3
Eventually the "Starshine," alone in space as no other space-ship had been alone in twenty thousand years, behaved like a sentient thing. At first, of course, her actions were frenzied, almost insane, as if the Disciplinary Circuit waves which made Dona a statue of agony and kept Kim frozen with contorted muscles could affect the space-ship too.
Wildly the little vessel went upward through air which screamed as it parted for her passage. She yawed and swayed and ludicrously plunged backwards. The screaming of the air rose to a shriek, and then to a high thin whistle, and then ceased altogether. Finally she was free of the air of Alphin III.
After this she really made speed, backing away from the planet. Her meteor-detectors had been turned on in one of Kim's random splicings, and when current reached them they reported a monstrous obstruction in her path and shunted in the meteor-repelling beams. The obstacle was the planet itself, and the beams tried to push it away. Naturally, they pushed the ship itself away, out into the huge chasm of interplanetary space.
It kept up for a long time, too, because Kim was paralyzed by the broadcast waves. They were kept focused upon him by the psychographic locator. So long as those waves of the Disciplinary Circuit came up through the ionosphere, Kim's spasmodically contracted muscles kept together the two cables which had started everything. But theStarshinebacked away at four gravities acceleration, faster and ever faster, and ordinary psychographic locators are not designed for use beyond planetary distances.
Ultimately the tormenting radio-beam lessened from sheer distance. At last the influence broke off suddenly and Kim's hands on the leads dropped away. The beam fumbled back to contact, and wavered away again, and presently was only a tingling sensation probing for a target the locators could no longer keep lined up.
Then theStarshineseemed to lose her frenzy and become merely a derelict. She sped on, giving no sign of life for a time. Then her vision-ports glowed abruptly. Kim Rendell, working desperately against time and with the chill of outer space creeping into the ship's unpowered hull, had found a severed cable which supplied light and heat.
An hour later still, the ship steadied in her motion. He had traced down the gyros' power-lead and set them to work.
Two hours later yet theStarshinepaused in her flight. Her long, pointed nose turned about. A new element of motion entered the picture she made. She changed course.
At last, as if having her drive finally in operation gave her something of purposefulness, the slim space-ship ceased to look frenzied or frowsy or bemused, and swam through space with a serene competence, like something very much alive and knowing exactly what she was about.
She came to rest upon the almost but not quite airless bulk of Alphin II some thirty hours after her escape from Alphin III. Kim was desperately hungry. But for the lesser gravity of the smaller inner planet, which was responsible for its thinned-out atmosphere, he might have staggered as he walked. Certainly a normal space-suit would have been a heavy burden for a man who had starved for days. Dona, also, looked pale and worn-out when she took from him the things he brought back through the airlock.
They put the great masses of spongy, woody stuff in the synthesizer. It was organic matter. Some of it, perhaps, could have been consumed as food in its original state. But the synthesizer received it, and hummed and buzzed quietly to itself, and presently the man and woman ate. The synthesizer was not the equivalent of those magnificently complex food-machines which in public dining-halls provide almost every dish the gourmets have ever invented from raw materials. But it did make a palatable meal from the tasteless vegetation of the small planet.
Kim said quietly, when they had finished eating, "Now we'll find out for certain what Burt intends to do about us." He grimaced. "He's dangerously intelligent. He underestimated me before. He may consider us dead, or he may overestimate us. I think he'll play it safe. I would, in his place."
"What does that mean?" Dona asked wistfully. "We will be able to go to some other planet, won't we, Kim? As if we'd gone in the matter-transmitter in a perfectly normal fashion? Simply to take up residence on another world?"
Kim shook his head. "I'm beginning to doubt it," he said slowly. "The discovery that with a bit of hafnium a man can change his psychographic pattern is high explosive. If the Disciplinary Circuit can't pick him out as an individual, any man can defy any government which depends on the Circuit. Which means that no government is safe. I've got to remove you for the sake of the government everywhere in the Galaxy."
"But they can't touch us here," said Dona. "We're safe now."
Kim shook his head.
"No. I was too hungry to think, before. We're not safe. I've got to work like the devil. Do you remember your Galactic History? Remember what the Disciplinary Circuit was built up to? Remember the Last War? It's not only the space-ships which went into museums. I'm suddenly scared stiff."
He stood up and abruptly began to put on the space-suit again. His face had become haggard.
"In the Last War there were no battles, only massacres," he said curtly as he snapped buckles. "There was no victory. They used a beam which was a stepped-up version of the Disciplinary Circuit. They called it a fighting-beam, then, and they thought they could fight with it. But they couldn't. It simply made war impossible. So ultimately they hooded over the projectors of the fighting-beams, and most of them probably fell to rust. But there are some in the museums. If Burt and the others want to play safe, they'll haul those projectors out of the museum and hook them up to find and kill us. And there's no question but that they can do it."
