5
Dona was puzzled by what Kim had said. She stared at him, wide-eyed, trying to figure out his meaning. For a moment or two he made no attempt to explain. He just stood there, grinning at her.
"Listen, Dona," he said, finally. "Why did they stop making space-ships?"
"Matter-transmitters are quicker and space-ships aren't needed any more."
"Right!" Kim said. "But why was theStarshineused by my revered great-grandfather to bring the first colonists to Alphin Three?"
"Because—well—because you have to have a receiver for a matter-transmitter, and you have to carry it. Alphin Three was almost the last planet in the Galaxy to be colonized, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Why do you have to carry a receiver? No, don't bother. But do answer this one. If two places are both too far to get to, what's the difference?"
"Why, none."
"Oh, there's a lot!" he told her. "The next star-cluster is too far away for theStarshinewith her present drive and fuel. To the next galaxy is no farther. But when I stopped trying to think of ways to stretch our fuel, and started trying to think of a way to get to the next galaxy, I got it."
She stared.
"Are we going there to live?" she said submissively. But her eyes were sparkling with mirth.
He kissed her exuberantly.
"My dear, I wouldn't put anything past the two of us together. But let me show you how it works."
He spread out the drawings he had made from the construction-records while she searched the Pilot. He expounded their meaning enthusiastically and she listened and made admiring comments, but it is rather doubtful if she really understood. She was too much occupied with the happy knowledge that he was again confident and hopeful.
But the idea was not particularly complicated. Every fact was familiar enough. Space-ships, in the old days, and theStarshine, in this, were able to exceed the speed of light by enclosing themselves in an overdrive field, which was space so stressed that in it the velocity of light was enormously increased. Therefore the inertia of matter, its resistance to acceleration, or its mass, was reduced by the same factor, y.
The kinetic energy of a moving space-ship, of course, had to remain the same when an overdrive field was formed about it. Thus when its inertia was decreased by the field, its velocity had to increase. Mathematically, the relationship of mass to velocity with a given quantity of kinetic energy is, for normal space, MV=E. In an overdrive field, where the factor y enters, the equation is M/y, yV=E. The value of y is such that speeds up to two hundred times that of light result from a space-ship at normal interplanetary speed going into an overdrive field.
A matter-transmitter field, as everyone knows now, simply raises the value of y to infinity. The formula then becomes M/infinity, infinity V=E. The mass is divided by infinity and the velocity multiplied by infinity. The velocity, in a planet-to-planet transmitter, is always directly toward the receiver to which the transmitter is tuned.
In theory, then, a man who enters such a transmitter passes through empty space unprotected, but his exposure is so exceedingly brief—across the whole First Galaxy transit was estimated to require .0001 second—that not one molecule of the air surrounding him has time to escape into emptiness.
Thus the one device is simply an extension of the principle of the other. A matter-transmitter is merely an enormously developed overdrive-field generator with a tuning device attached. But until this moment, apparently it had not happened that a matter-transmitter technician was in a predicament where the only way out was to put those facts together. Kim was such a technician, and on theStarshinehe had probably the only overdrive field generator of space-ship pattern still in working order in the Universe.
"All I've got to do is to add two stages of coupling and rewind the exciter-secondary," he told her zestfully. "Doing it by hand may take a week. Then theStarshinewill be a matter-transmitter which will transmit itself! The toughest part of the whole job will be the distance-gauge. And I've got that."
Worshipfully, Dona looked up at him. She probably hoped that he would kiss her again, but he mistook it for interest.
He explained at length. There could be, of course, no measure of distance traveled in emptiness. Astrogation has always been a matter of dead reckoning plus direct observation. But at such immeasurably high speeds there could be no direct observation. At matter-transmitter speeds, no manual control could stop a ship in motion within any given galaxy!
So Kim had planned a photo-gauge, which would throw off the transmitter-field when a specific amount of radiation had reached it. At thousands of light-speeds, the radiation impinging on the bow of a ship, would equal in seconds the normal reception of years. When a specific total of radiation had struck it, a relay would cut off the drive field. Among other features, such a control would make it impossible for a speeding ship to venture too close to a sun.
