The Last Spaceship

by Murray Leinster

  “My dear,” he told her, “you did it! A little fuel-tank with gallons in it and a complete catalyzer. By the size of it, one of their beams uses an engine big enough for fifty ships like this!"

  Clutching at every projection, he made his way to the engine-room. Dona followed.

  “I'm glad, Kim,” she said unsteadily, “that I was able to do something important. You always do everything."

  “The heck I do,” he said. “But anyhow...."

  He worked on the tank. She'd sheared it off with a tiny atomic torch and the severed fuel-line had closed of itself, of course. He spliced it into the Starlight's fuel-line, and waited eagerly for the heavy, viscid fluid to reach the catalyzer and then the engines.

  “We'll—be all right now?” asked Dona hopefully.

  “We were on transmitter-drive for five minutes, at a guess. You know that that means!"

  She caught her breath.

  “Kim! We're lost!"

  “To say that we're lost is a masterpiece of understatement,” he said wryly. “At transmitter-speed we could cross the First Galaxy in a ten-thousandth of a second. Which means roughly a hundred thousand light-years in a ten-thousandth of a second. And we traveled for three hundred seconds or thereabouts. What are our changes of finding out way back?"

  “Oh, Kim!” she cried softly. “It's unthinkable!"

  He watched the meters. Suddenly, the engines caught. For the fraction of a second they ran irregularly. Then all was normal. There was light. There was weight. An indignant roar came from forward.

  “If this is Hades—"

  They went to the control-room. The Mayor of Steadheim sat on the floor, staring incredulously about him. As they entered he grinned sheepishly.

  “I was floating in the air and couldn't see a thing, and then the lights came on and the floor smacked me! What happened and where are we?"

  Kim went to the instrument-board and plugged in the heaters—already the vision-ports had begun to frost—and the air purifier and the other normal devices of a spaceship.

  “What happened is simple enough,” said Kim. “The last atom of power on board the ship here threw us into transmitter-field drive. And when that field is established it doesn't take power to maintain it.

  “So we started to move! There's a relay that should have stopped us, but there wasn't enough power left to work it. So we traveled for probably five minutes on transmitter-drive."

  “We went a long way, eh?” said the mayor, comfortably.

  “We did,” said Kim grimly. “To Ades from its sun in ninety million miles—eight light-minutes. Minutes, remember! The First Galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across. Light travels a hundred thousand years, going ninety million miles every eight minutes to cross it.

  “The Starshine travels a hundred thousand light-years in the ten-thousandth part of a second. In one second—a billion light-years. The most powerful telescope in the Galaxy cannot gather light from so far away. But we went at least three hundred times farther.

  “Three hundred billion light-years, plus or minus thirty billions more! We went beyond the farthest that men have ever seen, and kept on beyond the farthest that men have ever thought of!

  “The light from the island universes we can see through the ports has never yet reached the First Galaxy since time began. It hasn't had time! We're not only beyond the limits that men have guessed at, we're beyond their wildest imagining!"

  The Mayor of Steadheim blinked at him. Then he got up and peered out the vision-ports. Dim, remote luminosities were visible, each one a galaxy of a thousand million suns!

  “Hah!” grunted the mayor. “Not much to look at, at that! Now what?"

  Kim spread out his hands and looked at Dona.

  “Turning about and trying to go back,” he said, “would be like starting from an individual grain of sand on a desert, and flying a thousand miles, and then trying to fly back to that grain of sand again. That's how the First Galaxy stacks up."

  Dona took a deep breath.

  “You'll find a way, Kim! And—anyhow—"

  She smiled at him shakily. Whether or not they ever saw another human being, she was prepared to take what came, with him. The possibility of being lost amid the uncountable island universes of the cosmos had been known to them both from the beginning of the use of the Starshine.

  “We'll take some pictures,” Kim told her, “and then sit down on a planet and figure things out."

