6
No obvious warlike move had been made on either side, of course. Ades swam through space, a solitary planet circling its own small sun. About it glittered the thousands of millions of stars which were the suns of the First Galaxy.
Nearby, bright and unwinking, Sinab and Khiv and Phanis were the largest suns of the star-cluster which was becoming the Empire of Sinab. Twenty planets—twenty-one, with Khiv Five—were already cut off from the rest of the Galaxy, apparently by the failure of their matter-transmitters.
Actually those twenty planets were the cradles of a new and horrible type of civilization. On the other inhabited worlds every conceivable type of tyranny had come into being, sustained by the Disciplinary Circuit which put every citizen at the mercy of his government throughout every moment of his life.
On most worlds kings and oligarchs reveled in the primitive satisfaction of arbitrary power. There is an instinct still surviving among men which allows power, as such, to become an end in itself, and when it is attained to be exercised without purpose save for its own display. Some men use power to force abject submission or fawning servility or stark terror.
In the Empire of Greater Sinab there was merely the novelty that the rulers craved adulation—and got it. The rulers of Sinab were without doubt served by the most enthusiastic, most loyal, most ardently cooperative subjects ever known among men.
Every member of the male population of Sinab—where women were considered practically a lower species of animal—could look forward confidently to a life of utter ease on one planet or another, served and caressed by solicitous females, with no particular obligation save to admire and revere his rulers and to breed more subjects for them.
It made for loyalty, but not for undue energy. There was no great worry about the progress of the splendid plan for a Greater Sinab. All went well. The planet Khiv Five had been beamed from space some nine days since.
Every man upon the planet had died in one instant of unholy anguish, during which tetanic convulsions of the muscles of his heart burst it while the ligaments and anchorages of other muscles were torn free of his skeleton by the terrific contraction of muscle fibres.
Every woman on Khiv Five was still in a state of frantic grief which would become despair only with the passage of time. It was strange that two guard-ships circling Khiv Five no longer reported to headquarters, but it was unthinkable that any harm could have come to them. Records showed that no other planet had practiced space-travel for centuries or millennia.
Only the Empire of Sinab had revived the ancient art for purposes of conquest. There was no reason to be solicitous, so the Empire of Sinab waited somnolently for time to pass, when colonists would be called upon to take over the manless Khiv Five and all its cities and its women.
There was another small planet called Ades, next in order for absorption into the Empire. A squadron had been dispatched to beam it to manlessness—though volunteers for its chilly clime would not be numerous.
The failure of two guard-ships to report, of course, could have no meaning to that other squadron. Of course not! There were no space-ships save the fleet of Greater Sinab. There were no weapons mounted for use against space-craft anywhere.
There was nothing to hinder the expansion of Greater Sinab to include every one of the Galaxy's three hundred million inhabited planets. So nobody worried on Sinab.
On Ades it was different. That small planet hummed with activity. It was not the ordered, regimented-from-above sort of activity any other planet in the Galaxy would have shown. It was individual activity, often erratic and doubtless inefficient. But it made for progress.
First, of course, a steady stream of human beings filed into the matter-transmitter which communicated with Terranova in the Second Galaxy. Gangling boys, mostly, and mothers with small boy-children made the journey, taking them to Terranova where the beams of Sinabian murder-craft could not cause their death.
The adults of Terranova were not anxious to flee from Ades. The men with wives—though there were only one-tenth as many women as men on Ades—savagely refused to abandon them. Those without wives labored furiously to complete the space-ships that waited for their finishing touches on the outskirts of every community on the planet.
The small drum of fuel taken by Dona from the warship off Khiv Five was depleted by Kim's use of it, but the rest was enormously useful. The catalyzer from the same warship was taken apart and its precious hafnium parts recovered. And then the values of individualism appeared.
A physicist who had been exiled from Muharram Two for the crime of criticizing a magistrate, presented himself as an expert on autocatalysis. With a sample of the catalyzed fuel to start the process he shortly had a small plant turning out space-fuel without hafnium at all. The catalyzed fuel itself acted as a catalyst to cause other fuel to take the desired molecular form.
A power-plant engineer from Hlond Three seized upon the principle and redesigned the catalyzers to be made for the ships. For safety's sake a particle of hafnium was included, but the new-type catalyzers required only a microscopic speck of the precious material.
