The Last Spaceship Read online

  Eighteen minutes passed before he saw Dona. She stood quietly beside the railing outside the spaceship, alone and quite pale. He opened the outer airlock door. She faced him. She was deadly white. As she saw him, hollow-cheeked and bitter, she managed to smile.

  “My poor Kim! What did they do to you?"

  “Blocked me!” Kim cried. “Took away my hafnium gadget and put me on the Circuit. They locked up every scrap of hafnium on the planet behind an all-citizen block. They just didn't know that it was used in spaceships in the fuel-catalyzers. I've found enough to make the two of us safe, though. Here!” He thrust a scrap of metal into her hand. “Hold it tightly. It has to touch your skin."

  She caught her breath.

  “I was blocked in my quarters, and I couldn't come out,” she told him unsteadily. “I was going crazy with terror, because you'd told me what it might mean. I tried—so hard—to break through. But flesh and blood can't face the Circuit. I hadn't any reason to hope that you'd be able to do anything, but I did hope."

  “I told them I'd kill both of us,” he said fiercely. “Maybe I shall! But if I can only find the right cable, we'll have a chance!"

  Suddenly, every muscle in his body went rigid and a screaming torment filled him. It lasted for part of a second. His face went gray. He wetted his lips.

  “Burt!” he said thickly. “He has a psychometer under his robe. They came here, and he knew my psychogram was changed by the hafnium I'd found, so while they talked he stole the new pattern. It's taken them this long to get it ready for the Circuit. Now they're putting it in."

  With a sudden, convulsive jerk, he went rigid once more. His muscles stood out in great knots. He was paralyzed with every nerve and sinew in his body tensed to tetanic rigor. Agony filled him with an exquisite torment. It was the Disciplinary Circuit. It was those waves broadcast, focused upon him at full power. They would have found him anywhere upon the planet. And their torment was unspeakable.

  Dona sobbed suddenly.

  “Kim!” she cried desperately. “I know you can hear me! Listen! They must have me on the Circuit too, only what you gave me has thrown it off. They expect to hold us paralyzed while they cut in with torches and take us. But they mustn't! So I'm going to give you the thing you gave me. If it changed my pattern, it will change yours again, to something they can't guess at.” She sobbed again. “Please, Kim! Don't give it back. Go ahead and do what you planned, whatever it is. And if you don't win out, please, kill me before you give up. Please! I don't want to be conditioned to do whatever they want in their pleasure-palaces."

  She took the tiny sliver of metal in her shaking fingers. She pushed aside the flesh of her hand to put it in his grip. Courageously she released it.

  The agonized paralysis left Kim Rendell. But now Dona was a pitiful figure of agony.

  Kim groaned. Rage filled him. His anguish and fury was so terrible that he would have destroyed the whole planet, had he been able. But he could not permit her gift, which she had given at the price of such torment, to go without reward. He must struggled on to save them both, even though now he had no hope.

  He sprang to the control-board. He stabbed at buttons almost at random, hoping for a response. He tried to get the ship into some sort of operating condition, but now there was no time. Frenziedly he attempted to find some combination of controls which would make something, anything happen. He slipped the second bit of hafnium into his mouth to have both hands free. In desperation he ripped the control-board panel loose. He saw clipped wires everywhere behind it. Seizing the dangling ends, he struck them fiercely together. A lurid blue spark leaped. He cried out in triumph, and the morsel of metal Dona had sacrificed to him dropped from his lips.

  His muscles contorted and agony filled him.

  There was a roaring noise. The Starshine bucked violently. There were crashes and there was a feeling of intolerable weight which he could feel, despite his agony. The ship reeled crazily. It smashed through a wall. It battered into a roof. It spun like a mad thing and went skyward tail-first with Kim Rendell in frozen, helpless torment, holding two cables together with muscles utterly beyond his control.

  It went up toward empty space, in which no other vessel was navigating anywhere.

