4
Like a silver arrow, the "Starshine" continued to bore on through a weird, synthetic Universe, two hundred times faster than light. In the space-ship Kim worked angrily, making desperate attempts to devise a method of nullifying the non-individualized fighting beams with which—now that he was in free space in a space-ship—any attempt to land upon an inhabited planet might be frustrated.
In the end he constructed two small wristlets, one for himself and one for Dona to wear. If tuned waves of the Circuit struck them, the wristlets might nullify them. But if the fighting-beams struck, that would be another story.
Twelve days after turning on the overdrive, which by changing the constants of space about the space-ship, made two hundred light-speeds possible, Kim turned it off. He had previously assured himself that Dona was wearing the little gadget he had built. As he snapped off the overdrive field, the look of the Universe changed with a startling suddenness. Stars leaped into being on every side, amazingly bright and astoundingly varicolored. Cetis Alpha loomed almost dead ahead, a glaring globe of fire with enormous streamers streaming out on every side.
There were planets, too. As theStarshinejogged on at a normal interplanetary—rather than interstellar—speed, Dona focused the electron telescope upon the nearest. It was a great, round disk, with polar ice-caps and extraordinarily interconnected seas, so that there were innumerable small continents distributed everywhere. Green vegetation showed, and patches of cloud, and when Dona turned the magnification up to its very peak, they were certain that they saw the pattern of a magnificent metropolis.
She looked at it hungrily. Kim regarded it steadily. They did not speak for a long time.
"It would be nice there," Dona said longingly, at last. "Do you think we can land, Kim?"
"We're going to try," he told her.
But they didn't. They were forty million miles away when a sudden overwhelming anguish smote them both. All the Universe ceased to be....
Six weeks later, Kim Rendell eased theStarshineto a landing on the solitary satellite of the red dwarf sun Phanis. It was about four thousand miles in diameter. Its atmosphere was about one-fourth the density needed to support human life. Such vegetation as it possessed was stunted and lichenous. The terrain was tumbled and upheaved, with raw rock showing in great masses which had apparently solidified in a condition of frenzied turmoil. It had been examined and dismissed as useless for human colonization many centuries since. That was why Kim and Dona could land upon it.
They had spent half their store of fuel in the desperate effort to find a planet on which they could land.
Their attempt to approach Cetis Alpha VI had been the exact type of all their fruitless efforts. They came in for a landing, and while yet millions of miles out, recently reinstalled detector-screens searched them out. Newly stepped-up long distance psychographic finders had identified theStarshineas containing living human beings. Then projectors, taken out of museums, had hurled at them the deadly pain-beams which had made war futile a thousand years before. They might have died within one second, from the bursting of their hearts and the convulsive rupture of every muscular anchorage to every bone, except for one thing.
Kim's contrived wristlets had saved them. The wristlets, plus a relay on a set of controls to throw theStarshineinto overdrive travel through space. The wristlets contained a morsel of hafnium, so that any previous psychographic record of them as individuals would no longer check with the psychogram a searchbeam would encounter. But also, on the first instant of convulsive contraction of muscles beneath the wristlets, they emitted a frantic, tiny signal. That signal kicked over the control-relay. TheStarshineflung itself into overdrive escape, faster than light, faster than the pain-beams could follow.
They had suffered, of course. Horribly. But the pain-beams could not play upon them or more than the tenth of a millisecond before theStarshinevanished into faster-than-light escape. They had tried each of the six planets of Cetis Alpha. They had gone rather desperately to Cetis Gamma, with four inhabited planets, and Sorene, with three. Then the inroads on their scant fuel-supply and their dwindling store of vegetation from Alphin II made them accept defeat. The massed volumes of the Galactic Pilot for this sector, age-yellowed, brittle volumes now, had told them of vegetation on the useless planet of the dwarf star Phanis. They came to it. Kim was stunned and bitter. And they landed.
After the ship had settled down in a weird valley with fantastic overhanging cliffs and a frozen small waterfall nearby, the two of them went outside. They wore space-suits, of course, because of the extreme thinness of the air.
"I suppose we can call this home, now," Kim said bitterly.
It was night. The sky was cloudless, and all the stars of the Galaxy looked down upon them as they stood in the biting cold. His voice went by space-phone to the helmet of Dona, by his side.
"I guess I can stand it if you can, Kim," she said quietly.
"We've got fuel for six weeks' drive," he said ironically. "That means we can go to any place within twenty-five light-years. We've tried every solar system in that range. They're all warned against us. They all had their projectors in operation. We couldn't land. And we'd have starved unless we got to some new material for the synthesizer. This was the only place we could land on. So we have to stand it, if we stand anything."
Dona was silent for a little while.
"We've got each other, Kim," she said slowly.
"For a limited time," he said. "If we use our fuel only for heat and to run the synthesizer for food, it will probably last several years. But ultimately it will run out and we'll die."
"Are you sorry you threw away everything for me, Kim?" asked Dona. "I'm not sorry I'm with you. I'd rather be with you for a little while and then die. Certainly death is better than what I faced."
Kim made a furious gesture.
"It's recognized, everywhere, that the population of a planet has the right to make all the laws of that planet. We are the population here. We could be married by our own act. But suppose we had children? When our fuel gives out they'd die with us. I think we'd go mad anticipating that. We can't even have each other. We're imprisoned here as they used to imprison criminals. For life. We can have no hope. There is nothing we can work at. We can't even try to do anything."
