The Boomerang Circuit
                                      By MURRAY LEINSTER

                           A COMPLETE KIM RENDELL NOVEL

  When the prison world of Ades, outpost of freedom, vanishes into nothingness,
Kim Rendell sets forth in the "Starshine" to find out why—and his discoveries
make tyrants tremble!

                                            CHAPTER I
                                         Damaged Transmitter

     KIM RENDELL had almost forgotten that he was ever a matter-transmitter technician. But then the
matter-transmitter on Terranova ceased to operate and they called on him.
     It happened just like that. One instant the wavering, silvery film seemed to stretch across the arch in
the public square of the principal but still small settlement on the first planet to be colonized in the Second
Galaxy. The film bulged, and momentarily seemed to form the outline of a human figure as a
totally-reflecting, pulsating cocoon about a moving object. Then it broke like a bubble-film and a walking
figure stepped unconcernedly out. Instantly the silvery film was formed again behind it and another shape
developed on the film's surface.
     Only seconds before, these people and these objects had been on another planet in another island
universe, across unthinkable parsecs of space. Now they were here. Bales and bundles and parcels of
merchandise. Huge containers of foodstuffs—the colony on Terranova was still not completely
self-sustaining—and drums of fuel for the space-ships busy mapping the new galaxy for the use of men,
and more people, and a huge tank of viscous, opalescent plastic.
     Then came a pretty girl, smiling brightly on her first appearance on a new planet in a new universe,
and crates of castings for more spaceships, and a family group with a pet zorag on a leash behind them,
and a batch of cryptic pieces of machinery, and a man.
     Then nothing. Without fuss, the silvery film ceased to be. One could look completely through the
archway which was the matter- transmitter. One could see what was on the other side instead of a
wavering, pulsating reflection of objects nearby. The last man to come through spoke unconcernedly over
his shoulder, to someone he evidently believed just behind, but who was actually now separated from him
by the abyss between island universes and some thousands of parsecs beyond.
     Nobody paid any attention to matter-transmitters ordinarily. They had been in use for ten thousand
years. All the commerce of the First Galaxy now moved through them. Spaceships had become obsolete,
and the little Starshine—which was the first handiwork of man to cross the gulf to the Second
Galaxy—had been a museum exhibit for nearly two hundred years before Kim Rendell smashed out of
the museum in it, with Dona, and the two of them went roaming hopelessly among the ancient, decaying
civilizations of man's first home in quest of a world in which they could live in freedom.

     IT SEEMED a hopeless quest, at first. Every government was absolute, and hence every ruler had
become tyrannical. And the very limitations of spaceships, which had caused their supplantation by
matter-transmitters, had seemed to doom their quest to futility.
     But Kim had adapted the principle of the transmitter to the drive of his ship, and with the increased
speed and range they'd found freedom on the prison world of Ades, where alone there was no tyranny.
And later Kim had crossed to this new galaxy, and set up a transmitter here—the one which had just
failed—and the exiled rebels and recalcitrants of Ades had begun to move through to a new universe
where, they swore, men should be forever free.* (See "THE DISCIPLINARY CIRCUIT." Thrilling
Wonder Stories, Winter Issue, 1946.)
     They planned to have Ades remain a receiving-depot for more criminals and rebels who would
increase the population of the new galaxy. There should be a constant flow of them. Governments which
could not be overthrown existed everywhere. They were maintained by the device of the disciplinary
circuit which enabled a tyrant or a group of oligarchs to administer intolerable torture to any individual
they chose, wherever he might hide upon a planet's surface.
     Revolt was utterly impossible. But there were some who revolted, nevertheless. And Ades had been
a planet of hopeless exile to which such sturdy rebels could be sent as to a fate more mysterious and
hence more terrible than death. On the whole, the newcomers were of the stuff of pioneers. The principal
drawback was that so few women were rebels.
     Events begun by the Empire of Sinab had solved even that problem of a superabundance of males,
by reversing it. The Sinabian Empire had expanded by a policy of seemingly irresistible murder. By that
policy, modified fighting-beams swept over a planet which was to be added to the empire, and in a single
day slew every man and boy-child on it, leaving the women unharmed. And as time passed and years
went by, when the women had grown numbed by their grief and then their despair that their race must
die—why, then male colonists from Sinab appeared, and condescended to take the place of their
victims.
     They had planned to add Ades to their empire,* (See "THE MANLESS WORLDS." Thrilling
Wonder Stories, February, 1947) but the end was the exile of the men of Sinab to a planet and a
universe so remote that men had not even conceived of such a distance before. And the widows of
murdered men—not sharing that exile— accepted the wiveless men of Ades as their deliverers. From
that time until now, it had seemed that only triumphs could lie before the exiles. Duplicates of the
Starshine roamed among the new and unnamed stars of the Second Galaxy. Infinite opportunities lay
ahead. Until now!



