The Boomerang Circuit

CHAPTER III Dangerous Trip

DONA plucked at Kim's arm. He turned, seething, and went out. Outside he vented his bitterness.

"I thought men were crazy!" he said. "If she's the head of the planet government, I pity the planet."

"She could talk to another woman quite rationally," Dona said with satisfaction. "But she's had to persuade herself that she hates me, and you had me with you, and I'm prettier than she is, Kim, and I have you. So she couldn't talk to you."

"But she's unreasonable," Kim said stubbornly.

"We'll go back to the ship," said Dona brightly. "I'll lock you in it and then go find out what we want to know."

She smiled comfortably all the way back to the Starshine. But the staring women made Kim acutely uncomfortable. When he was safely inside the ship, he wiped perspiration from his forehead.

"I wouldn't want to live on this planet!" he said feverishly.

"I wouldn't want you to," said Dona. "Stay inside, darling. You'd better not even show yourself at a vision-port."

"Heaven forbid!" said Kim.

Dona went out. Kim paced up and down the living quarters of the ship. There was something in the back of his mind that would not quite come out. The disappearance of Ades was impossible. Men had conquered one galaxy and now started on a second, but never yet had they destroyed a planet. Never yet had they even moved one. But nevertheless, only thirty-six hours ago the planet Ades had revolved about its sun and men and women had strolled into its matter-transmitter with no hint of danger, and between two seconds something had happened.

Even had the planet been shattered into dust, its remnants should have been discoverable. And surely a device which could destroy a planet would have had some preliminary testings and the galaxy would have heard of its existence! This thing that had happened was inconceivable! On the basis of the photographs, Ades had not only been destroyed, but the quintillions of tons of its substance had been removed so far that sunlight shining upon them did not light them enough for photography. Which simply could not be.

Kim wrestled with the problem while Dona went about in the world of women. There was something odd about her in the eyes of women of Khiv Five. Their faces were unlike the faces of the women of a normal world. On a world with men and women, all women wear masks. Their thoughts are unreadable. But where there are no men, masks are useless. The women of Khiv Five saw plainly that Dona was unlike them, but they were willing to talk to her.

She came back to the Starshine as Kim reached a state of complete bewilderment. Ades could not have been destroyed. But it had vanished. Even if shattered, its fragments could not have been moved so far or so fast that they could no longer be detected. But they were undiscoverable. The thing was impossible on any scale of power conceivable for humans to use. But it had happened.

So Kim paced back and forth and bit his nails until Dona returned.

"We can take off, Kim," she said quietly.

She locked the inner airlock door as if shutting out something. She twisted the fastening extra tight. Her face was pale.

"What about Ades?" asked Kim.

"They had matter-transmission to it from here, too," said Dona. "You remember, the original transmitter on Ades was one-way only. It would receive but not send. Some new ones were built after the war with Sinabia, though. And this planet's communication with Ades cut off just when ours did, thirty-six hours ago. None of the other twenty planets has communication with it either. Something happened, and on the instant everything stopped."

"What caused it?" 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. In strict geometric rows they marched, looking neither to the right nor to the left. They were a glittering stream, moving rhythmically in unison, proceeding to join an already-arrived mass of armed men already drawn up in impressive array.

Racing toward the high arch of the transmitter with air screaming about the Starshine's hull, Kim saw grimly that the figures were soldiers, as Dona had said. He had never before seen a soldier in actual life, but pictures and histories had made them familiar enough.

These were figures out of the unthinkably remote past. They wore helmets of polished metal. They glittered with shining orichalc and chromium. The bright small flashes of faceted corundum—synthetic sapphire in all the shades from blue-white to ruby—shone from their identical costumes and equipment. They were barbarous in their splendor, and strange in the precision and unison of their movements, which was like nothing so, much as the antics of girl precision dancers, without the extravagance of the dancers' gestures.

The Starshine dipped lower. It shot along a canyon-like open way between buildings. The matter-transmitter was upon a hill within the city and the ship was now lower than the transmitter and the heads of the soldiers who still tramped out of the archway in a scintillating stream.

Kim raged. Soldiers were an absurdity on top of a catastrophe. Something had erased the planet Ades from its orbit around a lonely sun. That bespoke science and intelligence beyond anything dreamed of hitherto. But soldiers marching like dancing-girls, bedecked with jewels and polished metal like the women of the pleasure-world of Dite—

This military display was pure childishness!