  * * *

  3

  RAYS OF DESTRUCTION

  Eventually the Starshine, alone in space as no other spaceship had been alone in twenty thousand years, behaved like a sentient thing. At first, of course, her actions were frenzied, almost insane, as if the Disciplinary Circuit waves which made Dona a statue of agony and kept Kim frozen with contorted muscles could affect the spaceship too.

  Wildly the little vessel went upward through air which screamed as it parted for her passage. She yawed and swayed and ludicrously plunged backwards. The screaming of the air rose to a shriek, and then to a high thin whistle, and then ceased altogether. Finally she was free of the air of Alphin III.

  After this she really made speed, backing away from the planet. Her meteor-detectors had been turned on in one of Kim's random splicings, and when current reached them they reported a monstrous obstruction in her path and shunted in the meteor-repelling beams. The obstacle was the planet itself, and the beams tried to push it away. Naturally, they pushed the ship itself away, out into the huge chasm of interplanetary space.

  It kept up for a long time, too, because Kim was paralyzed by the broadcast waves. They were kept focused upon him by the psychographic locator. So long as those waves of the Disciplinary Circuit came up through the ionosphere, Kim's spasmodically contracted muscles kept together the two cables which had started everything. But the Starshine backed away at four gravities acceleration, faster and ever faster, and ordinary psychographic locators are not designed for use beyond planetary distances.

  Ultimately the tormenting radio-beams lessened from sheer distance. At last the influence broke off suddenly and Kim's hands on the leads dropped away. The beam fumbled back to contact and wavered away again, and presently was only a tingling sensation probing for a target the locators could not longer keep lined up.

  Then the Starshine seemed to lose her frenzy and become merely a derelict. She sped on, giving no sign of life for a time. Then her vision-ports glowed abruptly. Kim Rendell, working desperately against time and with the chill of outer space creeping into the ship's unpowered hull, had found a severed cable which supplied light and heat.

  An hour later still, the ship steadied in her motion. He had traced down the gyros’ power-lead and set them to work.

  Two hours later yet the Starshine paused in her flight. Her long, pointed nose turned about. A new element of motion entered the picture she made. She changed course.

  At last, as if having her drive finally in operation gave her something of purposefulness, the slim spaceship cleared to look frenzied or frowsy or bemused, and swam through space with a serene competence, like something very much alive and knowing exactly what she was about.

  She came to rest upon the almost but not quite airless bulk of Alphin II some thirty hours after her escape from Alphin III. Kim was desperately hungry. But for the lesser gravity of the smaller inner planet, which was responsible for its thinned-out atmosphere, he might have staggered as he walked. Certainly a normal spacesuit would have been a heavy burden for a man who had starved for days. Dona, also, looked pale and worn-out when she took from him the things he brought back through the airlock.

  They put the great masses of spongy, woody stuff in the synthesizer. It was organic matter. Some of it, perhaps, could have been consumed as food in its original state. But the synthesizer received it, and hummed and buzzed quietly to itself, and presently the man and woman ate. The synthesizer was not the equivalent of those magnificently complex food-machines which in public dining-halls provide almost every dish the gourmets have ever invented from raw materials. But it did make a palatable meal from the tasteless vegetation of the smaller planet.

  Kim said quietly, when they were finished eating, “Now we'll fi
nd out for certain what Burt intends to do about us.” He grimaced. “He's dangerously intelligent. He underestimated me before. He may consider us dead, or he may overestimate us. I think he'll play it safe. I would, in his place."

  “What does that mean?” Dona asked wistfully. “We will be able to go to some other planet, won't we, Kim? As we'd gone in the matter-transmitter in a perfectly normal fashion? Simply to take up residence on another world?"

  Kim shook his head. “I'm beginning to doubt it,” he said slowly. “The discovery that with a bit of hafnium a man can change his psychographic pattern is high explosive. If the Disciplinary Circuit can't pick him out as an individual, any man can defy any government which depends on the Circuit. Which means that no government is safe. I've got to remove you for the sake of the government everywhere in the Galaxy."