     Now the matter-transmitter had ceased to operate. Five millions of human beings in the Second
Galaxy were isolated from the First. Ades was the only planet in the home galaxy on which all men were
criminals by definition, and hence were friendly to the people of the new settlements. Every single other
planet—save the bewildered and almost manless planets which had been subject to Sinab—was a
tyranny of one brutal variety or another.
     Every other planet regarded the men of Ades as outlaws, rebels, and criminals. The people of
Terranova, therefore, were not only cut off from the immigrants and supplies and the technical skills of
Ades. They were necessarily isolated from the rest of the human race. And it could not be endured. And
then, besides that, there were sixteen millions of people left on Ades, cut off from the hope that
Terranova represented.
     Kim Rendell was called on immediately. The Colony Organizer of Terranova, himself, went in person
to confer and to bewail.
     Kim Rendell was peacefully puttering with an unimportant small gadget when the Colony Organizer
arrived. The house was something of a gem of polished plastic—Dona had designed it—and it stood on
a hill with a view which faced the morning sun and the rising twin moons of Terranova.
     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 called for 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 garments. 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 get
detuned, but we made the pair 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 his arm.
     “I’ll be back," he told Dona heavily. "But I suspect you'd better pack."
     He went out to the grounded flier. Then Colony Organizer took it up and across the green-clad hills
of Terranova. The vegetation of Terranova is extraordinarily flexible, and the green stuff below the flier
swayed elaborately in the wind. The top 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 shortages 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 wee 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 wasn't 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."

                                                CHAPTER II
                                               Enemy Sabotage

     SKILFULLY 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 many years. 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 found. 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 attached a number of leads. He returned to the front and worked the panel again. The
results were wildly 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 space-ships!"
     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 sombre. At last in 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 formation 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 than 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 instrument
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 could shuttle across the width of a galaxy a hundred
time 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 Ade: 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 transmitters
couldn't have bee 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 war 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 even 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 million 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 mythical 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, could be no successful crime—save by 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.


                              "They live on domed platforms of uranium glass and, when
                              they go out to mine ore, they work in shielded space-suits."

     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 space-ships 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 populace 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 the 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 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 space-ship had driven some hundreds of thousands of miles. Even nearby
stars at distances of light-years, would not have their angles change appreciably, and so would 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.
    Long years on an exclusively feminine world does strange things to psychology. There were women
wearing the badges of mourning for husbands dead more than half a decade.
    In a sense it was a dramatization of their loss, because all women, everywhere, take a melancholy
pleasure in the display of their unhappiness. But in part to boast of grief for a lost husband was an excuse
for not having captured one of the few men who had arrived since the mass murder. As a matter of fact,
Kim did not see a single man in the capital city of Khiv Five, but its streets swarmed with women.
    He asked for the head of the planet government, and at long last found an untidy woman at a desk.
He asked what was known of Ades.
    "I was on Terranova," he explained. "The matter-transmitter went off and it did not come back on. I
came back by space-ship to find out about it, and went to where Ades should have been. I'm Kim
Rendell, and I used to be a matter-transmitter technician. I thought I might repair the one on Ades if it
needed repairing. But I could find no planet circling Ades' sun."
    The woman regarded him with what was almost hostility. .
    "Kim Rendell," she said. "I've heard of you. You are a very famous man. But we women on Khiv
Five can do without men!"
    "No doubt," Kim said patiently. "But has there been any word of Ades?"
    "We are not interested in Ades," she said angrily. "We can do without Ades."
    "But I'm interested in Ades," ' said Kim. "And after all, it was Ades which punished the murderers of
the men of Khiv Five. A certain amount of gratitude is indicated."
    "Gratitude!" said the untidy woman harshly. "We'd have been grateful if you men of Ades had turned
those Sinabians over to us! We'd have killed them every one—slowly!"
    "But the point is," said Kim, "that something has happened to Ades. It might happen to Khiv Five. If
we can find out what it was, we'll take steps so it won't happen again."
    "Just leave us alone!" said the untidy woman fiercely. "We can get along without men or Ades or
anything else. Go away!"

