Murray Leinster

“ How can people be held as slaves unless you keep them in despair?"
The Colony Organizer corrected his course a trifle. Far away the walls of the capital city of Terranova glinted in the sunlight.
"And there are the twenty-one planets which fell into our laps when we had to smash Sinab," said Kim. "Ades became the subject of dreams. Peasants and commoners think of it yearningly, as a sort of paradise. But kings and tyrants dream of it either as a nightmare which threatens the tranquility of their realms, or else as a very pretty bit of loot to be seized if possible. ”

“ But Kim had adapted the principle of the transmitter to the drive of his ship, and with the increased speed and range they'd found freedom on the prison world of Ades, where alone there was no tyranny. And later Kim had crossed to this new galaxy, and set up a transmitter here—the one which had just failed—and the exiled rebels and recalcitrants of Ades had begun to move through to a new universe where, they swore, men should be forever free. ”

“ There are probably ten thousand royal courts where ambitious men rack their brains for some plausible way to wipe out Ades as a menace and take over our twenty-one planets for loot. Ades is already full of spies, sent there in the guise of exiles. There've been men found murdered after torture,—seized and tortured by spies hoping to find out the secrets by which we whipped Sinab. There's one bomb-crater on Ades already, where a bomb smuggled through the transmitter was set off in an effort to wipe out all the brains on the planet. ”

“ Instantly the silvery film was formed again behind it and another shape developed on the film's surface.
Only seconds before, these people and these objects had been on another planet in another island universe, across unthinkable parsecs of space. Now they were here. Bales and bundles and parcels of merchandise. Huge containers of foodstuffs—the colony on Terranova was still not completely self-sustaining—and drums of fuel for the space-ships busy mapping the new galaxy for the use of men, and more people, and a huge tank of viscous, opalescent plastic. ”

“ A sun with no satellites—save for giant pulsing Cephids and close-coupled double suns—is almost unknown. But for billions upon billions of years that sun and Ades had kept each other company. Then men had appeared. For a thousand years great space-ships had grimly trundled back and forth to unload their cargoes of criminals upon the chilly small world. ”

“ Dona punched buttons on the Starshine's control-board. The ship lifted. The great black mass which was the night-side of the last planet faded behind and the Starshine drove on into space. And Dona turned back to Kim from her post at the controls.
"Now what?"
Kim stared at nothing, his features somber.
"It's bad," he said sourly. "There's the gang on Terranova. They're fair game if they land on any planet in the whole First Galaxy—and Terranova isn't self-sustaining yet. They'll starve if they stay isolated. There are the people on Ades. Sixteen millions of them. ”

“ Five millions of human beings in the Second Galaxy were isolated from the First. Ades was the only planet in the home galaxy on which all men were criminals by definition, and hence were friendly to the people of the new settlements. Every single other planet—save the bewildered and almost manless planets which had been subject to Sinab—was a tyranny of one brutal variety or another.
Every other planet regarded the men of Ades as outlaws, rebels, and criminals. The people of Terranova, therefore, were not only cut off from the immigrants and supplies and the technical skills of Ades. ”

“ 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." ”

“ The sun of Ades swam in emptiness. For uncountable billions of years it had floated serenely with its single planet circling it in the companionability of bodies separated only by millions of miles, when their next nearest neighbors are light-years away. A sun with one planet is a great rarity. ”

“ And Kim had come to the sector of the galaxy he desired on his second leap, and to the star-cluster in the third, and the fourth brought him to the small sun he looked for.
But space was empty about it. A sun without planets is a rarity so strange that it is almost impossible. This sun had possessed Ades. Nevertheless Kim searched for Ades. He found nothing. He searched for debris of an exploded planet. He found nothing. He set cameras to photograph all the cosmos about him, and drove the Starshine at highest interplanetary speed for twelve hours. ”

“ In the older, long-settled planets, civilization rose to incredible heights of luxury and of pride, and then took the long dive down into decadence and futility while newer, fresher worlds still struggled upward from the status of frontier settlements.
But at long last humanity's task in the First Galaxy was ended. The last planet suitable for human occupancy had been mapped and colonized. The race had reached the limit of its growth. ”

“ Kim asked, but Dona paid no attention.
"Take off, Kim," she said. "Men are marching out of the matter-transmitter. Marching, I said, Kim! Armed men, marching as soldiers, with machine-mounted heavy weapons. Somebody knows Ades can't protect its own any more, and invaders must be crowding in for the spoils. I'm—afraid, Kim, that Ades has been destroyed and our planets are part of a tyrant's empire now."
Later, the Starshine swooped down from the blue toward the matter-transmitter on Khiv Five. Serried ranks of marching figures were tramping out of the transmitter's silvery, wavering film. ”

“ Kim grinned at him.
"The universe is all right. It's Ades. Somewhere on the planet there's a generator throwing out a force-field. It will have plenty of power, that generator. Maybe I can pick it up with the instruments of the Starshine. But we'll be sure to find it with magnetic compasses. What we want is for everyone to flick their compasses and note the time of swing. We want to find the place where the swings get slower and slower. When we find a place where the compasses point steadily, without a flicker—not even up and down—we'll be at the generator. ”

