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.

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.

CHAPTER VI

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 

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