The Boomerang Circuit

CHAPTER II Enemy Sabotage

SKILFULLY the Colony Organizer sent the flier into the long shallow glide that would land it in the planet capital city. There were only twenty thousand people in that city. It would rate as a village anywhere except on Ades, but it was the largest settlement on Terranova.

"Then you think," said the harassed Organizer, "that some outrage has been committed and the transmitter on Ades damaged —perhaps by another bomb?"

"I hope it's no worse than that," said Kim. "I don't know what I fear, but there are still sixteen million people on Ades, and some of them are very decent folk. In a little while I'll know if it's nothing important, or if it's bad. I could have found out back at home, but I wanted to hold on to hope."

His lips were tightly compressed. The flier landed. The two men got out and went along a yielding walk to the central square of the city.

Many persons had collected in the square, more people in that one spot than Kim had seen together for many years. Now at least a thousand men and women and children had gathered, and were standing motionless, looking at the tall arch of the transmitter.

There would have been nothing extraordinary about the appearance of the arch to a man from past ages. It would have seemed to be quite commonplace—gracefully designed, to be sure, and with a smooth purity of line which the ancient artists only aspired to, but still not at all a remarkable object. But the throng of onlookers who stared at it, did so because they could look through it. That had never before been possible. It had been a matter-transmitter. Now it was only an arch. The people stared.

Kim went in the technician's door at the base of the arch. The local matter-technician greeted him with relief.

"I'm glad you have come, Kim Rendell," he said uneasily. "I can find nothing wrong. Every circuit is correct. Every contact is found. But it simply does not work!"

"I'll see," said Kim. "I'm sure you are right; but I’ll verify it. Yet I'm afraid I'm only postponing a test I should have made before."

He went over the test-panel, trying the various circuits. All checked up satisfactorily. He went behind the test-panel and attached a number of leads. He returned to the front and worked the panel again. The results were wildly at variance with the original readings, but Kim regarded them with an angry acceptance.

"I reversed some leads, just in case a checking instrument was out by the same amount as a circuit," he told the technician. "To be frank about it, I made sure you hadn't knocked out the transmitter on purpose. Such things have been done." Then he said grimly. "This one is all right. The transmitter on Ades is out of action. It not only doesn't work, but they haven't been able to fix it in—how long?"

"Two hours now," said the technician unhappily.

"Too long!" said Kim.

He unpacked his box. It was very small, a foot by a foot by a foot. There was a cone-shaped hole in one end which diminished to a small hole at the other end. Kim sweated a little.

"I should have tried this before," he said. "But I wanted to hope. With all the First Galaxy fearing and hating Ades, somebody would think of a way to do us damage, even without space-ships!"

He turned a tiny knob on the box, and looked through the hole. His lips tautened. He began to make tests. His face grew more and more drawn and sombre. At last in turned the little knob again, and nothing happened. His face went quite white.

"What is it?" asked the Colony Organizer

Kim sat down, looking rather sick.

"It's bad," he said. Then he gestured toward the box. "When we were fighting Sinab, somebody worked out an idea for the remote control of ships. Beam control would be too slow. At a few million miles, the formation the robot gathered would take seconds to get back to the control-board, and more seconds would be needed for the controlling signals to get back to the robot. In terms of light-years, communications than way would be impossible."

KIM glanced at the Organizer who signified by a nod that he understood. "If it took a year each way, there'd be two years between the robot's observation of something to be acted on," Kim continued "And the signal that would make it act. So this man proposed very tiny matter-transmitters. One on the robot and one on the home planet. A solid object would receive all the information the robot's instrument gathered.

"The transmitter would send it back to the control-board at transmitter-speed, and the board would impress orders on it and send it to the robot again. It could shuttle across the width of a galaxy a hundred time a second, and make robot-control at any distance practical. A few of them were made, but not used. This is one of them.

"I had it for measuring the actual speed of transmitter-travel between here and Ade: We thought the distance would be enough for a good measurement. It wasn't. But this is a transmitter like the big one, and it has a mate on Ades, and its mate is a hemisphere away from Ades' main transmitter. And neither one works. Something's happened on Ades, that involves both hemispheres. And the transmitters couldn't have bee knocked out by something that only killed people. It looks as if Ades may have been destroyed."

There was an instant's uncomprehending silence. Then the realization struck home. In all of human history no planet had ever been completely destroyed. Dozens, even hundreds, had been devastated, before war came to an end by the discovery of a weapon too terrible to be used. Four had been depopulated by that weapon, the fighting beam.

But never before had it even been imagined that a planet could be wiped out of existence. —There are theoretic considerations," said Kim, dry-throated, "which make a material weapon like atomic explosive unthinkable. There are other considerations which make it certain that any immaterial weapon that could destroy a planet would have infinite speed and therefore infinite range. If Ades has been destroyed, all the human race, including us, must sooner or later be subject to those who control such a weapon." Kim Rendell paused and cleared his throat. 'If they start off by destroying the only world on which men are free, I don't think I like it. Now I must go back home. I'd better get over to the First Galaxy in the Starshine and find out what's happened."