He stepped into the airlock and closed the door, still fumbling with the last adjustments to his space-suit.
Dona was puzzled by his gloomy forebodings. She heard the outer door open. As she stood there bewildered, she heard him bringing more raw food-stuff to the airlock with a feverish haste. He made two trips, three, and four.
She found herself screaming shrilly because of an agony already past.
It had been a bare flash of pain. It was gone in the fraction of a second, in the fraction of a millisecond. But it was such pain! It was the anguish of the Disciplinary Circuit a thousand times multiplied. It was such torment as the ancients tried vainly to picture as the lot of damned souls in hell. Had it lasted, any living creature would have died of sheer suffering.
But it flashed into being, and was gone, and Dona had cried out in a strangled voice. She was filled with a horrible weakness from the one instant of anguish, and she felt stark panic lest it come again.
The outer airlock door slammed shut. The inner opened. Kim came staggering within. He did not strip off the space-suit. He ran clumsily toward the now-repaired control-panel, his face contorted.
"Lie down flat!" he shouted as he opened his face-plate. "I'm taking off."
TheStarshineroared from the almost-barren world which was an inferior planet of the sun Alphin, not worth colonization by men. Acceleration built up and built up and built up to the very limit of what the human body could stand.
After twenty minutes, it dropped from four gravities to one.
"Dona!" Kim called hoarsely.
She answered faintly.
"They've got the ancient projectors hooked up," he said as hoarsely as before. "They're searching for us. We were so far away that the beam flashed past. It won't record finding us for minutes, as it'll take time for the response to get back. That's what will save us, but they're bound to touch us occasionally until we get out of range."
TheStarshineswung about in space. The brutal acceleration began again, at an angle to the former line of motion.
Ten minutes later there was another moment of intolerable pain. Every nerve in their bodies jumped in a tetanic convulsion. Had it continued, their muscles would have torn loose from their bones and their hearts would have burst from the violence of the fearful contraction. TheStarshinewould have gone on senselessly as a speeding coffin. But again the searing torment lasted for only the fraction of a second.
Back on Alphin III, great projectors swept across the sky. They were ancient devices, those projectors. They were quaint, even primitive in appearance. But a thousand years before they had been the final word in armament. They represented an attack against which there was no defense. A defense which could not be breached. Those machines had ended wars.
They poured forth tight beams of the same wave-frequencies and forms of which the Disciplinary Circuit was a more ancient development still. But where the Circuit was an exquisitely sensitive device for the exquisitely graduated torment of individuals, these beams were murderers of men. They were not tuned to the psychographic patterns of single persons, but coarsely, in irresistible strength, to all living matter containing given amino-chain molecules. In short, to all men.
And they had made the Last War the last. There had been one battle in that war. It had taken place near Canis Major, where there had been forty thousand warships of space lined up in hostile array. The two fleets were almost equally matched in numbers, and both possessed the fighting beams. They hurtled toward each other, the beams stabbing out ahead. They interpenetrated each other and went on, blindly.
It was a hundred years before the last of the run-away derelicts blundered to destruction or was picked up by other space-ships which then still roved the space-ways. Because there was no defense against the fighting-beams, which were aimed by electronic devices, a ship did not cease to fight when its crew was dead. And every crew had died when a fighting-beam lingered briefly on their ship. There was not one single survivor of the Battle of Canis Major. The fleets plunged at each other, and every living thing in both fleets had perished instantly. Thereafter the empty ships fought on as robots against all other ships. So there were no more wars.
For two hundred years after that battle, the planets of the Galaxy continued to mount their projectors and keep their detector-screens out. But war had defeated itself. There could be no victories, but only joint suicides. There could be no conquests, because even a depopulated planet's projectors would still destroy all life in any approaching space-ship for as many years as the projectors were powered for. But in time, more especially after matter-transmitters had made space-craft useless, they were forgotten. All but those which went into museums for the instruction of the young.
These resuscitated weapons were now at work to find and kill Kim and Dona. In a sense it was like trying to kill flies with a sixteen-inch gun. The difficulties of aiming were extreme. To set up a detector-field and neutralize it would take time and skill which were not available.
So the beams swept through great arcs, with operators watching for signs of contact. It was long minutes after the first contact before the instruments on the projectors recorded it, because the news could only go back at the speed of light. Then the projectors had to retrace their path, and theStarshinehad moved. The beams had to fumble blindly for the fugitives, and they told of each touch, but only after it occurred. And Kim struggled to make his course unpredictable.
In ten hours the beam struck four times only, because Kim changed course and acceleration so fiercely and so frequently that a contact could only be a matter of chance.
