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Ebook has 382 lines and 19499 words, and 8 pages

The Manless Worlds

The speaker inside the house spoke softly.

"Guests for Kim Rendell, asking permission to land."

Kim stared up at the unfamiliar stars of the Second Galaxy, and picked out a tiny winking light with his eyes. He moved to a speaker-disk.

He moved to the edge of the terrace to watch the landing. Dona came and stood beside him, her hand twisting into his. The night was very dark, and the two small moons of Terranova cast no more than enough light to outline nearby objects. The house behind Kim and Dona was low and sprawling and, on its polished outer surface, unnamed Second Galaxy constellations glinted faintly.

The flier came down, black and seemingly ungainly, with spinning rotors that guided and controlled its descent, rather than sustaining it against the planet's gravity. The extraordinarily flexible vegetation of Terranova bent away from the hovering object. It landed and the rotors ceased to spin. Figures got out.

"I'm here," said Kim Rendell into the darkness.

Two men came across the matted lawn to the terrace. One was the colony organizer for Terranova and the other was the definitely rough-and-ready mayor of Steadheim, a small settlement on Ades back in the First Galaxy.

"I am honored," said Kim in the stock phrase of greeting.

The two figures came heavily up on the terrace. Dona went indoors and came back with refreshments, according to the custom of Ades and Terranova. The visitors accepted the glasses, in which ice tinkled musically.

"You seem depressed," said Kim politely, another stock phrase. It was a way of getting immediately to business.

"There's trouble," growled the Mayor of Steadheim. "Bad trouble. It couldn't be worse. It looks like Ades is going to be wiped out. For lack of space-ships and fuel. Those so-and-so's on Sinab Two!"

"Lack of space-ships and fuel?" protested Kim. "But you're making them!"

He pounded with his fist for emphasis. Kim blinked at him. After twenty thousand years of civilization it was odd to hear a man say that it was impossible to make anything that happened to be wanted. Most of the peoples of the First Galaxy, to be sure, were hardly progressive.

Every habitable planet had been explored and colonized, and the human race swarmed and bred from rim to rim. But on every planet but one--Ades--men were enslaved by the Disciplinary Circuit, which, as an agent of government subjected every citizen on every planet to torture or death at the whim of his rulers.

So everywhere but on Ades in the First Galaxy progress had come to an end and only those people who, for intelligence or crime or rebellion or the lack of a sheeplike spirit, had been exiled to Ades looked forward to any further triumphs for mankind.

Kim Rendell--himself a fugitive from the planet Alphin Three--had allied himself with them and the colony on Terranova was a victory of his contriving.

It was the first foothold of the human race across the monstrous void surrounding the First Galaxy.

It was the promise of all the island universes in all the cosmos, opened for the use of men. It had seemed that an unending march of triumph lay ahead. So it was incredible that the men of Ades should be unable to make space-ships or the fuel needed for ships to subjugate the new galaxy.

All that was true. On most planets, to be sure, the making of space-ships was not even dreamed of--abandoned even in the amusement reels as too antique to be amusing. Space travel by ship had ceased centuries since. Matter-transmitters on every planet conveyed persons and things from one solar system to another in infinitely less time and with infinitely greater convenience.

They'd had a bad time of it. They'd have died helplessly because of the little ship's inherent limitations, had not Kim applied his matter-transmitter-technician's knowledge and modified its drive past recognition.

He'd made the little ship into a matter-transmitter which received itself, traveling light-millennia in microseconds, and at long last he and Dona had found a haven on Ades--the prison world to which all malcontents were exiled and from which no exile had ever escaped.

"Space!" exploded the Mayor of Steadheim. "Of course we know how! We know all about it! There are fifty useless hulks in a neat row outside my city--every one unfinished. We're short of metal on Ades and we had to melt down tools to make them, but we did--as far as we could go. Now we're stuck and we're apt to be wiped out because of it!"

The Mayor of Steadheim wore a bearskin cap and his costume was appropriate to that part of Ades in which his municipality lay. He was dressed for a subarctic climate, not for the balmy warmth of Terranova, where Kim Rendell had made his homestead. He sweated as he gulped at his drink.

