"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. But I think it's started now. It will be a profitable business, and my friend who wanted to bargain for some planets in the Second Galaxy will make a pretty penny of the beginning, and it will carry on of itself."
The planet below and behind was now only a globe. It soon dwindled into a tiny ball. Kim touched Dona on the shoulder.
"I'll take over," he said. "We've got work to do, Dona."
Dona stood up and stamped her foot.
"Kim! You're misunderstanding me on purpose! What about Ades? Did you find out what happened to it?"
Kim began the process of sighting the Starshine's nose upon a single, distant, minute speck of light which seemingly could not be told from a million other points of light, all of which were suns.
"I think I found out something," he told her. "I thought a merchant planet would be he place to hear all the gossip of the galaxy. My friend back yonder put his research organization to work finding out what I wanted to know. What they dug up looks plausible. Right now I'm going to get even for it. That's a necessity! After that, we'll see.
“There were sixteen million people on Ades. We'll try to do something about them. They aren't likely to be all dead—yet." 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.
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 spaceships had grimly trundled back and forth to unload their cargoes of criminals upon the chilly small world.
Ades was chosen as a prison planet from the beginning. Later matter-transmitters made the journeys of space-craft useless, for six, seven, eight thousand years there was no traffic but the one-way traffic of its especially contrived transmitter, which would receive criminals from all the galaxy but would return none or any news of them to the worlds outside.
DURING all that time a lonely guard-ship hung drearily about, watching lest someone try to rescue a man doomed to hopeless exile, and return him to happier scenes. And finally the guard-ship had gone away, because the space-ways were no longer used by anybody, and there were no ships in the void save those of the Patrol itself. Accordingly the Patrol was disbanded. For hundreds of years nothing happened at all. And then Kim Rendell came in the Starshine, and shortly thereafter tiny ships began to take off from Ades, and they fought valorously on distant star-systems, and at last a squadron of war-craft came to subjugate Ades for the beastly Empire of Sinab. Finally there was a battle in the bright beams of the lonely sun itself. And after that, for a time, little space-ships swam up from the planet and darted away, and darted back, and darted away, and back.
But never before had there been any such situation as now. The sun, which had kept company with Ades for so long, now shone in lonely splendor, amid emptiness, devoid of its companion. And that emptiness was bewildering to a small ship—sister to the Starshine—which flicked suddenly into being nearby.
The ship had come back from a journey among the virgin stars of the Second Galaxy with honorable scars upon its hull and a zestful young crew who wished to boast of their journeying. They had come back to Ades—so they thought—direct, not even stopping at Terranova. And there was no Ades.
The little ship flashed here and there about the bereft sun in bewilderment. It searched desperately for a planet some seven thousand miles in diameter, which had apparently been misplaced. And as it hunted, a second ship whisked into sight from faster-than-light drive. The detectors of the two ships told them of each other's presence, and they met and hung in space together. Then they searched in unison, but in vain. At long last they set out in company for one of the planets of the former Sinabian Empire, on which there must be some news of what had happened to Ades.
On transmitter-drive they inevitably separated and one was much closer to the chosen planet when they came out of stressed space. One drove down into atmosphere while the other was still thousands of miles away.
The leading ship went down at landing-speed, toward a city. The other ship watched by electron telescope and prepared to duplicate its course. But the man of the second ship saw—and there could be no doubt about it—that suddenly the landing ship vanished from its place as if it had gone into intergalactic drive in atmosphere. There was a flash of intolerable, unbearable light. And then there was an explosion of such monstrous violence that half of the planet's capital city vanished or was laid in ruins.
The crew of second ship were stunned. But the second ship went slowly and cautiously down into atmosphere, and its communicators picked up voices issuing stern warnings that troops must be welcomed by all citizens, and that absolute obedience must be given to all men wearing the uniform of His Magnificence the Despot of Lith. And then there was babbling confusion and contradictory shoutings, and a hoarse voice ordered all soldiers of His Magnificence to keep a ceaseless watch upon the sky, because a ship had come down from overhead, and when the fighting-beams struck it—to kill its crew—it appeared to have fired some devastating projectile which had destroyed half a great city. All ships seen in the sky were to be shot down instantly. His Magnificence, the Despot of Lith, would avenge the outrage.
The lonely surviving ship went dazedly away from the planet which once had been friendly to the men of Ades. It went back to Ades' sun, and searched despairingly once again, and then fled to the Second Galaxy and Terranova, to tell of what it had seen.
That was an event of some importance. At least all of one planet had been rocked to its core from the detonation of a space-ship which flashed into collision with it at uncountable multiples of the speed of light, and was thereby raised to the temperature of a hot sun's very heart. And besides, there was agitation and suspicion and threats and diplomatic chaos among the planetary governments who had joined to loot the dependencies of Ades, once Ades was eliminated from the scene.
BUT a vastly, an enormously more significant event took place on a planet very far away, at almost the same instant. 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 air-lock, and dropped a small object out of the door. He closed the door, returned to the control-room, and took the Starshine out to space again.