He slipped into the conventional out-of-door garments. Dona had listened. Now she said a word or two to Kim, her expression concerned. Kim's expression darkened.
"That's what I'm afraid of," he told her. "A transmitter is too simple to break down. They can get detuned, but we made the pair for Ades and Terranova especially. Their tuning elements are set in solid plastite. They couldn't get out of tune!"
He picked up a small box. He tucked it under his arm.
“I’ll be back," he told Dona heavily. "But I suspect you'd better pack."
He went out to the grounded flier. Then Colony Organizer took it up and across the green-clad hills of Terranova. The vegetation of Terranova is extraordinarily flexible, and the green stuff below the flier swayed elaborately in the wind. The top of the forests bowed and bent in the form of billows and waves. The effect was that of an ocean; which complacently remained upraised in; hillocks and had no normal surface. It was not easy to get used to such things.
"I'm terribly worried," said the Organizer anxiously. "There is a tremendous shortages of textiles, and the ores we usually send back to balance our account are piling up."
"You're badly worried, eh?" said Kim, grimly.
"Of course! How can we keep our economic system now?"
Kim made an angry noise.
"I'm a lot more worried than you are," he snapped. "Nothing should have stopped this particular pair of transmitters from working but the destruction of one or the other! This box in my pocket might tell me the answer, but I'm afraid to find out. I assure you that temporary surpluses and shortages of ores and textiles are the least of the things wee have to worry about."
The little flier sped on, with the great, waving billows of the forest beneath it. On one hillock there was a clearing with a group of four plastic houses shining in the sunlight. They looked horribly lonely in the sea of green, but the population on Terranova was spread thin. Far over at the horizon there was another clearing. Sunlight glinted on water. A pleasure-pool. There was a sizable village about it. Half a dozen soarers spun and whirled lazily above. Kim said:
"The thing is that Ades and the planets left over after we handled Sinab are the only places in the whole First Galaxy where there are no disciplinary circuits. Ades is the only place where a man can spit in the eye of another man and the two of them settle it between themselves. There's a government of sorts, on Ades, as there is here, but there's no ruler. Also there's nobody who can strut around and make other men bow to him. A woman on Ades, and here, belongs to the man she wants to belong to. She can't be seized by some lordling for his own pleasure, and turned over to his guards and underlings when he's through with her."
'That's true," said the Colony Organizer, who was still worried. "But the transmitter—"
"Gossip of the admirable state of things on Ades has gone about," said Kim hardly. "Some of our young men appointed themselves missionaries and went roaming around the planets, spreading word that Ades wasn't a bad place. That if you were exiled to Ades you were lucky. They probably bragged that we whipped the Empire of Sinab in a fight."
AT THIS the mouth of the Organizer dropped open in astonishment. "Of course, of course! The number of exiles arriving at Ades increased. It was excellent. We need people for the Second Galaxy, and people who earn exile are usually people with courage, willing to take risks for the sake of hope.”
"Don't you realize that such things have been dangerous? When people on Markab Two began to hope?" Kim said impatiently. “When peasants on the planets of Allioth began to imagine that things might be better? When slaves on Utbeg began to tell each other in murmurs that there was a place where people weren't slaves? Don't you see that such things would alarm the rulers of such Planets? 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. 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. It didn't, but it was bad."
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?"