  “But they can't touch us here,” said Dona. “We're safe now."

  Kim shook his head.

  “No. I was too hungry to think, before. We're not safe. I've got to work like the devil. Do you remember your Galactic History? Remember what the Disciplinary Circuit was built up to? Remember the Last War? It's not only the spaceship which went into museums. I'm suddenly scared stiff."

  He stood up and abruptly began to put on the spacesuit again. His face had become haggard.

  “In the Last War there were no battles, only massacres,” he said curtly as he snapped buckles. “There was no victory. They used a beam which was a stepped-up version of the Disciplinary Circuit. They called it a fighting-beam, then, and they thought they could fight with it. But they couldn't. It simply made war impossible. So ultimately they hooded over the projectors of the fighting-beams, and most of them probably fell to rust. But there are some in the museums. If Burt and the others want to play safe, they'll haul those projectors out of the museum and hook them up to find and kill us. And there's no question but that they can do it."

  He stepped into the airlock and closed the door, still fumbling with the last adjustments to his spacesuit.

  Dona was puzzled by his gloomy forebodings. She heard the outer door open. As she stood there bewildered, she heard him bringing more raw food-stuff to the airlock with a feverish haste. He made two trips, three, and four.

  She found herself screaming shrilly because of an agony already past.

  It had been a bare flash of pain. It was gone in the fraction of a second, in the fraction of a millisecond. But it was such pain! It was the anguish of the Disciplinary Circuit a thousand times multiplied. It was such torment as the ancients tried vainly to picture as the lot of damned souls in hell. Had it lasted, any living creature would have died of sheer suffering.

  But it flashed into being, and was gone, and Dona had cried out in a strangled voice. She was filled with a horrible weakness from the one instant of anguish, and she felt stark panic lest it come again.

  The outer airlock door slammed shut. The inner opened. Kim came staggering within. He did not strip off the spacesuit. He ran clumsily toward the now-repaired control-panel, his face contorted.

  “Lie down flat!” he shouted as he opened his face-plate. “I'm taking off."

  The Starshine roared from the almost-barren world which was an inferior planet of the sun Alphin, not worth colonization by men. Acceleration built up and built up and built up to the very limit of what the human body could stand.

  After twenty minutes it dropped from four gravities to one.

  “Dona!” Kim called hoarsely.

  She answered faintly.

  “They've got the ancient projectors hooked up,” he said, as hoarsely as before. “They're searching for us. We were so far away that the beam flashed past. It won't record finding us for minutes, as it'll take time for the response to get back. That's what will save us, but they're bound to catch up occasionally until we get out of range."

  The Starshine swung about in space. The brutal acceleration began again, at an angle to the former line of motion.

  Ten minutes later there was another moment of intolerable pain. Every nerve in their bodies jumped in a tetanic convulsion. Had it continued their muscles would have torn loose from their bones and their hearts would have burst from the violence of the fearful contraction. The Starshine would have gone on senselessly as a speeding coffin. But again the searing torment lasted for only the fraction of a second.

  Back on Alphin III, great projectors swept across the sky. They were ancient devices, those projectors. They were quaint, even primitive in appearance. But a thousand years before they had been the final word in armament. They represented an attack against which there was no defense. A defense which could not be breached. Those machines had ended war.

  They poured forth tight beams of the same wave-frequencies and forms of which the Disciplinary Circuit was an exquisitely sensitive device for the exquisitely graduated torment of individuals; these beams were murderers of men. They were not tuned to the psychographic patterns of single persons, but coarsely, in irresistible strength to all living matter containing given amino-chain molecules. In short, to all men.

  And they had made the Last War the last. There had been one battle in that war. It had taken place near Canis Major, where there had been forty thousand warships of space lined up in hostile array. The two fleets were almost equally matched in numbers, and both possessed the fighting beams. They hurtled toward each other, the beams stabbing out ahead. They interpenetrated each other and went on, blindly.

