An hour later Kim carefully tuned the transmitting part of the little ship's drive to the matter-receiving station on Ades. In that way, and only in that way, the ship would inevitably arrive at the home galaxy of humanity. And he pushed a button. It arrived at the matter station on Ades instead of descending from the skies. And the people on Ades were surprised. 6 _Man-Made Meteor_ No obvious warlike move had been made on either side, of course. Ades swam through space, a solitary planet circling its own small sun. About it glittered the thousands of millions of stars which were the suns of the First Galaxy. Nearby, bright and unwinking, Sinab and Khiv and Phanis were the largest suns of the star-cluster which was becoming the Empire of Sinab. Twenty planets--twenty-one, with Khiv Five--were already cut off from the rest of the Galaxy, apparently by the failure of their matter-transmitters. Actually those twenty planets were the cradles of a new and horrible type of civilization. On the other inhabited worlds every conceivable type of tyranny had come into being, sustained by the Disciplinary Circuit which put every citizen at the mercy of his government throughout every moment of his life. On most worlds kings and oligarchs reveled in the primitive satisfaction of arbitrary power. There is an instinct still surviving among men which allows power, as such, to become an end in itself, and when it is attained to be exercised without purpose save for its own display. Some men use power to force abject submission or fawning servility or stark terror. In the Empire of Greater Sinab there was merely the novelty that the rulers craved adulation--and got it. The rulers of Sinab were without doubt served by the most enthusiastic, most loyal, most ardently cooperative subjects ever known among men. Every member of the male population of Sinab--where women were considered practically a lower species of animal--could look forward confidently to a life of utter ease on one planet or another, served and caressed by solicitous females, with no particular obligation save to admire and revere his rulers and to breed more subjects for them. It made for loyalty, but not for undue energy. There was no great worry about the progress of the splendid plan for a Greater Sinab. All went well. The planet Khiv Five had been beamed from space some nine days since. Every man upon the planet had died in one instant of unholy anguish, during which tetanic convulsions of the muscles of his heart burst it while the ligaments and anchorages of other muscles were torn free of his skeleton by the terrific contraction of muscle fibres.