                                               CHAPTER III
                                             Dangerous Trip

     DONA plucked at Kim's arm. He turned, seething, and went out. Outside he vented his bitterness.
     "I thought men were crazy!" he said. "If she's the head of the planet government, I pity the planet."
     "She could talk to another woman quite rationally," Dona said with satisfaction. "But she's had to
persuade herself that she hates me, and you had me with you, and I'm prettier than she is, Kim, and I
have you. So she couldn't talk to you."
     "But she's unreasonable," Kim said stubbornly.
     "We'll go back to the ship," said Dona brightly. "I'll lock you in it and then go find out what we want
to know."
     She smiled comfortably all the way back to the Starshine. But the staring women made Kim acutely
uncomfortable. When he was safely inside the ship, he wiped perspiration from his forehead.
     "I wouldn't want to live on this planet!" he said feverishly.
     "I wouldn't want you to," said Dona. "Stay inside, darling. You'd better not even show yourself at a
vision-port."
     "Heaven forbid!" said Kim.
     Dona went out. Kim paced up and down the living quarters of the ship. There was something in the
back of his mind that would not quite come out. The disappearance of Ades was impossible. Men had
conquered one galaxy and now started on a second, but never yet had they destroyed a planet. Never
yet had they even moved one. But nevertheless, only thirty-six hours ago the planet Ades had revolved
about its sun and men and women had strolled into its matter-transmitter with no hint of danger, and
between two seconds something had happened.
     Even had the planet been shattered into dust, its remnants should have been discoverable. And surely
a device which could destroy a planet would have had some preliminary testings and the galaxy would
have heard of its existence! This thing that had happened was inconceivable! On the basis of the
photographs, Ades had not only been destroyed, but the quintillions of tons of its substance had been
removed so far that sunlight shining upon them did not light them enough for photography. Which simply
could not be.
     Kim wrestled with the problem while Dona went about in the world of women. There was something
odd about her in the eyes of women of Khiv Five. Their faces were unlike the faces of the women of a
normal world. On a world with men and women, all women wear masks. Their thoughts are unreadable.
But where there are no men, masks are useless. The women of Khiv Five saw plainly that Dona was
unlike them, but they were willing to talk to her.
     She came back to the Starshine as Kim reached a state of complete bewilderment. Ades could not
have been destroyed. But it had vanished. Even if shattered, its fragments could not have been moved so
far or so fast that they could no longer be detected. But they were undiscoverable. The thing was
impossible on any scale of power conceivable for humans to use. But it had happened.
     So Kim paced back and forth and bit his nails until Dona returned.
     "We can take off, Kim," she said quietly.
     She locked the inner airlock door as if shutting out something. She twisted the fastening extra tight.
Her face was pale.
     "What about Ades?" asked Kim.
     "They had matter-transmission to it from here, too," said Dona. "You remember, the original
transmitter on Ades was one-way only. It would receive but not send. Some new ones were built after
the war with Sinabia, though. And this planet's communication with Ades cut off just when ours did,
thirty-six hours ago. None of the other twenty planets has communication with it either. Something
happened, and on the instant everything stopped."
     "What caused it?" Kim asked, but Dona paid no attention.
     "Take off, Kim," she said. "Men are marching out of the matter-transmitter. Marching, I said, Kim!
Armed men, marching as soldiers, with machine-mounted heavy weapons. Somebody knows Ades can't
protect its own any more, and invaders must be crowding in for the spoils. I'm—afraid, Kim, that Ades
has been destroyed and our planets are part of a tyrant's empire now."