  It was a hundred years before the last of the run-away derelicts blundered to destruction or was picked up by other spaceships which then still roved the space-ways. Because there was not defense against the fighting-beams, which were aimed by electronic devices, a ship did not cease to fight when its crew was dead. And every crew had died when a fighting-beam lingered briefly on their ship. There was not one single survivor of the Battle of Canis Major. The fleets plunged at each other, and every living thing in both fleets had perished instantly. Thereafter the empty ships fought on as robots against all other ships. So there were no more wars.

  For two hundred years after the battle, the planets of the Galaxy continued to mount their projectors and keep their detector-screens out. But war had defeated itself. There could be no victories, but only joint suicides. There could be no conquests, because even a depopulated planet's projector would still destroy all life in any approaching spaceship for as many years as the projectors were powered for. But in time, more especially after matter-transmitters had made spacecraft useless, they were forgotten. All but those which went into museums for the instruction of the young.

  These resuscitated weapons were now at work to find and kill Kim and Dona. In a sense it was like trying to kill flies with a sixteen-inch gun. The difficulties of aiming were extreme. To set up a detector-field and neutralize it would take time and skill which were not available.

  So the beams swept through great arcs, with operators watching for signs of contact. It was long minutes after the first contact before the instruments on the projector recorded it, because the news could only go back at the speed of light. Then the projectors had to retrace their path, and the Starshine had moved. The beams had to fumble blindly for the fugitives, and they told of each touch, but only after it occurred, And Kim struggled to make his course unpredictable.

  In ten hours the beams struck only four times, because Kim changed course and acceleration so fiercely and so frequently that a contact could only be a matter of chance.

  Then for a long time there was no touch at all. In two days Alphin, the sun, had dwindled until it was merely the brightest of the stars, with a barely perceptible disk. On the third day the beam found them yet again, and Dona burst into hysterical sobs. But it was not really bad, this time. There is a limit to the distance to which a tight beam can be held together in space, by technicians who have no space-experience and instinctive know-how.

  Within hours after this fifth contact, Kim Rendell found the last key break in the control-cables of the ship, and was able to t
hrow on the overdrive, by which the Starshine fled from Alphin at two hundred times the speed of light. Then, of course, they were safe. Even had the beam of agony been trained directly upon the ship, it could not have overtaken them.

  But Dona was a bundle of shrinking nerves when it was over, and Kim raged as he looked at her scared eyes.

  “I know,” she said unsteadily, when he had her in the control-room to look at the cosmos as it appeared at faster-than-light speed. “I know I'm silly, Kim. It can't hurt us any more. We're going to another solar system entirely. They won't know anything about us. We're all right. Quite all right. But I'm just all in little pieces."

  With somber brow, Kim stared at the vision-plates about him. The Universe as seen at two hundred light-speeds was not a reassuring sight. All stars behind had vanished. All those on either hand were dimmed to near-invisibility. Ahead, where the very nose of the spaceship pointed, there were specks of light in a recognizable star-pattern, but the colors and the magnitudes were incredible.

  “We're heading now for Cetis Alpha,” Kim said slowly, after a long time. “It's the next nearest solar system. Our fuel-tanks are one-twelfth full. We have power to travel a distance of fifty light-years, no more, and it would take us three months to cover that. Cetis Alpha is seven light-years away, or it was."

  “We're going to settle on one of the planets there?” Dona asked hopefully. “What are they like, Kim?"

  “You might look them up in the Pilot,” Kim said, rather glumly. “There are six inhabited ones."

  “You sound worried,” she said. “What is it?"

  “I'm wondering,” Kim admitted. “If Burt and the Prime Board should send word ahead of us by matter-transmitter, to these six planets and all the other inhabited planets within fifty or a hundred light-years, it would be awkward for us. Transmission by matter-transmitter is instantaneous, and it wouldn't take too long for the governments on the Cetis Alpha planets to set up detectors and remount the projectors which could kill us. Burt would call us very dangerous criminals. He's say we were so dangerous we had better be killed before we land.” He paused, and added. “He's right."