  He set to work making a map of all the island universes in view of the Starshine's current position, with due regard to the Starshine's course. On the relatively short jumps within a galaxy, and especially those of a few light-years only, he could simply turn the ship about and come very close to his original position—the line of it, anyhow.

  But he did not know within many many billions of light-years how far he had come and he did know that an error of a hundredth of a second of arc would amount to millions of light-years at the distance of the First Galaxy.

  The positions of galaxies about the First were plotted only within a radius of something like two million light-years. There had never been a point in even that! At fifteen hundred thousand times that distance he was not likely to strike the tiny mapped area by accident.

  He set to work. Presently he was examining the photographs by enlarger for a sign of structure in one of the galaxies in view. One showed evidence of super-giant stars—which proved it the nearest. He aimed the Starshine for it. He threw the ship into transmitter-drive.

  The galaxy was startlingly familiar when they reached it. The stellar types were normal ones and there were star-clusters and doubtless star-drifts too and Kim was wholly accustomed to astronavigation now.

  He simply chose a sol-type sun, set the radiation-switch to stop the little spaceship close by, aimed for it and pressed a button. Instantly they were there. They visited six solar systems.

  They found a habitable planet in the last—a bit on the small side, but with good gravity, adequate atmosphere and polar ice-caps to assure its climate.

  They landed and its atmosphere was good. The Mayor of Steadheim stepped out and blinked about him.

  “Hah!” he said gruffly. “If we've come as far as you say it was hardly worth the trip!"

  Kim grinned.

  “It looks normal enough,” he acknowledged. “But chemistry's the same everywhere and plants will use chlorophyll in sunlight from a sol-type sun. Stalks and leaves will grow anywhere, and the most efficient animals will be warm-blooded. Given similar conditions you'll have parallel evolution everywhere."

  “Hm—” said the Mayor of Steadheim. “A planet like this for each of my four sons to settle on, now—when we've settled with those rats from Sinab—"

  The planet was a desirable one. The Starshine had come to rest where a mountain range rose out of lush, strange, forest-covered hills, which reached away and away to a greenish sea. There was nothing in view which was altogether familiar and nothing which was altogether strange. The Mayor of Steadheim stamped away to a rocky outcrop where he would have an even better view.

  “Poor man!” said Dona softly. “When he finds out that we can never go back, and there'll be only the three of us here while horrible things happen back—back home."

  But Kim's expression had suddenly become strained.

  “I think,” he said softly, “I see a way to get back. I was thinking that a place as far away as this would be ideal for the Empire of Sinab to move to. True, they're murdered all the men on nineteen or twenty planets, but we couldn't repair anything by murdering all of them in return.

  “If we moved them out here, though, there'd be no other people for them to prey on. They'd regret their lost opportunities for scoundrelism but their real penalty would be that they'd have to learn to be decent in order to survive. It's a very neat answer to the biggest problem of the war with Sinab—a post-war settlement."

  “But we haven't any chance of getting back, have we?"

  “If we wanted to sen
d them here, how'd we do it?” asked Kim. “By matter-transmitter, of course. A receiver set up here—as there used to be one on Ades—to which a sender would be tuned.

  “When a transmitter's tuned to a receiver you can't miss. But our transmitter-drive is just that—a transmitter which sends the ship and itself, with a part which is tuned to receive itself, too.

  “I'll set up the receiving element here, for later use. And I'll tune the sender-element to Ades. We'll arrive at the station there and everyone will be surprised."

  He paused and spoke reflectively.

  “A curious war, this. We've no weapons and we arrive at a post-war settlement before we start fighting. We've decided how to keep from killing our enemies before we're sure how we'll defeat them and I suspect that the men had better stay at home and let the women go out to battle. I'm not sure I like it."

  He set to work. In twelve hours one-half of the transmitter-drive of the Starshine had been removed and set up on the unnamed planet in a galaxy not even imagined by human beings before.