He clenched his hands inside his space-gloves. Dona looked at him.
"Are you going to give up, Kim?"
"Give up what?" Then he said bitterly, "No, Dona. I'm going to find some excuse for hoping. Some lie I can tell myself. But I'll know I'm simply trying to deceive myself."
There was a long silence. Hopelessness. Futility.
"I've been thinking, Kim," Dona said softly, at last. "There are three hundred million inhabited planets. There are trillions and quintillions of people in the Galaxy. If they knew about us, some of them at least would want to help us. There are some, probably, who'd hope we could help them. If we were to think of a new approach to the problem we face, and reach the people who would want to help us, it might mean eventual rescue."
"Signals travel at the speed of light," Kim said. "We'd be dead long before even a tight-beam signal could reach another star-cluster, if there were anybody there to receive or act on it. But there aren't any space-ships except theStarshine. It was the last ship used in the Galaxy."
Dona said stoutly:
"We've been regarding our predicament as if it were unique, as if nobody else in the Universe wanted to be free. As if there was only one problem—ours! I heard a story once, Kim. It was about a man who had to carry a certain particular grain of dust to another place. A silly story, of course. But this was the top grain in a dust-pile. The man tried to find something that would pick up the one grain of dust, and something that would hold it quite safe. But he couldn't solve the problem. There wasn't any box that would hold a single grain of dust. He couldn't even pick up a solitary dust-grain. And how could he carry it if he couldn't pick it up?"
"That's a fable," Kim said, harshly. "There's a moral?"
Dona smiled. "Yes," she said. "There is. He picked up the dust-grain. With a shovel. He picked up a lot of others, too, but that didn't matter. And he could find a box to hold a hundred thousand dust-grains, when he couldn't find a box to hold one."
Kim was silent. Dona nodded and smiled at him.
"If you want a new way to think, how about thinking not just of us and our problem, but the problem of all the people like us who have gone into revolt?" she said. "How about all the people who've been sent to Ades? How about all those who will go in years to come? I don't know the answer, Kim, but it's another way to think. Since we've failed to solve a little problem by itself, suppose we look at it as part of a big one? It's a new approach, anyhow."
There was silence. The bright, many-colored stars overhead moved perceptibly toward what would be called the west by age-old custom. Weird shapes of frozen rock loomed above the space-ship, and the starlight glimmered up on thin hoarfrost which settled everywhere upon this small planet in the dark hours.
Kim stirred suddenly, and was still again. Dona continued to watch him. She could not see his face, but it seemed to her that he stood straighter, somehow. Then, suddenly, he spoke gruffly.
"Let's go back in the ship," he said. "Space-suits are admirable inventions, Dona, but they have limitations. I can't kiss you through a space-helmet."
He did not wait until they were out of the airlock, and she clung to him. Then he grinned for the first time in many days.
"My dear," he said contentedly. "Not only are you the best-looking female I ever saw, but you've got brains. Now watch me!"
"What are you going to do?" she asked breathlessly.
"Too much to waste time talking about it," he told her. "Want to help? Look up Ades in the Pilot. I had completely forgotten I was a matter-transmitter technician."
He kissed her again, exuberantly, and strode for theStarshinerecord-room, shedding the parts of his space-suit as he went. He pulled down the microfilm reels covering the ship's construction and zestfully set to work to review them, making notes and sketches from time to time. The reels, of course, contained not only the complete working drawings of the entire ship, showing every bolt and rivet, but also every moving part in stereoscopic relationship to its fellows, with full data so that no possible breakdown could take place without full information being available for its repair.
Dona watched him furtively as she began the tedious task of hunting through the Galactic Pilot of this sector, two-hundred-odd volumes, for even a stray reference to the planet Ades.
Ultimately she did find Ades mentioned. Not in the bound volumes of the Pilot, but in the microfilm abbreviated Galactic Directory. Ades rated just three lines of type—its space-coördinates, the spectral type of its sun, a climate-atmosphere symbol which indicated that three-fourths of its surface experienced sub-Arctic conditions, and the memo:
"Its borderline habitability caused it to be chosen as a penal colony at a very early date. Landing upon it is forbidden under all circumstances. A patrol-ship is on guard."
The memorandum was quaint, now that no space-line had operated in five centuries, no exploring ship in nearly two, and the Space Patrol itself had been disbanded three hundred years since.
"Mmmm!" Kim said. "If we need it, not too bad. People could survive on Ades. People probably have. And they won't be sheep, anyhow."
"How far away is it?" Dona asked uneasily. "We have enough fuel for twenty-five light-years' travel, you said."
"Ades is just about halfway across the Galaxy," he told her. "We couldn't really get started there if our tanks were full. The only way to reach it is by matter-transmitter."
But he did not look disheartened. Dona watch his face.
"It's ruled out. What did you hope from it, Kim?"
"A wedding," he said, and grinned. "But it isn't ruled out, Dona. Nothing's ruled out, if an idea you gave me works. Your story about the dust-grain hit my mind just right. I was trying to figure out how to travel a hundred light-years on twenty-five light-years' fuel, even though the Prime Board may have sent warnings three times that far. But if you can't solve a little problem, make it a big one and tackle that. That's what your story meant. It's a nice trick!"