     LATER, the Starshine swooped down from the blue toward the matter-transmitter on Khiv Five.
Serried ranks of marching figures were tramping out of the transmitter's silvery, wavering film. In strict
geometric rows they marched, looking neither to the right nor to the left. They were a glittering stream,
moving rhythmically in unison, proceeding to join an already-arrived mass of armed men already drawn
up in impressive array.
     Racing toward the high arch of the transmitter with air screaming about the Starshine's hull, Kim saw
grimly that the figures were soldiers, as Dona had said. He had never before seen a soldier in actual life,
but pictures and histories had made them familiar enough.
     These were figures out of the unthinkably remote past. They wore helmets of polished metal. They
glittered with shining orichalc and chromium. The bright small flashes of faceted corundum—synthetic
sapphire in all the shades from blue-white to ruby—shone from their identical costumes and equipment.
They were barbarous in their splendor, and strange in the precision and unison of their movements, which
was like nothing so, much as the antics of girl precision dancers, without the extravagance of the dancers'
gestures.
     The Starshine dipped lower. It shot along a canyon-like open way between buildings. The
matter-transmitter was upon a hill within the city and the ship was now lower than the transmitter and the
heads of the soldiers who still tramped out of the archway in a scintillating stream.
     Kim raged. Soldiers were an absurdity on top of a catastrophe. Something had erased the planet
Ades from its orbit around a lonely sun. That bespoke science and intelligence beyond anything dreamed
of hitherto. But soldiers marching like dancing-girls, bedecked with jewels and polished metal like the
women of the pleasure-world of Dite—
     This military display was pure childishness!
     "Our pressure-wave'll topple them," said Kim savagely. "At least we'll smash the transmitter."
     There was a monstrous roaring noise. The Starshine, which had flashed through intergalactic space
at speeds no science was yet able to measure, roared between tall buildings in atmosphere. Wind whirled
and howled past its hull. It dived forward toward the soldiers.
     There was one instant when the ship was barely yards above the gaping faces of startled, barbarously
accoutred troopers. The following spreading pressure-wave of the ship's faster-than-sound movement
spread out on every side like a three-dimensional wake. It toppled the soldiers as it hit. They went down
in unison, in a wildly-waving, light-flashing tangle of waving arms and legs and savage weapons.
     But Kim saw, too, squat and bell-mouthed instruments on wheels, in the act of swinging to bear upon
him. One bore on the Starshine. It was impossible to stop or swerve the ship. There was yet another
fraction of a second of kaleidoscopic confusion, of momentary glimpses of incredibly antique and childish
pomp.
     And then anguish struck.
     It was the hellish torment of a fighting-beam, more concentrated and more horrible than any other
agony known to mankind. For the infinitesimal fraction of an instant Kim experienced it to the full. Then
there was nothingness.
     There was no sound. There was no planet. There was no sunlight on tall and stately structures built
by men long murdered from the skies. The vision-ports showed remote and peaceful suns and all the
tranquil glory of interstellar space. The Starshine floated in emptiness.
     It was, of course, the result of that very small device that Kim had built into the Starshine before
even the invention of the transmitter-drive. It was a relay which flung on faster-than-light drive the instant
fighting-beams struck any living body in the ship. The Starshine had been thrown into full interstellar
drive while still in atmosphere.
     It had plunged upward—along the line of its aiming—through the air. The result of its passage to
Khiv Five could only be guessed at, but in even the unthinkably minute part of a second it remained in air,
the ship's outside temperatures had risen two hundred degrees. Moving at multiples of the speed of light,
it must have created an instantaneous flash of literally stellar heat by the mere compression of air before
it.

    KIM was sick and shaken by the agony which would have killed him had it lasted as long as the
hundredth of a second. But Dona stared at him.
    "Kim—what— Oh!"
    She ran to him. The beam had not touched her. So close to the projector, it had been narrow, no
more than a yard across. It had struck Kim and missed Dona.
    "Oh, my poor Kim!"
    He grimaced.
    "Forget it," he said, breathing hard. "We've both had it before, but not as bad as this. It was a mobile
fighting-beam projector. I imagine they'll think we burned up in a flash of lightning. I hope there were
X-rays for them to enjoy."
    For a long time Kim Rendell sat still, with his eyes closed. The dosage of the fighting-beam had been
greater than they had ever experienced together, though. It left him weak and sick.
    "Funny," he said presently. "Barbarous enough to have soldiers with decorative uniforms and shiny
dingle-dangles on them, and modern enough to have fighting-beam projectors, and a weapon that's
wiped Ades out of space. We've got to find out who they are, Dona, and where they came from.
They've something quite new."
    "I wonder," said Dona. But she still looked at Kim with troubled eyes.



