one. That makes it a fair bet. We'll try."
He got up and began to tinker with the radiation-operated relay which turned off the transmitter-drive. Presently, he looked up.
“I'm glad I married you, Dona,” he said gruffly.
As the Starshine moved closer in, the feeling in the control-room grew tense. The little ship had advanced to within twenty millions of miles of the blue-white sun, and even at that distance there was a detectable X-ray intensity.
Kim had turned on a Geiger counter, and it was silent simply because there was no measurable interval between its discharges. A neutron detector showed an indication very close to the danger mark. But Kim had the Starshine's nose pointed to the intolerably glaring sun.
The electron-telescope showed the sun's surface filling all its field, and because the illumination had been turned so low, raging sun-storms could be seen on the star's disk. Against it, the black silhouette of the planet was clear. It was small. Kim estimated its diameter at no more than six thousand miles. The Starshine's gyros hummed softly and the field of the telescope swayed until the planet was centered exactly.
There was a little sweat on Kim's forehead.
“I—don't mind taking the chance myself, Dona,” he said, dry-throated. “But I hate to think of you ... If we miss, we'll flash into the sun."
“And never know it,” said Dona, smiling. “It'll be all over in the skillionth of a second—if we miss. But we won't."
“We're aiming for the disk of the planet,” he reminded her. “We have to go in on transmitter-speed to cut the time of our exposure to hard radiation. That speed will make the time of exposure effectively zero. But we have to move at a huge multiple of the speed of light, and we have to stop on that planet. It may not be possible!"
“Do you want me to press the button, Kim?” Dona said softly.
He took a deep breath.
“I'll do it. Thanks, Dona."
He put his finger on the stud that would throw the ship into transmitter-drive, aimed straight at the disk of the planet against the inferno of sun beyond. There was nothing more certain than that to miss the planet would fling them instantly into the sun. And there was nothing more absurd than to expect to come out of transmitter-drive within any given number of millions of miles, much less within a few thousand. But—
Kim pressed the stud.
Instantly there was blackness before them. A monstrous, absolute blackness filled half the firmament. It was the force-field-shielded planet, blotting out its sun and half the stars of a dinner-plate at eleven hundred yards. More than that, he had stopped short of the target, equivalent to stopping a bullet three inches short of that place.
He said in a queer voice.
“The—relay worked—even backward, Dona."
* * *
8
DARK BARRIER
For a time Kim sat still and sweat poured out of his skin. Because their chances had seemed slight indeed. To stop a spaceship at transmitter-speed was impossible with manual means, anyhow. It could cross a galaxy in the tenth of a millisecond. So Kim had devised a radiation-operated relay which threw off the drive when the total radiation reaching a sensitive plate in the bow had reached an adjustable total.
If in an ordinary flight the Starshine headed into a sun—unlikely as such an occurrence was—the increased light striking the relay-plate would throw off the drive before harm came. But this time they had needed to approach fatally close to a star. So Kim had reversed the operation of the relay. It would throw off the drive when the amount of light reaching it dropped below a certain minimum. That could happen only if the ship came up behind the planet, so the sun was blacked out by the world's shadowed night-side.
It had happened. The glare was cut off. The transmitter-drive followed. The Starshine floated within a bare few million miles—perhaps less than one million—of a blue-white dwarf star, and the two humans in the ship were alive because they had between them and the sun's atomic furnaces, a planet some six thousand miles in diameter.
“We don't know how our velocity matches this thing,” said Kim after and instant. “We could be drifting toward the edge of the shadow. You watch the stars all around. Make sure I head directly for that blackness. When we touch, I'll see what I can find out."
He reversed the ship's direction. He let the Starshine float down backward. The mass of unsubstantial darkness seemed to swell. It engulfed more and more of the cosmos....
A long, long time later, there was a strange sensation in the feel of things. Dona gave a little cry.
“Kim! I feel queer! So queer!"
Kim moved heavily. His body resisted any attempt at motion, and yet he felt a horrible tension within him, as if every molecule were attempting to fly apart from every other molecule. The controls of the ship moved sluggishly. Each part of each device seemed to have a vast inertia. But the controls did yield. The drive did come on. A little later the sensation ended. But both Kim and Dona felt utterly exhausted.
“It—was getting dark, too,” said Dona. She trembled.
“When we tried to move,” said Kim, “our arms had a tendency to move at right angles to the way we wanted them to—at all the possible right angles at once. That was the edge of the shield, Dona. Now we'll see what we've got."
He uncovered the recording cabinet. There had been no need to set up instruments especially for the analysis of the field. They had been a part of the Starshine's original design for exploration. Now Kim read the records.
“Cosmic-ray intensity went down,” he reported, studying the tapes. “The dielectric constant of space changed. It just soared up. The relationship of mass to inertia. That particular gadget never recorded anything significant before, Dona. In theory it should have detected space-warps. Actually, it never amounted to anything but a quantitative measure of gravitation on a planet one landed on. But it went wild in that field! And here! Look!"