Then for a long time there was no touch at all. In two days Alphin, the sun, had dwindled until it was merely the brightest of the stars, with a barely perceptible disk. On the third day the beam found them yet again, and Dona burst into hysterical sobs. But it was not really bad, this time. There is a limit to the distance to which a tight beam can be held together in space, by technicians who have no space-experience and instinctive know-how.
Within hours after this fifth contact, Kim Rendell found the last key break in the control-cables of the ship, and was able to throw on the overdrive, by which theStarshinefled from Alphin at two hundred times the speed of light. Then, of course, they were safe. Even had the beam of agony been trained directly upon the ship, it could not have overtaken them.
But Dona was a bundle of shrinking nerves when it was over, and Kim raged as he looked at her scared eyes.
"I know," she said unsteadily, when he had her in the control-room to look at the cosmos as it appeared at faster-than-light speed. "I know I'm silly, Kim. It can't hurt us any more. We're going to another solar system entirely. They won't know anything about us. We're all right. Quite all right. But I'm just all in little pieces."
With somber brow, Kim stared at the vision-plates about him. The Universe as seen at two hundred light-speeds was not a reassuring sight. All stars behind had vanished. All those on either hand were dimmed to near-invisibility. Ahead, where the very nose of the space-ship pointed, there were specks of light in a recognizable star-pattern, but the colors and the magnitudes were incredible.
"We're heading now for Cetis Alpha," Kim said slowly, after a long time. "It's the next nearest solar system. Our fuel-tanks are one-twelfth full. We have power to travel a distance of fifty light-years, no more, and it would take us three months to cover that. Cetis Alpha is seven light-years away, or it was."
"We're going to settle on one of the planets there?" Dona asked hopefully. "What are they like, Kim?"
"You might look them up in the Pilot," Kim said, rather glumly. "There are six inhabited ones."
"You sound worried," she said. "What is it?"
"I'm wondering," Kim admitted. "If Burt and the Prime Board should send word ahead of us by matter-transmitter, to these six planets and all the other inhabited planets within fifty or a hundred light-years, it would be awkward for us. Transmission by matter-transmitter is instantaneous, and it wouldn't take too long for the governments on the Cetis Alpha planets to set up detectors and remount the projectors which could kill us. Burt would call us very dangerous criminals. He'd say we were so dangerous we had better be killed before we land." He paused, and added, "He's right."
"I don't see why they should do anything so cruel."
"We've struck at the foundation of government," Kim said savagely. "On Alphin Three there's a pretense that all men are free, and we know it's a lie. But on the other planets they don't even pretend. On Loré Four they have a king. On Markab Two the citizens wear collars of metal—slave-collars—and members of the aristocracy have the right to murder social inferiors at pleasure. On Andrometa Nine the Disciplinary Circuit, and so the government, is in the hands of a blood-thirsty lunatic. The Circuit backs all governments alike, the supposedly free and the frankly despotic governments impartially. We're a danger to all of them. Even a decent government, if there is one, would dread having its citizens able to defy the Circuit. Yet in ten words I can tell how to nullify the one instrument on which all government is based. Once that knowledge gets loose, nothing can suppress it."
Dona sighed.
"I was hoping we could go some place where we would be safe," she said. "Isn't there any such place?"
Kim's laugh was bitter.
"I wonder if there's any place where we can be free," he said. "I planned big, Dona, but it didn't work out. There wasn't another man on Alphin Three who wanted to be free as much as I did. I'd about decided that just the two of us would put on protectors and journey from one planet to another in search of freedom. But then Burt saw you, and you were locked up so you'd go frantic with fear and loneliness. Later they'd have given you a psychological conditioning to cure you of terror, and sent you away to Burt's pleasure-palace."
"Why didn't you take me away before Burt saw me?" she asked. "Why did you wait?"
Kim groaned. "Because I wasn't ready. When I realized the danger, I tried to get you, and I was caught. They found out what I had and everything became hopeless. They put me on block to see if anyone would try to befriend me, but I hadn't any friends. I didn't know anyone else who wouldn't have been frightened if I'd told him he was a slave. I threatened the Prime Board with a broadcast, but I'm afraid nobody would have believed me."
"It all happened because of me," Dona said. "Forget what I said about wanting to be safe, Kim. I don't care any more, not if I'm with you."
Kim scowled at the weird pattern of strangely-colored stars upon the vision-plate.
"We're using a lot of our fuel in trying for Cetis Alpha's planets. I'd like to—well—have a marriage ceremony."
Despite her anxiety, Dona burst out laughing.
"It's about time, you big lug!" she cried. "I was beginning to lose hope."
Kim laughed too. "All right. I'll see if it can be managed. But if warnings have been sent ahead of us, marriage may be difficult."