    "If it's new," said Dona. "If it's a weapon. Even if—if Ades is destroyed."
    Kim stared at her.
    "Now, what do you mean by that?"
    "I don't quite know," admitted Dona. "I say things, and you turn them over in your head, and
something quite new comes out. I told you a story about a dust-grain, once, and you made the
transmitter-drive that took us to Ades in the first place and made everything else possible afterward."
    "Hmmm," said Kim meditatively. "If it's new. If it's a weapon. If Ades is destroyed. Why did you
think of those three things?"
    "You said no planet had ever been destroyed," she told him. "If anybody could think of a way to do
such a thing, you could. And when Sinab had to be fought, and there weren't any weapons, you worked
out a way to conquer them with things that certainly weren't weapons. Just broadcasters of the
disciplinary circuit field. So I wondered if what they used was a weapon. Of course if it wasn't a weapon,
it was probably something that had been used before for some other purpose, and it wouldn't be new."
    "I've got to think about that," said Kim. He cogitated for a moment. "Yes, I definitely have to think
about that."
    Then he stood up.
    "We'll try to identify these gentry first. Then we'll go to another of the twenty-one planets."

                                             CHAPTER IV
                                            Despots Take Over

     HE TOOK his observations and swung the little ship about. He adjusted the radiation-switch to
throw off the transmitter-drive on near approach to a sun. He aimed for the star Thom. Its fourth planet
had been subjugated to the Empire of Sinab ten years before, and freed by the men of Sinab six years
since.
     The Starshine winked into being some twenty million miles from it, and two hundred million from the
star. Kim looked annoyed, and then glanced at the relay and adjusted it again. He pointed the Starshine
close to the planet's disk. He pressed the transmitter-drive button. Instantly the ship was within mere
thousands of miles of the planet
     "Nice!" Kim was pleased. "Saves a lot of overdrive juggling. Those horrible fighter-beams seem to
make one think more clearly. Dona, get us down to the night-side while I try to work something out.
Don't ground. Just drop into atmosphere enough to pick up any broadcasts."
     She took his place at the controls. He got out his writing-materials and a stylus and began busily to
sketch and to calculate. Dona drove the ship to atmosphere on the dark side of Thom Four, not too far
from the sunset's rim. In the earlier night hours, on a given continent, the broadcasts should be greater in
number.
     Communicator-bands murmured in soprano. Thom Four was more than ninety-five per cent female,
too. Kim worked on. After a long time a speaker suddenly emitted a blast of martial music. Until now the
broadcast programs had gone unheeded by both Kim and Dona, because from each wave-band only
women's voices had come out, and only women's music. The sound of brazen horns was something new.
Dona smiled at Kim and turned up the volume.
     A man's voice said pompously:
     "To the People of Thom Four, greeting!
     "Whereas His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage, has heard with
distress of the misfortunes of the people of the planet Thom Four, of the injuries they have suffered at the
hands of enemies, and of their present distressful state, and
     "Whereas, His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage, is moved to
extend his protection to all well-disposed persons in need of a gallant and potent protector;
     "Therefore His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage, has commanded
his loyal and courageous troops to occupy the said planet Thom Four, to defend it against all enemies
whatsoever, and to extend to its people all the benefits of his reign.
     "Given at his Palace of Gornith, on the second day of the tenth month of the sixteenth year of his
reign, and signed by His Most Gracious Majesty, Elim the Fortieth, of high and noble lineage."
     The voice stopped. There was another blare of martial music. The broadcast ended. Ten minutes
later, on another wavelength, the same proclamation was repeated. That broadcast stopped too. Five
minutes later came still another broadcast. And so on and so on. At long last there was but a single
wavelength coming into the communicators. It was a broadcast of a drama with only female characters,
and in which there was no reference to the fact that the human race normally includes two sexes. It was
highly emotional and it was very strange indeed.
     Then a pompous male voice read the silly proclamation and the broadcast cut off.
     "The question," said Kim," is whether I'd better try to catch a soldier and make him tell us where
Gornith is and what planet ruled by Elim the Fortieth of high and noble lineage. I think I'd better find
out."
     "Darling," said Dona," I'm not afraid of soldiers bothering you, but I certainly won't let you venture
out on a planet full of women. And there's something else."
     "What?"
     "There are twenty-one planets which Ades used to protect. What planetary ruler could send troops
to occupy twenty-one other planets? Do you think this King Elim the Fortieth has tried to seize all of
them, or do you think he arranged a cooperative steal with the rulers of other planets, and an
arrangement for them all to help protect each other? Hadn't we better make sure?"