Hafnium from the one bit of machinery from the one beam-generator of an enemy war-craft, was extended to supply the engine-rooms of a thousand space-craft of theStarshine'sdesign.
In a myriad other ways individuals worked at their chosen problems. Hundreds undoubtedly toiled to contrive a shield for the fighting beams—tuned to kill men only—which were the means by which Ades was to be devastated. The scientists of half a galaxy had tried that five thousand years before without success.
But one man did come up with a plausible device. He proposed a shielding paint containing crystals of the hormone to which the fighting-beams were tuned. The crystalline material should absorb the deadly frequencies, so they could not pass on to murder men.
It would have been simple enough to synthesize any desired organic substance, but Kim pointed out grimly that the shield would be made useless by changing the tuning of the beams. Other men devised horrific and generally impractical weapons.
But again, one man came up with a robot ship idea, a ship which could be fought without humans on board and controlled even at interstellar distances. Radio signals at the speed of light would be fantastically too slow.
He proposed miniature matter-transmitters automatically shuttling a magnetic element between ship and planet-station and back to the ship again, the solid object conveying all the information to be had from the ship's instruments to the planet-station, and relaying commands to the ship's controls. The trick could have been made to work, and it would be vastly faster than any radiation-beam. But there was no time to manufacture them.
Actually, only four days after the return of the partly dismantledStarshinefrom the farther side of nowhere, Kim took off again from Ades with fifty other ships following him. There were twenty other similar squadrons ready to take space in days more.
But for a first operation he insisted on a small force to gain experience without too much risk. At transmitter-speeds there could be no such thing as cruising in fleet formation, nor of arriving at any destination in a unit. Guerilla warfare was inevitable.
The navy of the criminals of Ades, though, went swirling up through the atmosphere of that cold planet like a column of voyaging wild geese. It broke through the upper atmosphere and there were all the suns of the Galaxy shining coldly on every hand.
The ships headed first for Khiv Five, lining up for it with such precision as the separate astrogators—hurriedly trained by Kim—could manage. It was a brave small company of tiny ships, forging through space away from the sunlit little world behind them. The light of the local sun was bright upon their hulls.
Glinting reflections of many-colored stars shimmered on their shadowed sides. They drove on and on, on planetary drive, seemingly motionless in space. Then theStarshinewinked out of existence. By ones and twos and half-dozens, the others vanished from space.
It was the transmitter-drive, of course. The repairedStarshinevanished from space near Ades because it went away from Ades at such speed that no light could possibly be reflected from it. It reappeared in space within the solar system of Khiv because it slowed enough to be visible.
But it seemed utterly alone. Yet presently an alarm-gong rang, and there was one of its sister-ships a bare ten thousand miles away. The rest were scattered over parsecs.
Kim drove for the banded planet on which dead men still lay unburied. His fleet was to rendezvous above its summer pole, as shown by the size of the ice-cap. There had been two guard-ships circling Khiv Five to keep account of the development of grief into despair. Dona had robbed one of them while its crew was held helpless by projectors of the Disciplinary Circuit field.
A second had been on the way to its aid when theStarshinereeled away with the last morsel of energy in its equalizing-batteries. With fifty small ships, swift as gadflies though without a single weapon. Kim hoped to try out the tactics planned for his fleet, and perhaps to capture one or both of the giants.
He picked up a third member of his force on the way to the planet and the three drove on in company. Detectors indicated two others at extreme range. But as the three hovered over the polar cap of Khiv Five, others came from every direction.
Then a wheezing voice bellowed out of the newly-installed space-radio in theStarshine'scontrol-room. It was the voice of the Mayor of Steadheim, grandly captaining a tiny ship with his four tall sons for crew.
"Kim Rendell!" he bellowed. "Kim Rendell! Enemy ships in sight! We're closing with them and be da—"
His voice stopped—utterly.
Kim snapped orders and his squadron came swarming after him. The direction of the message was clear. It had come from a point a bare two thousand miles above the surface of Khiv Five and with coördinates which made its location easy.