“ But the men of Sinab had been sent to an unimaginable fate, leaving wives and daughters behind. The fact that the women of the Sinabian Empire were mostly the widows of men massacred for the Empire's spread was not clearly told in the rumors which ran about among the world.
If you became a criminal and were exiled to Ades, you were lucky. There were not enough men on Ades to accomplish the high triumphs awaiting them on every hand. There was hope for any man who dared to become a rebel. Exile to Ades was the most fortunate of adventures instead of the most dreadful of fates. ”

“ They were maintained by the device of the disciplinary circuit which enabled a tyrant or a group of oligarchs to administer intolerable torture to any individual they chose, wherever he might hide upon a planet's surface.
Revolt was utterly impossible. But there were some who revolted, nevertheless. And Ades had been a planet of hopeless exile to which such sturdy rebels could be sent as to a fate more mysterious and hence more terrible than death. On the whole, the new-comers were of the stuff of pioneers. The principal drawback was that so few women were rebels. ”

“ And the rebels will have some very tasty ideas of what to do to the folk who've tyrannized over them. No troops can stop a revolt nowadays. Not for long!"
"No, not for long," said Kim. "No government will be able to rule with a dissatisfied population. Not if it has a little gadget hidden somewhere that will blow out the disciplinary circuit, if it's used to excess."
"Good enough, good enough," grumbled the mayor. "When rulers are kept busy satisfying their people, they won't have time to bother political offenders like us on Ades, or start wars." ”

“ Not a big population for a planet, but a lot of people to be murdered so a few princelings can feast on the leavings of Sinab's empire.
"There are all the people who'd started to dream because Ades had come to mean hope. And there are all the people in generations to come who'd like to dream of hope and now won't be able to, and there are all the nasty little surprise-attacks and treacheries which will be carried out by matter-transmitters, now that these gentry of high and noble lineage have been able to snatch some loot for themselves. ”

“ There are precedents, I gather."
"But Kim!" protested Dona. "What did you do?"
"I did one thing that's been needed for a long time," said Kim grimly. "It seems to me that I do everything backwards. I should have attended to the matter of Ades first, but I had a chance and took it. I think I put something in motion that will ultimately smash up the whole cursed system that's made slaves of every human being but those on Ades and Terranova—the disciplinary circuit. Back on Ades we've talked about the need to free the people of this galaxy. It's always seemed too big a job. ”

“ The planet was Donet Three, the only habitable planet of its system. It was a monstrous, sprawling world, visibly flattened by the speed of its rotation and actually habitable only by the fact that its rotation partly balanced out its high gravity.
The Starshine approached over a polar region and descended to touch atmosphere. Then, while Dona looked curiously through the electron telescope at monstrous ice-mountains below, Kim donned a space-suit, went into the airlock, and dropped a small object out of the door. ”

“ There were bright spots in emptiness which the electron telescope instantly declared to be planets. Kim set up cameras for pictures.
"Alis One is the only really uninhabitable planet in the galaxy that's inhabited," he observed painstakingly. "It belongs to Pharos Three. I understand it's the personal property of the king. It has no atmosphere in spite of an extremely high specific gravity and a reasonable mass. But the plutonium mines have been worked for five thousand years." ”

“ Kim put the picture on the enlarger, for examination in a greater size.
"They made the shield to keep things out," he said wearily. "Radiation, charged particles, neutrons—everything. The planet simply can't be reached, not even by matter-transmitters, when the shield is up. But by the same token nothing can leave the planet either. It can't even be spotted from space, because the light of the sun isn't reflected. It's deflected to a right-angled course. You might pick it up if it formed a right-angled triangle with you and the sun, or you might spot it in transit across the sun's disk. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There aren't many wars in the ordinary course of events, but he turns out weapons for palace guards, mobile fighting-beam projectors, and so on. All the equipment for a planet ruler who wants a fancy army for parades or a force with a punch to fight off any sneak attack via matter-transmitter. That's what your average ruler is afraid of, and what he keeps an army to defend himself against. Of course the disciplinary circuit takes care of his subjects. ”

“ The oligarchs and tyrants and despots and politicians who ruled their planets by the threat of the disciplinary circuit, found this new state of affairs deplorable. Populations grew restive. There was actually hope among the common people, who could be subjected to unbearable torment by the mere pressure of a button. ”

“ Dona said skeptically. "You must be joking!"
"No," said Kim. "It's a very heavy planet, loaded with uranium and stuff from bismuth on out. It has an extremely eccentric orbit. As I told you, at aphelion it's beyond the orbit of Pharos Two. At perihelion, when it's nearest to its sun, it just barely misses Roche's Limit—the limit of nearness a satellite can come to its primary without being torn apart by tidal strains. And at its nearest to its sun, it's bombarded with everything a sun can fling out into space from its millions of tons of disintegrating atoms. ”

“ The banded planet Khiv Five swam sedately in emptiness. Kim drove for it, at first on mere overdrive, and then on the interplanetary drive used for rising from and landing on the surface of worlds. He landed on Khiv Five.
Women looked at him strangely. A space-ship which landed on Khiv Five—or anywhere else, for that matter—must certainly come from Ades, but ships were not commonplace sights. Kim was no commonplace sight, either. Six years before, the men on Khiv Five had died in one rotation of the planet. Every man and boy was murdered by the killing-beams of the now defunct Sinabian Empire. ”