Kim set joyously to work to make three changes in the overdrive circuit, and to build a radiation-operated relay.
Outside the space-ship the sky turned deep-purple. Presently the dull-red sun arose, and the white hoarfrost melted and glistened wetly, and most of it evaporated in a thin white mist. The frozen waterfall dripped and dripped, and presently flowed freely. The lichenous plants rippled and stirred in the thin chill winds that blew over the small planet, and even animals appeared, stupid and sluggish things, which lived upon the lichens.
Hours passed. The dull-red sun sank low and vanished. The little waterfall flowed more and more slowly, and at last ceased altogether. The sky became a deep dense black and multitudes of stars shone down on the grounded space-ship.
It was a small, starved world, this planet, swinging in lonely isolation around a burned-out sun. About it lay the Galaxy in which were three hundred million inhabited worlds, circling brighter, hotter, much more splendid stars. But the starveling little planet was the only place in all the Galaxy, save one, where no Disciplinary Circuit held the human race in slavery.
Nothing happened visibly upon the planet during many days. There were nights in which the hoarfrost glistened whitely, and days in which the frozen waterfall thawed and splashed valiantly. The sluggish, stupid animals ignored the space-ship. It was motionless and they took it for a rock. Only twice did its two occupants emerge, to gather the vegetation which was raw material for their food-synthesizer. On the second expedition, Kim seized upon an animal to add to the larder, but its helpless futile struggles somehow disgusted him. He let it go.
"I prefer test-tube meat," he said distastefully. "We've food enough anyhow for a long, long time. At worst we can always come back for more."
They went into the ship and stored the vegetable matter in the synthesizer-bins. They returned, then, to the control-room.
"I think it's right," Kim said soberly, as he took the seat before the control-panel. "But nobody ever knows. Maybe we have a space-ship now which makes matter-transmitters absurd. Maybe we've something we can't control at all, which will land us hundreds of millions of light-years away, so that we'll never be able to find even this galaxy again."
"Maybe we might have something which will simply kill us instantly," Dona said quietly. "That's right, isn't it?"
He nodded.
"When I push this button we find out."
She put her hand over his. She bent over and kissed him. Then she pressed down his finger on the control-stud.
Incredible, glaring light burst into the viewports, blinding them. Relays clicked loudly. Alarms rang stridently. TheStarshinebucked frantically, and the vision-screens flared with a searing light before the light-control reacted....
There was a sun in view to the left. It was a blue-white giant which even at a distance which reduced its disk to the size of a water-drop, gave off a blistering heat. To the right, within a matter of a very few millions of miles, there was a cloud-veiled planet.
"At least we traveled," Kim said. "And a long way, too. Cosmography's hardly a living science since exploration stopped, but that star surely wasn't in the cluster we came from."
He cut off the alarms and the meteor-repeller beams which strove to sheer theStarshineaway from the planet, as they had once driven it backward away from Alphin III. He touched a stud which activated the relay which would turn on overdrive should a fighting-beam touch its human occupants.
He waited, expectant, tense. The space-ship was no more than ten million miles from the surface of the cloud-wreathed world. If there were an alarm-system at work, the detectors on the planet should be setting up a terrific clamor, now, and a fighter-beam should be stabbing out at any instant to destroy the two occupants of theStarshine. Kim found himself almost cringing from anticipation of the unspeakable agony which only an instant's exposure to a pain-beam involved.
But nothing happened. They watched the clouds. Dona trained the electron telescope upon them. They were not continuous. There were rifts through which solidity could be glimpsed, sometimes clearly, and sometimes as through mist.
She put in an infra-red filter and stepped up the illumination. The surface of the planet came into view on the telescope-screen. They saw cities. They saw patches of vegetation of unvarying texture, which could only be cultivated areas providing raw material for the food-synthesizers. They saw one city of truly colossal size.