He exultantly held out a paper recording.
“Glance at that, Dona! See? A magnetometer to record the ship's own field in the absence of any other. And the ship's field dropped to zero! Do you see? Do you?"
“I'm afraid not,” admitted Dona. But she smiled at the expression on Kim's face.
“It's the answer!” said Kim zestfully. “Still I don't know how that blasted field is made, but I know now how it works. Neutrons have no magnetic field, but this thing turns them aside. Alpha and beta and gamma radiation do have magnetic fields, but this thing turns them aside, too. And the point is that it neutralizes their magnetic fields, because otherwise it couldn't start to turn them aside. So if we make a magnetic field too strong for the field to counter, it won't be able to turn aside anything in that magnetic area. The maximum force-field strength needed for the planet is simply equal to the top magnetic field the sun may project so far. If we can bury the Starshine in magnetic flux that the force-field can't handle—” He grinned. He hugged her.
“And there's a loop around the Starshine's hull for space-radio use,” he cried. “I'll run a really big current through that loop and we'll try again. We should be able to put quite a lot of juice through a six-turn loop and get a flux-density that will curl your hair!"
He set to work, beaming. It took him less than half an hour to set up a series-wound generator in the airlock, couple in a thermo-cell to the loop, so it would cool the generator as the current flowed and thereby reduce its internal resistance.
“Now!” he said. “We'll try once more. The more juice that goes through the outfit, the colder the generator will get and the less its resistance will be, and the more current it will make and the stronger the magnetic field will be."
He flipped a switch. There was a tiny humming noise. A meter-needle swayed over, and stayed
.
The Starshine ventured into the black globe below.
Nothing happened. Nothing happened at all.
“The stars are blotted out, Kim,” Dona at last said uneasily.
“But you feel all right, don't you?” He grinned like an ape in his delight.
“Why yes."
“I feel unusually good,” said Kim happily.
The vision-screens were utterly blank. The ports opened upon absolute blackness—blackness so dead and absorbent that it seemed more than merely lack of light. It seemed like something horrible pressing against the ports and trying to thrust itself in.
And, suddenly, a screen glowed faintly, and then another....
Then there was a greenish glow in the ports, and Dona looked out and down.
Above was that blackness, complete and absolute. But below, seen with utter clarity, because of the absence of atmosphere, lay a world. Nothing grew upon it. Nothing moved. It was raw, naked rock with an unholy luminescence. Here and there the glow was brighter where mineral deposits contained more highly active material. The surface was tortured and twisted, in swirled stained writhings of formerly melted rock.
They looked. They saw no sign of human life nor any sign that humans had ever been there. But after all, even five thousand years of mining on a globe six thousand miles through would not involve the disturbance of more than a fraction of its surface.
“We did it,” said Kim. “The shield can be broken through by anything with a strong enough magnetic field. We won't disturb the local inhabitants. They undoubtedly have orders to kill anybody who incredibly manages to intrude. We can't afford to take a chance. We've got to get back to Ades!"
He pointed the Starshine straight up. He drove her, slowly, at the ceiling of impenetrable black. He worked upon the transmitter-drive relay. He adjusted it to throw the Starshine into transmitter-speed the instant normal starlight appeared ahead.
The ship swam slowly upward. Suddenly there was a momentary impression of reeling, dancing stars. Kim swung the bow about.
“Now for Ades!” he said gleefully. “Did you know, Dona, that once upon a time the word Ades meant hell?"
The stars reeled again....
They found Ades. Knowing how, now, it was not too difficult. There were two positions from which it could be detected. One was a position in which it was on a line between the Starshine and the sun. The other was a position in which the invisible planet, the spaceship, and the sun formed the three points of a right-angled triangle with Ades in the ninety-degree corner.
Kim sent the little ship in a great circle beyond the planet's normal orbit, watching for it to appear where such an imaginary triangle would be formed. The deflected light of the sun would spread out in a circular flat thin plane, and somewhere about the circuit the Starshine had to run through it. It would be a momentary sight only, and it would not be bright; it would be utterly unlike the steady radiance of a normal planet. Such flashes, if seen before, would have been dismissed as illusions or as reflections from within the ship. Even so, it was a long, long time before Dona called out quickly.
“There!” she said, and pointed.
Kim swung the Starshine back. He saw the dim, diffused specter of the sun's reflection. They drove for it, and presently a minute dark space appeared. It grew against the background of a radiant galaxy, and presently was a huge blackness, and the Starshine's space-radio loop was once more filled with a highly improbable electrical amperage by the super-cooled generator in the airlock.
The ship ventured cautiously into the black.
And later there were lonely, unspeakably desolate little lights of the lost world down below.
Kim drove for them with a reckless exultation. He landed in the very center of a despairing small settlement which had believed itself dead and damned—or at any rate doomed. He shouted out his coming, and Dona cried out the news that the end of darkness was near, and men came surging toward her to listen. But it was Dona who explained, her eyes shining in the light of torches men held up toward her.