    KIM looked up at her from the desk where he worked. "You're an uncomfortably brainy woman,
Dona," he said drily. "Do you think you could find Sinab? Sinab Two was the capital planet of the empire
we had to take over." Dona looked carefully on a star-chart. Kim went back to his task. He had drawn,
very carefully, an electronic circuit. Now he began to simplify it. He frowned from time to time, though,
and by his expression was thinking of something else than the meticulous placing of symbols on paper.
    It was symptomatic of his confidence in Dona, though, that he remained absorbed while she worked
the ship. Presently there were mutterings in the speakers. Dona had navigated to another solar system
and entered the atmosphere of another planet.
     "Listen, Kim!" she said suddenly.
     From a communicator blared a heavy male voice.
     "People of Sinab Two!" the voice said. "You are freed from the tyranny of the criminals of Ades.
     "From this time forth, Sinab Two is under the protection of the Dynast of Tabor, whose mercy to the
meek, justice to the just, and wrath toward the evil-doer is known among all men.
     "People of Sinab Two! The soldiers now pouring in to defend you are to be received submissively.
You will honor all requisitions for food, lodgings, and supplies. Such persons as have hitherto exercised
public office will surrender their authority to the officials appointed by the Dynast to replace them.
     "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 Sardathian
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 King Jan of Pirn 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 of 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 space-ship 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.

                                                CHAPTER V
                                              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 drily.
     "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 focussed 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—of
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 space-ship. 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 wave-length. 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 landed before a gigantic building. An armed guard stood before it at a gateway. Kim
trudged across to him. He came back.
    "He's stupid," he said shortly. "He knows what to guard, and the name of the plant, and where a
workman may go to be received into employment. That's all. We'll try again."
    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 air-lock there was a dull, grumbling rumble in the air. It came from the
many-storied building which surrounded this courtyard and stretched away for miles.

     KIM and Dona stood 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 and thousands of bells. They rang stridently 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 tintinabulation.
     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 space-ship 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 struggled.
     "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 or whatever the devil—"
     "I be late!" panted the man.
     He twisted out of Kim's grasp and ran to join the swarming folk 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 the 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 splendid 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 smooth lawn of incredible perfection, before a home that Dona
regarded with shining eyes.
     "It's—lovely!" she said breathlessly. "It is," agreed Kim.
     He sat still, looking.
     "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 so placed
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 that it was a pleasure-pool.
     Once she saw two boys staring at the space-ship. There was no trace of fear in their manner. But a
richly-dressed servant—much more carefully garbed than the boys—led up two of the slim riding-sards
of Phanis, and the boys mounted and their steeds started off with that 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 air lock. 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 offices at home, with a corps of secretaries and a
television-screen for interviews with his underlings. Quite a chap."
     "Were those four men servants?" Dona asked.
     "No, they were guards," said Kim drily. "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, insisting 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 munition 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."

                                               CHAPTER VI
                                              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 space-ship, 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 week-ends and when he retired from
business on Spicus Five. There are precedents, I gather."
     "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've
talked about the need to free the people of this galaxy. It's always seemed too big a job. But I think it's
started now. It will be a 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 he 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 were sixteen million people on Ades. We'll try to do something about them. They aren't likely
to be all 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 Cephids 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 trundled 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 space-craft 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 lest 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 for 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 space-ships 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 at 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 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
Magnificence the Despot of Lith. And then there was babbling confusion and contradictory shoutings,
and a hoarse voice ordered all 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 its
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 space-ship 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, an 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
space-suit, went into the air-lock, 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 yet 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 through 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 greatest ocean.
     He dropped another on the shifting desert sands which cover one-third of Sind where an Emperor
and Council rule 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 drily. "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."

                                            CHAPTER VII
                                        One Chance in a Million

    IN SPITE of his pessimism, Kim settled I 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, it's
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 terrifically 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 on 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 space-suits they
were able to mine its substance for four to five months before heat and rising induced radio-activity 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 space-ships, 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."

     DONA stared out the vision-ports. Then were two planets which might be tilt one in question. But
there were only three an sight.
     “How did they solve it?" Dona asked.
     “Somebody invented a shield," said Kim as drily 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 at 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, met 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. It's deflected, 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
space-suits and work in shielded machines. The 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 that 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. There 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 cameras 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 deflected 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 on to Ades? When the field went on, Ades would be invisible and
unreachable from outside. And the outside would be unreachable from it. Space-ships 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! The sky would be black—always!
Never a glimmer of light. No stars. No moons. 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's 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 the projected image of the sun. There was a tiny dot against its 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 space-ships 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?"
     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," t 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 short of 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 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 thousands.
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 the galaxy. Kim had made a
bull's-eye on a target relatively the size of a dinnerplate at eleven hundred yards. More than that, he had
stopped short of his target, equivalent to stopping a bullet three inches short of that plate.
     He said in a queer voice:
     "The—relay worked—even backward, Dona."