It was too close for the use of transmitter-drive, of course. Even overdrive at two hundred light-speeds was out of the question. On normal drive the little ships—bare specks in space—spread out and out. Their battle tactics had been agreed upon. They wove and darted erratically.
They had projectors of the Disciplinary Circuit field, which would paralyze any man they struck with sufficient intensity. But that was all—for the good and sufficient reason that such fields could be tested upon grimly resolute volunteers and adjusted to the utmost of efficiency.
On the prison world of Ades, to which criminals were sent from all over the Galaxy, there was no legal murder. Killing fighting-beams could not be calibrated. There were no available victims.
The detectors picked up a single considerable mass. Electron telescopes focussed upon it. Kim's lips tensed. He saw a giant war-craft, squat and ungainly—with no air-resistance in space there is no point in streamlining a space-ship—and with the look of a mass of crammed generators of deadly beams.
It turned slowly in its flight. It was not one space-ship, but two—two giant ships grappled together. It turned further and there was a shimmering, unsubstantial tiny shape clutched to one....
"The dickens!" said Kim bitterly. He called into the space-phones; "Kim Rendell speaking! Don't attack! Those ships aren't driving, they're falling! They'll smash on Khiv Five and we can't do anything about it. Keep at least fifty miles away!"
A wheezing voice said furiously from the communicator.
"They tricked me! I went for 'em, and the transmitter-drive went on. I'll get 'em this time!"
Kim barked at the Mayor of Steadheim, even as in the field of the electron telescope he saw a tiny mote of a space-ship charge valorously at the monsters. It plunged toward them—and vanished.
Dona spoke breathlessly.
"But what happened, Kim?"
"This," said Kim bitterly, "is the end of the battle we fought with one of those ships a week ago. We put out a decoy and that ship grappled it. A Disciplinary Circuit generator went on and paralyzed its crew.
"You remember that we went up to it and you went on board. I turned off its generator from a distance and held the crew paralyzed with beams from theStarshine. There was another ship coming when you got off and we got away to the other side of beyond."
"Yes, but—"
"We vanished," said Kim. "The other enemy ship came up. Its skipper must have decided to go on board the first for a conference, or perhaps to inspect the decoy. It grappled to the first—and the magnetic surge turned on the disciplinary field again in the gadget in the decoy!
"Every man in both ships were paralyzed all over again! Both ships were drifting with power off! They've been falling toward Khiv Five! Every man of both crews must be dead by now, but the field's still on and it will stay on! They'll crash!"
"But can't we do anything?" demanded Dona anxiously. "I know you want a ship."
"It would be handy to have those beams modified so we could paralyze a planet from a distance," said Kim grimly, "but these ships are gone."
"I could go on board again," said Dona.
"No! They'll hit atmosphere in minutes now. And even if we could cut off the paralyzing field and get to the control-room nobody could pull an unfamiliar ship out of that fall. I wouldn't let you try it anyhow. They're falling fast. Miles a second. They'll hit with the speed of a meteor!"
"But try, Kim!"
For answer he pulled her away from the electron telescope and pointed through the forward vision-port. The falling ships had seemed almost within reach on the electron-telescope screen. But through the vision-port one could see the whole vast bulk of Khiv Five.
Two thirds of it glowed brightly in sunlight, but night had fallen directly below. The falling ships were the barest specks the eye could possibly detect—too far for hope of overhauling on planetary drive, too close to risk any other. Any speed that would overtake the derelicts would mean a crash against the planet's disk.
"I think," said Kim, "they'll cross the sunset line and fall in the night area."
They did. They vanished, as specks against the sunlit disk. Then, minutes later, a little red spark appeared where the bulk of the banded planet faded into absolute black. The spark held and grew in brightness.
"They've hit atmosphere," Kim told her. "They're compressing the air before them until it's incandescent. They're a meteoric fall."
The spark flared terribly, minute though it was from this distance. It curved downward as the air slowed its forward speed. It was an infinitesimal comet, trailing a long tail of fire behind it. It swooped downward in a gracefully downward-curving arc. It crashed.
"Which," said Kim coldly in theStarshine'scontrol-room, "means that two Sinabian warships are destroyed without cost to us. It's a victory. But it's very, very bad luck for us. With those two ships and transmitter-drive we could end the war in one day."