The thousand million suns of the First Galaxy swam in space, attended by their families of planets. Three hundred million worlds had been populated by the human race. For thirty thousand years the descendants of the people of Earth—that almost mythical first home of humanity—had spread through the vastness of what once had seemed to them the very cosmos itself.

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. It had reached, too—or so it seemed—its highest possible point of development. Matter-transmitters conveyed parcels and persons instantly and easily from rim to rim of the galaxy.

Disciplinary circuits enforced the laws of planetary governments beyond any hope of evasion or defiance. There were impregnable defenses against attacks from space. There could be no war, there could be no revolt, could be no successful crime—save by people who controlled governments!—and there could be no hope. So humanity settled back toward barbarism.

Perhaps it was inevitable that conquest should again become possible, revolt conceivable, and crime once more feasible even to individuals, so that hope could return to men. And perhaps it was the most natural thing imaginable that hope first sprang from the prison world of Ades.

"They live on domed platforms of uranium glass and, when

they go out to mine ore, they work in shielded space-suits."

WHISPERS spread from planet to planet. Ades, to which all rebels and nonconformists had been banished in hopeless exile, was no longer a symbol for isolation and despair. Its citizens—if criminals could be citizens anywhere—had revived the art of space-travel by means of ships.

The rest of the galaxy had abandoned space-ships long ago as antiquities. Matter-transmitters far surpassed them. But Ades had revived them and fought a war with the Empire of Sinab, and won it, and twenty-one planets with all their cities and machines had fallen to them. 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.

Those whispers were fascinating, but they were seditious. 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. And of course hope could not be permitted. Allow the populace to hope, and it would aspire to justice. Grant it justice and it might look for liberty! Something had to be done!

So something was done. Many things were done. Royal courts debated the question, alike of the danger and of possible loot in the empire to which Ades had fallen heir. And in consequence the despots had acted.

The Starshine winked into existence near the sun which had been the luminary of Ades. It was a small cold sun, and Ades had been its only planet. The Starshine had made the journey from Terranova in four leaps, of which the first was the monstrous one from the Second Galaxy to the First. Accuracy of aim could not be expected over such an expanse.

The little ship had come out of its first leap near that preposterous group of the blue-white suns of Dheen, whose complicated orbits about each other still puzzled mathematicians. 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 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. Then he looked at the plates.

In that twelve hours the space-ship had driven some hundreds of thousands of miles. Even nearby stars at distances of light-years, would not have their angles change appreciably, and so would show upon the plates as definite, tiny dots. But any planet or any debris within a thousand million miles would make a streak instead of a dot upon the photographic plate.

There was nothing. Ades had vanished.

He aimed for the star Khiv and flashed to its vicinity. 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 spaceship 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. Now there were only women, save for the very few men who had migrated to it in quest of wives, and had remained to rear families.

The population of Khiv Five was overwhelmingly female.

Kim found his way to the governing center of the capital city. Dona walked with him through the city streets. There were women everywhere. They turned to stare at Kim. They looked at Dona with veiled eyes.

Long years on an exclusively feminine world does strange things to psychology. There were women wearing the badges of mourning for husbands dead more than half a decade.

In a sense it was a dramatization of their loss, because all women, everywhere, take a melancholy pleasure in the display of their unhappiness. But in part to boast of grief for a lost husband was an excuse for not having captured one of the few men who had arrived since the mass murder. As a matter of fact, Kim did not see a single man in the capital city of Khiv Five, but its streets swarmed with women.

He asked for the head of the planet government, and at long last found an untidy woman at a desk. He asked what was known of Ades.

"I was on Terranova," he explained. "The matter-transmitter went off and it did not come back on. I came back by space-ship to find out about it, and went to where Ades should have been. I'm Kim Rendell, and I used to be a matter-transmitter technician. I thought I might repair the one on Ades if it needed repairing. But I could find no planet circling Ades' sun."

The woman regarded him with what was almost hostility. .

"Kim Rendell," she said. "I've heard of you. You are a very famous man. But we women on Khiv Five can do without men!"

"No doubt," Kim said patiently. "But has there been any word of Ades?"

"We are not interested in Ades," she said angrily. "We can do without Ades."

"But I'm interested in Ades," ' said Kim. "And after all, it was Ades which punished the murderers of the men of Khiv Five. A certain amount of gratitude is indicated."

"Gratitude!" said the untidy woman harshly. "We'd have been grateful if you men of Ades had turned those Sinabians over to us! We'd have killed them every one—slowly!"

"But the point is," said Kim, "that something has happened to Ades. It might happen to Khiv Five. If we can find out what it was, we'll take steps so it won't happen again."

"Just leave us alone!" said the untidy woman fiercely. "We can get along without men or Ades or anything else. Go away!"