"Tell me the trouble," said Kim. "Maybe--"

"Hafnium!" barked the mayor. "There's no hafnium on Ades! The ships are done, all but the fuel-catalyzers. The fuel is ready--all but the first catalyzation that prepares it to be put in a ship's tanks. We have to have hafnium to make catalyzers for the ships. We have to have hafnium to make the fuel!

"We haven't got it! There's not an atom of it on the planet! We're so short of heavy elements, anyhow, that we make hammers out of magnesium alloy and put stones in 'em to give them weight so they'll strike a real blow! We haven't got an atom of hafnium and we can't make ships or run them either without it!"

Kim blinked at the Colony Organizer for Terranova.

"Here--"

"No hafnium here either," said the Colony Organizer gloomily. "We analyzed a huge sample of ocean salts. If there were any on the planet there'd be a trace in the ocean. Naturally! So what do we do?"

Kim spoke unhappily.

"Take a year to find it," said the Mayor of Steadheim bitterly. "If we could search! And it might be no good then! We haven't got a year. Probably we haven't a month!"

"We're beaten," mourned the Colony Organizer. "All we can do is get as many through the Transmitter from Ades as possible and go on half rations. But we'll starve."

"And who'd sell us hafnium?" demanded the Colony Organizer bitterly. "We're the men of Ades--the rebels, the outlaws! We were sent to Ades to keep us from contaminating the sheep who live under governments with disciplinary circuits and think they're men! We'd be killed on sight for breaking our exile on any planet in the First Galaxy! Who'd sell us hafnium?"

"Who spoke of buying?" roared the mayor. "I was sent to Ades for murder! I'm not above killing again for the things I believe in! I've a wife on Ades, where there are ten men for every woman. I've four tall sons! D'you think I won't kill for them?"

"You speak of piracy," said the Colony Organizer, distastefully.

"Piracy! Murder! What's the difference? When my sons are in danger--"

"What's this danger?" Kim said sharply. "It's bad enough to be grounded, as we seem to be. But you said just now--"

"Sinab Two!" snorted the Mayor of Steadheim. "That's the danger! We know! When a man becomes a criminal anywhere he's sent to us. In the First Galaxy a man with brains usually becomes a criminal. A free man always does! So we've known for a long while there were empires in the making. You heard that, Kim Rendell!"

"Yes, I've heard that," agreed Kim.

So he had, but only vaguely. His own home planet, Alphin Three, was ostensibly a technarchy, ruled by men chosen for their aptitude for public affairs by psychological tests and given power after long training.

Actually it was a tyranny, ruled by members of the Prime Council. Other planets were despotisms or oligarchies and many were kingdoms, these days. Every possible form of government was represented in the three hundred million inhabited planets of the First Galaxy.

But every planet was independent and in all--by virtue of the disciplinary circuit--the government was absolute and hence tyrannical. Empires, however, were something new. On Ades, Kim had barely heard that three were in process of formation.

"One's the Empire of Greater Sinab," snorted the mayor, "and we've just heard how it grows!"

"Surprise attacks, no doubt," said Kim, "through matter-transmitters."

"We'd not worry if that were all!" snapped the mayor. "It's vastly worse! You know the old fighting-beams?"

"I know them!" said Kim grimly.

He did. They were the most terrible weapons ever created by men. They had ended war by making all battles mass suicide for both sides. They were beams of the same neuronic frequencies utilized in the disciplinary circuits which kept men enslaved.

But where the disciplinary circuits were used in place of police and prisons and merely tortured the individual citizen to whom they were tuned--wherever he might be upon a planet--the fighting-beams killed indiscriminately. They induced monstrous, murderous currents in any living tissue containing the amino-chains normally a part of human flesh.

They were death-rays. They killed men and women and children alike in instants of shrieking agony. But no planet could be attacked from space if it was defended by such beams. It was two thousand years since the last attempt at attack from space had been made.

That fleet had been detected far out and swept with fighting-beams and every living thing in the attacking ships died instantly. So planets were independent of each other. But when space-ships ceased to be used the fighting-beams were needless and ultimately were scrapped or put into museums.

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