Read Ebook: The boomerang circuit by Leinster Murray Stevens Lawrence Sterne Illustrator

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Ebook has 72 lines and 5888 words, and 2 pages

ensation 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."

"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.

He grinned. He hugged her.

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 thermo-cell 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.

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 manages to intrude. We can't afford to take a chance. We've got to get back to Ades!"

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....

"There!" she said, and pointed.

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 Terranova--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.

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."

"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."

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