"We'll go in on planetary drive," Kim said quietly. "We must have gone beyond news of us, or they'd have stabbed at us before now. But we'll be careful. I think we'd better sneak in on the night-side. We'll turn on the communicator, by the way. We may get some idea of the identity of this sun."
He put the little ship into a power-orbit, slanting steeply inward in a curve which would make contact with the planet's atmosphere just beyond the sunset line. He watched the hull-thermometers for their indications.
They touched air very high up, and went down and down, fumbling and cautious. The vision-screens were blank for a long time, but the instruments told of solidity two hundred miles below, then one hundred, then fifty, twenty-five, ten—
Suddenly the communicator-speaker spoke in a gabble of confusing voices. Dona tuned it down to one. All the Galaxy spoke the same language, of course, but this dialect was strangely accented. Presently they grew accustomed and could understand.
"We all take pride in the perfection of our life," the voice said unctuously. "Ten thousand years ago perfection was attained upon this planet, and it is for us to maintain that perfection. Unquestioningly, we obey our rulers, because obedience is a part of perfection. Sometimes our rulers give us orders which, to all appearances, are severe. It is not always easy to obey. But the more difficult obedience may be, the more necessary it is for perfection. The Disciplinary Circuit is a reminder of that need as it touches us once each day to spur us to perfection. The destruction of a family, even to first and second cousins, for the disobedience of a single member, is necessary that every seed of imperfection shall be eliminated from our life."
Kim and Dona looked at each other. Dona turned to another of the voices.
"People of Uvan!" The tones were harsh and arrogant. "I am your new lord. These are your orders. Your taxes are increased by one-tenth. I require absolute obedience not only to myself, but to my guards. If any man, woman or child shall so much as think a protest against my lightest command, he or she shall writhe in agony in a public place until death comes, and it will not come quickly! Before my guards you will kneel. Before my personal attendants you will prostrate yourselves, not daring to lift your eyes. That is all for the present."
Dona cut it off quickly. A dry, crisp voice came in on a higher wave-length.
"This is Matix speaking. You will arrange at once to procure from Khamil Four a shipment of fighting animals for the Lord Sohn's festival four days hence. Fliers will arrive at the matter-transmitter to take them on board tomorrow afternoon two hours before sunset. Lord Sohn was most pleased with the gheets in the last shipment. They do not fight well against men, but against women they are fairly deadly. In addition—"
"Somehow, I don't think we'll land, Dona," Kim said very quietly. "But turn back to the first voice."
Her hand shook, but she obeyed. The unctuous voice had somehow the air of ending its speech.
"Before going on, I repeat we are grateful for the perfection of our way of life, and we resolve firmly that so long as our planet shall circle Altair, in no wise will we depart from it."
Kim turned the nose of theStarshineupward. The stars of the Galaxy seemed strangely bright and monstrously indifferent. The little space-ship drove back into the heavens.
After a pause, Kim turned to Dona.
"Look up Altair," he said. "We came a very long way indeed."
There was silence save for the rustling of the index-volume as Dona searched for Altair in the sun-index. Presently she read off the space-coördinates. Kim calculated, ruefully.
"That wasn't space-travel," he said drily. "That was matter-transmission. TheStarshineis a matter-transmitter, Dona, transmitting itself and us. I wasn't aware of any interval between the time I pressed the stud and the time the altered field shut off. But we came almost a quarter across the Galaxy."
"It was—horrible," Dona said, shivering. "I thought Alphin Three was bad, but the tyranny here is ghastly."
"Alphin Three is a new planet," Kim told her grimly. "This one below us is old. Alphin Three has been occupied for barely two hundred years. Its people have relatively the vigor and the sturdy independence of pioneers, and still they're sheep! We're in an older part of the Galaxy now and the race back here has grown old and stupid and cruel. And I imagine it's ready to die."
He bent forward and made a careful adjustment of the light-operated distance-gauge. He cut it down enormously.
"We'll try it again," he said. He pressed the stud....