Despotism -- Fiction; Dissenters -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Science fiction
"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 out-crop 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 be moved to. True, they've 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 send 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
of a galaxy not even imagined by human beings before.
In fifteen hours the _Starshine_, rather limpingly, went aloft.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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