                                              CHAPTER VIII
                                               Dark Barrier

     FOR a time Kim sat still and sweat poured out on 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
nightside.
     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 an 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
strength of the magnetic field on a new planet. It recorded 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 .v 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 Star-shine'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 thermocell 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 strained 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 man- t ages 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 d 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 h 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 of the space-ship, and the sun formed the three K
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 spectre of 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 supercooled 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 the 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 Terra- nova—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-transmitter! 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!

                                              CHAPTER IX
                                              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 were 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, and 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 psychogram 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, it's 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.
    "I procured a little gadget," said Kim. "I dropped the gadget in various places where it wasn't likely to
be found. If one man is under disciplinary circuit punishment, or two or three or four—that's not
unreasonable on a great planet—nothing happens. But if twenty-five or fifty or a hundred are punished at
once, the disciplinary-circuit is blown out as I just blew out that force-field generator."
    The Mayor of Steadheim considered this information.
    "Ha-hmmm!" he said profoundly.
    "Criminals can be kept down, but a revolt can't be suppressed," Kim went on. "The soldiers who are
occupying the twenty-one planets will be called back to put down revolts, as soon as the people discover
the disciplinary circuits on their planets are blowing out, and that they blow out again as fast as they're
re-made and used."
      "Hm!" said the Mayor of Steadheim. "Not bad! And the rebels will have some very tasty ideas of
what to do to the folk who've tyrannized over them. No troops can stop a revolt nowadays. Not for
long!"
      "No, not for long," said Kim. "No government will be able to rule with a dissatisfied population. Not
if it has a little gadget hid den somewhere that will blow out the disci plinary circuit, if it's used to excess."
      "Good enough, good enough," grumbled the mayor. "When rulers are kept busy satisfying their
people, they won't have time to bother political offenders like us on Ades, or start wars." He looked up.
"Space!" he groaned. "Three hundred million planets! How long before we can have them all fitted out for
freedom?"
      Kim chuckled.
      "I explained the principle of the gadget to a munitions-manufacturer on Spicus Five," he said drily. "I
offered it to him in exchange for a dozen samples made up to my order. Does it occur to you that every
tyrant and every despot and every king in the Galaxy will be very, very happy to buy those little gadgets
at a fine fat price, to sow in the dominions of his neighbors? Then he needn't fear them! Don't you see?
And my munitions-maker friend will be impartially ready to sell them to his neighbors. They'll actually
increase the market for military goods for palace guards and the like."
      The Mayor of Steadheim puffed in his breath until it looked as if he would explode. Then he
bellowed with laughter.
      "Make the tyrants dethrone each other," he roared delightedly. "They'll weaken each other until they
find they've their own people to deal with. There'll be a fine scramble! I give it five years, no more, before
there's not a king in the galaxy who dares order an execution without a jury-trial first!"
      "A consummation devoutly to be wished," said Kim, smiling. "I rather like the idea myself."
      The mayor heaved himself up.
      "Hah!" he said, still chuckling. "I'll go back to my wife and tell her to come outdoors and look at the
stars, What will you two do next?"
      "Sleep, I suspect," said Kim. It was all over. The realization made him aware of how tired he was.
"We'll probably put in twenty-four hours of just plain slumber. Then we'll see if anything more needs to
be done, and then I guess Dona and I will head back to Terranova. The Organizer there is worried about
a shortage of textiles."
      "To the devil with him," grunted the Mayor of Steadheim. "We've had a shortage of sunlight! You're a
good man, Kim Rendell. I'll tell my grandchildren about you, when I have them."
      He waved grandly and went out. A little later his flier took off, occulting stars as it rose.
      Kim closed the airlock door. He yawned again.
      "Kim," said Dona. "We had to break that shield, but it was dangerous."
      "Yes," said Kim. He yawned again. "So it was. I'll be glad to get back to our house on Terranova."
      "So will I," said Dona. Her face had become determined. "We shouldn't even think of leaving it again,
Kim! We should—anchor ourselves to it, so nobody would think of asking us to leave."
      "A good idea," said Kim. "If it could be done."
      Dona looked critically at her. fingers, but she flushed suddenly.
      "It could," she said softly. "The best way would be—children."