everything, from the first steps in making a ship to the last least item of its outfitting! You know how to make fuel!"

All that was true. On most planets, to be sure, the making of space-ships was not even dreamed of—abandoned even in the amusement reels as too antique to be amusing. Space travel by ship had ceased centuries since. Matter-transmitters on every planet conveyed persons and things from one solar system to another in infinitely less time and with infinitely greater convenience.

The Starshine, in fact, had been the last ship known to make an interstellar voyage, and she was a museum-exhibit on Alphin Three when Kim Rendell and Dona drove her through the museum roof and set out to find a place where they could be free.

They'd had a bad time of it. They'd have died helplessly because of the little ship's inherent limitations, had not Kim applied his matter-transmitter-technician's knowledge and modified its drive past recognition.

He'd made the little ship into a matter-transmitter which received itself, traveling light-millennia in microseconds, and at long last he and Dona had found a haven on Ades—the prison world to which all malcontents were exiled and from which no exile had ever escaped.

The modified Starshine had ended that state of things. She carried a matter-transmitter to the Second Galaxy, and the folk of Ades streamed through to a new island universe and with infinite opportunity before them.

But the Starshine had still been the only ship in space as far as anyone knew. So others had been begun, back on Ades. They would open planets by hundreds of millions for occupation. But now—

"Space!" exploded the Mayor of Steadheim. "Of course we know how! We know all about it! There are fifty useless hulks in a neat row outside my city—every one unfinished. We're short of metal on Ades and we had to melt down tools to make them, but we did—as far as we could go. Now we're stuck and we're apt to be wiped out because of it!"

The Mayor of Steadheim wore a bearskin cap and his costume was appropriate to that part of Ades in which his municipality lay. He was dressed for a subarctic climate, not for the balmy warmth of Terranova, where Kim Rendell had made his homestead. He sweated as he gulped at his drink.

"Tell me the trouble," said Kim. "Maybe—"

"Hafnium!" 

 Prev. P 3/42 next