"Our pressure-wave'll topple them," said Kim savagely. "At least we'll smash the transmitter."

There was a monstrous roaring noise. The Starshine, which had flashed through intergalactic space at speeds no science was yet able to measure, roared between tall buildings in atmosphere. Wind whirled and howled past its hull. It dived forward toward the soldiers.

There was one instant when the ship was barely yards above the gaping faces of startled, barbarously accoutred troopers. The following spreading pressure-wave of the ship's faster-than-sound movement spread out on every side like a three-dimensional wake. It toppled the soldiers as it hit. They went down in unison, in a wildly-waving, light-flashing tangle of waving arms and legs and savage weapons.

But Kim saw, too, squat and bell-mouthed instruments on wheels, in the act of swinging to bear upon him. One bore on the Starshine. It was impossible to stop or swerve the ship. There was yet another fraction of a second of kaleidoscopic confusion, of momentary glimpses of incredibly antique and childish pomp.

And then anguish struck.

It was the hellish torment of a fighting-beam, more concentrated and more horrible than any other agony known to mankind. For the infinitesimal fraction of an instant Kim experienced it to the full. Then there was nothingness.

There was no sound. There was no planet. There was no sunlight on tall and stately structures built by men long murdered from the skies. The vision-ports showed remote and peaceful suns and all the tranquil glory of interstellar space. The Starshine floated in emptiness.

It was, of course, the result of that very small device that Kim had built into the Starshine before even the invention of the transmitter-drive. It was a relay which flung on faster-than-light drive the instant fighting-beams struck any living body in the ship. The Starshine had been thrown into full interstellar drive while still in atmosphere.

It had plunged upward—along the line of its aiming—through the air. The result of its passage to Khiv Five could only be guessed at, but in even the unthinkably minute part of a second it remained in air, the ship's outside temperatures had risen two hundred degrees. Moving at multiples of the speed of light, it must have created an instantaneous flash of literally stellar heat by the mere compression of air before it.

KIM was sick and shaken by the agony which would have killed him had it lasted as long as the hundredth of a second. But Dona stared at him.

"Kim—what— Oh!"

She ran to him. The beam had not touched her. So close to the projector, it had been narrow, no more than a yard across. It had struck Kim and missed Dona.

"Oh, my poor Kim!"

He grimaced.

"Forget it," he said, breathing hard. "We've both had it before, but not as bad as this. It was a mobile fighting-beam projector. I imagine they'll think we burned up in a flash of lightning. I hope there were X-rays for them to enjoy."

For a long time Kim Rendell sat still, with his eyes closed. The dosage of the fighting-beam had been greater than they had ever experienced together, though. It left him weak and sick.

"Funny," he said presently. "Barbarous enough to have soldiers with decorative uniforms and shiny dingle-dangles on them, and modern enough to have fighting-beam projectors, and a weapon that's wiped Ades out of space. We've got to find out who they are, Dona, and where they came from. They've something quite new."

"I wonder," said Dona. But she still looked at Kim with troubled eyes.

"If it's new," said Dona. "If it's a weapon. Even if—if Ades is destroyed."

Kim stared at her.

"Now, what do you mean by that?"

"I don't quite know," admitted Dona. "I say things, and you turn them over in your head, and something quite new comes out. I told you a story about a dust-grain, once, and you made the transmitter-drive that took us to Ades in the first place and made everything else possible afterward."

"Hmmm," said Kim meditatively. "If it's new. If it's a weapon. If Ades is destroyed. Why did you think of those three things?"

"You said no planet had ever been destroyed," she told him. "If anybody could think of a way to do such a thing, you could. And when Sinab had to be fought, and there weren't any weapons, you worked out a way to conquer them with things that certainly weren't weapons. Just broadcasters of the disciplinary circuit field. So I wondered if what they used was a weapon. Of course if it wasn't a weapon, it was probably something that had been used before for some other purpose, and it wouldn't be new."

"I've got to think about that," said Kim. He cogitated for a moment. "Yes, I definitely have to think about that."

Then he stood up.

"We'll try to identify these gentry first. Then we'll go to another of the twenty-one planets."