  In fifteen hours the Starshine, rather limpingly, went aloft.

  An hour later Kim carefully tuned the transmitting part of the little ship's drive to the matter-receiving station on Ades. In that way, and only in that way, the ship would inevitably arrive at the home galaxy of humanity.

  And he pushed a button.

  It arrived at the matter station on Ades instead of descending from the skies. And the people on Ades were surprised.

  * * *

  6

  MAN-MADE METEOR

  No obvious warlike move had been made on either side, of course. Ades swam through space, a solitary planet circling its own small sun. About it glittered the thousands of millions of stars which were the suns of the First Galaxy.

  Nearby, bright and unwinking, Sinab and Khiv and Phanis were the largest suns of the star-cluster which was becoming the Empire of Sinab. Twenty planets—twenty-one, with Khiv Five—were already cut off from the rest of the Galaxy, apparently by the failure of their matter-transmitters.

  Actually those twenty planets were the cradles of a new and horrible type of civilization. On the other inhabited worlds every conceivable type of tyranny had come into being, sustained by the Disciplinary Circuit which put every citizen at the mercy of his government throughout every moment of his life.

  On most worlds kings and oligarchs reveled in the primitive satisfaction of arbitrary power. There is an instinct still surviving among men which allows power, as such, to become an end in itself, and when it is attained to be exercised without purpose save for its own display. Some men use power to force abject submission or fawning servility or stark terror.

  In the Empire of Greater Sinab there was merely the novelty that the rulers craved adulation—and got it. The rulers of Sinab were without doubt served by the most enthusiastic, most loyal, most ardently cooperative subjects ever known among men.

  Every member of the male population of Sinab—where women were considered practically a lower species of animal—could look forward confidently to a life of utter ease on one planet or another, served and caressed by solicitous females, with no particular obligation save to admire and revere his rulers and to breed more subjects for them.

  It made for loyalty, but not for undue energy. There was no great worry about the progress of the splendid plan for a Greater Sinab. All went well. The planet Khiv Five had been beamed from space some nine days since.

  Every man upon the planet had died in one instant of unholy anguish, during which tetanic convulsions of the muscles of his heart burst while the ligaments and anchorages of other muscles were torn free of his skeleton by the terrific contraction of muscle fibers.

  Every woman on Khiv Five was still in a state of frantic grief which would become despair only with the passage of time. It was strange that two guardships circling Khiv Five no longer reported to headquarters, but it was unthinkable that any harm could have come to them. Records showed that no other planet had practiced space travel for centuries or millennia.

  Only the Empire of Sinab had revived the ancient art for purpose of conquest. There was no reason to be solicitous, so the Empire of Sinab waited somnolently for time to pass, when colonists would be called upon to take over the manless Khiv Five and all its cities and its women.

  There was another small planet called Ades, next in order for absorption into the Empire. A squadron had been dispatched to beam it to manlessness—though volunteers for its chilly clime would not be numerous.

  The failure of two guardships to report, of course, could have no meaning to that other squadron. Of course not! There were no spaceships save the fleet of Greater Sinab. There were no weapons mounted for use against spacecraft anywhere.

  There was nothing to hinder the expansion of Greater Sinab to include every one of the Galaxy's three hundred million inhabited planets. So nobody worried on Sinab.

  On Ades it was different. That small planet hummed with activity. It was not the ordered, regimented-from-above sort of activity any other planet in the Galaxy would have shown. It was individual activity, often erratic and doubtless inefficient. But it made for progress.

  First, of course, a steady stream of human beings filed into the matter-transmitter which communicated with Terranova in the Second Galaxy. Gangling boys, mostly, and mothers with small boy-children made the journey, taking them to Terranova where the beams of Sinabian murder-craft could not cause their deaths.

  The adults of Terranova were not anxious to flee from Ades. The men with wives on Ades—savagely refused to abandon them. Those without wives labored furiously to complete the spaceships that waited for their finishing touches on the outskirts of every community on the planet.

