Despotism -- Fiction; Dissenters -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction
Six weeks later, Kim Rendell eased the _Starshine_ to a landing on
the solitary satellite of the red dwarf sun Phanis. It was about four
thousand miles in diameter. Its atmosphere was about one-fourth the
density needed to support human life. Such vegetation as it possessed
was stunted and lichenous. The terrain was tumbled and upheaved, with
raw rock showing in great masses which had apparently solidified in a
condition of frenzied turmoil. It had been examined and dismissed as
useless for human colonization many centuries since. That was why Kim
and Dona could land upon it.
They had spent half their store of fuel in the desperate effort to find
a planet on which they could land.
Their attempt to approach Cetis Alpha VI had been the exact type of
all their fruitless efforts. They came in for a landing, and while yet
millions of miles out, recently reinstalled detector-screens searched
them out. Newly stepped-up long distance psychographic finders had
identified the _Starshine_ as containing living human beings.
Then projectors, taken out of museums, had hurled at them the deadly
pain-beams which had made war futile a thousand years before. They
might have died within one second, from the bursting of their hearts
and the convulsive rupture of every muscular anchorage to every bone,
except for one thing.
Kim's contrived wristlets had saved them. The wristlets, plus a relay
on a set of controls to throw the _Starshine_ into overdrive
travel through space. The wristlets contained a morsel of hafnium, so
that any previous psychographic record of them as individuals would
no longer check with the psychogram a searchbeam would encounter.
But also, on the first instant of convulsive contraction of muscles
beneath the wristlets, they emitted a frantic, tiny signal. That signal
kicked over the control-relay. The _Starshine_ flung itself into
overdrive escape, faster than light, faster than the pain-beams could
follow.
They had suffered, of course. Horribly. But the pain-beams could not
play upon them or more than the tenth of a millisecond before the
_Starshine_ vanished into faster-than-light escape. They had
tried each of the six planets of Cetis Alpha. They had gone rather
desperately to Cetis Gamma, with four inhabited planets, and Sorene,
with three. Then the inroads on their scant fuel-supply and their
dwindling store of vegetation from Alphin II made them accept defeat.
The massed volumes of the Galactic Pilot for this sector, age-yellowed,
brittle volumes now, had told them of vegetation on the useless planet
of the dwarf star Phanis. They came to it. Kim was stunned and bitter.
And they landed.
After the ship had settled down in a weird valley with fantastic
overhanging cliffs and a frozen small waterfall nearby, the two of them
went outside. They wore space-suits, of course, because of the extreme
thinness of the air.
"I suppose we can call this home, now," Kim said bitterly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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