Kim had gone back into the ship and was using the communicators to rouse out the mayors of every municipality, and to say he had just reached the planet from Terranova—there was no time to tell of adventures in between—and he needed atmosphere fliers to gather around him at once, with armed men in them, for urgent business connected with the restoration of a normal state of affairs.
They came swiftly, flittering down out of the blackness overhead, to land in the lights of huge bonfires built by Kim's orders. And Kim, on the communicators, asked for other bonfires everywhere, to help in navigation, and then he went out to be greeted by the bellowing Mayor of Steadheim.
“What's this?” he roared. “No sunlight! No stars! No matter-transmitters! No ships! Our ships took off and never came back! What the devil happened to the universe?"
Kim grinned at him.
“The Universe is all right. It's Ades. Somewhere on the planet there's a generator throwing out a force-field. It will have plenty of power, that generator. Maybe I can pick it up with the instruments of the Starshine. But we'll be sure to find it with magnetic compasses. What we want is for everyone to flick their compasses and note the time of swing. We want to find the place where the swings get slower and slower. When we find a place where the compasses point steadily, without a flicker—not even up and down—we'll be at the generator. And everybody put on navigation-lights or there'll be crashes!"
He lifted the Starshine and by communicator kept track of the search. Toward the polar regions was the logical hiding-place for the generator, because there the chilly climate of Ades became frigid and there were no inhabitants. But it was a long search. Hours went by before a signal came from a quarter-way around the globe.
Then the Starshine drove through darkness—but cautiously—with atmosphere-fliers all about. And there was an area where the planet's magnetic field grew weaker and weaker, and then a space in which there was no magnetic field. But in the darkness they could find no sign of a depot!
* * *
9
GADGET OF HOPE
Grimly Kim set the Starshine on the ground, in the very center of the dark area, and started the generator in the airlock. When it worked at its utmost, and nothing happened, Kim threw in the leads of the ship's full engine-power. There was a surging of all the terrific energy the ship's engines could give. Then the radio-loop went white-hot and melted, with a sputtering arc as the circuit broke.
Abruptly the stars appeared overhead, and simultaneously came the leaping flame of a rumbling explosion. Then followed the flare of fuel burning savagely in the night. The Starshine's full power had burned out the force-field generator, an instant before the loop melted to uselessness.
Kim was with the men who ran toward the scene of the explosion, and he would have tried to stop the killing of the other men who ran out of underground burrows, but the victims would not have it. They expected to be killed, and they fought wildly. All died.
Later Kim inspected the shattered apparatus which now lay in pieces, but he thought it could be reconstructed and perhaps in time understood.
“Night's nearly over,” he announced to those who prowled through the wreckage. “It shouldn't be much more than an hour until dawn. If I hadn't seen sunlight for a week or more, I think, I'd go for a look at the sunrise."
In seconds the first atmosphere-flier took off. In minutes the last of them was gone. They flew like great black birds beneath the starlight, headed for the east to greet a sun they had not expected to see again.
But the Mayor of Steadheim stayed behind.
“Hah!” he said, growling. “It's over my head. I don't know what happened and I never expect to understand. How are my sons in the new Galaxy?"
“Fine when last we heard,” said Dona, smiling. “Come into the ship."
He tramped into the living space of the Starshine. He eased himself into a seat.
“Now tell me what's gone on, and what's happened, a
nd why!” he commanded dictatorially.
Kim told him, as well as he could. The Mayor of Steadheim fumed.
“Took over the twenty-one planets, eh?” he sputtered. “We'll attend to that. We'll take a few ships, go over there, and punish ‘em."
“I suspect they've pulled out,” said Kim. “If they haven't, they will. And soon! The Gracious Majesties and Magnificents, and the other planetary rulers who essayed some easy conquests, have other need for their soldiers now. Plenty of need!"
“Eh, what?” cried the mayor. “What's the matter? Those rulers have got to have a lesson! We didn't try to free the whole Galaxy because it was too big a job. But it looks like we'll have to try!"
“I doubt the need,” said Kim, amused. “After all, it's the Disciplinary Circuit which has enslaved the human race. When the psychodrama of every citizen is on file, and a disciplinarian has only to put his card in the machinery and press a button to have that man searched out by Disciplinary Circuit waves and tortured, wherever he may be—when that's possible—any government is absolute. Men can't revolt when the whole population or any part of it can be tortured at the ruler's whim."
Dona's expression changed.
“Kim!” she said accusingly. “Those things you got on Spicus Five and dropped on the planets the soldiers came from—what were they?"
“I'll tell you,” said Kim. “The Disciplinary Circuit is all right to keep criminals in hand—not rebels like us, but thieves and such—and it does keep down the number of officials who have to be supported by the state. Police and guards aren't really needed on a free planet with the Disciplinary Circuit in action. It's a useful machine for the protection of law and order. The trouble is that, like all machines, its use has been abused. Now it serves tyranny. So I made a device to defend freedom."
The Mayor of Steadheim cocked a suspicious eye upon him.
The Last Spaceship Page 14