  The small drum of fuel taken by Dona from the warship off Khiv Five was depleted by Kim's use of it, but the rest was enormously useful. The catalyzer from the same warship was taken apart and its precious hafnium parts recovered. And then the values of individualism appeared.

  A physicist who had been exiled from Muharram Two for the crime of criticizing a magistrate, presented himself as an expert on autocatalysis. With a sample of the catalyzed fuel to start the process he shortly had a small planet turning out space-fuel without hafnium at all. The catalyzed fuel itself acted as a catalyst to cause other fuel to take the desired molecular form.

  A power-plant engineer from Hlond Three seized upon the principle and redesigned the catalyzers to be made for the ships. For safety's sake a particle of hafnium was included, but the new-type catalyzers required only a microscopic speck of the precious material.

  Hafnium from the one bit of machinery from the one beam-generator of an enemy war-craft, was extended to supply the engine-rooms of a thousand spacecraft of the Starshine's design.

  In a myriad other ways individuals worked at their chosen problems. Hundreds undoubtedly toiled to contrive a shield for the fighting-beams—tuned to kill men only—which were the means by which Ades was to be devastated. The scientists of half a galaxy had tried that five thousand years before without success.

  But one man did come up with a plausible device. He proposed a shielding paint containing crystals of the hormone to which the fighting-beams were tuned. The crystalline material should absorb the deadly frequencies, so they could not pass on to murder men.

  It would have been simple enough to synthesize any desired organic substance, but Kim pointed out grimly that the shield would be made useless by changing the tuning of the beams. Other men devised horrific and generally impractical weapons.

  But again, one man came up with a robot ship idea, a ship which could be fought without humans on board and controlled even at interstellar distances. Radio signals at the speed of light would be fantastically too slow.

  He proposed miniature matter-transmitters automatically shuttling a magnetic element between ship and plant-station and back to the ship again, the solid object conveying all the information to be had from the ship's instruments to the planet station,
and relaying commands to the ship's controls. The trick could have been made to work, and it would be vastly faster than any radiation-beam. But there was no time to manufacture them.

  Actually, only four days after the return of the partly dismantled Starshine from the farther side of nowhere, Kim took off again from Ades with fifty other ships following him. There were twenty other similar squadrons ready to take space in days more.

  But for a first operation he insisted on a small force to gain experience without too much risk. At transmitter-speeds there could be no such thing as cruising in fleet formation, nor of arriving at any destination in a unit. Guerilla warfare was inevitable.

  The navy of the criminals of Ades, though, went swirling up though the atmosphere of that cold planet like a column of voyaging wild geese. It broke through the upper atmosphere and there were all the suns of the Galaxy shining coldly on every hand.

  The ships headed first for Khiv Five, lining up for it with such precision as the separate astrogators—hurriedly trained by Kim—could manage. It was a brave small company of tiny ships, forging through space away from the sunlit little world behind them. The light of the local sun was bright upon their hulls.

  Glinting reflections of many-colored stars shimmered on their shadowed sides. They drove on and on, on planetary drive, seeming motionless in space. Then the Starshine winked out of existence. By ones and twos and half-dozens, the others vanished from space.

  It was the transmitter-drive, of course. The repaired Starshine vanished from space near Ades because it went away from Ades at such speed that no light could possibly be reflected from it. It reappeared in space within the solar system of Khiv because it slowed enough to be visible.

  But it seemed utterly alone. Yet presently an alarm-gong rang, and there was one of its sister-ships a bare ten thousand miles away. The rest were scattered over parsecs.

  Kim drove for the banded planet on which dead men still lay unburied. His fleet was to rendezvous above its summer pole, as shown by the size of the icecap. There had been two guardships circling Khiv Five to keep account of the development of grief into despair. Don had robbed one of them while its crew was held helpless by projectors of the Disciplinary Circuit field.