"I did one thing that's been needed for a long time," said Kim grimly. "It seems to me that I do everything backwards. I should have attended to the matter of Ades first, but I had a chance and took it. I think I put something in motion that will ultimately smash up the whole cursed system that's made slaves of every human being but those on Ades and Terranova—the Disciplinary Circuit. Back on Ades we've talked about the need to free the people of this galaxy. It's always seemed too big a job. But I think it's started now. It will be a profitable business, and my friend who wanted to bargain for some planets in the Second Galaxy will make a pretty penny of the beginning, and it will carry on of itself."
The planet below and behind was now only a globe. It soon dwindled into a tiny ball. Kim touched Dona on the shoulder.
"I'll take over," he said. "We've got work to do, Dona."
Dona stood up and stamped her foot.
"Kim! You're misunderstanding me on purpose! What about Ades? Did you find out what happened to it?"
Kim began the process of sighting the Starshine's nose upon a single, distant, minute speck of light which seemingly could not be told from a million other points of light, all of which were suns.
"I think I found out something," he told her. "I thought a merchant planet would be the place to hear all the gossip of the Galaxy. My friend back yonder put his research organization to work finding out what I wanted to know. What they dug up looks plausible. Right now I'm going to get even for it. That's a necessity! After that, we'll see. There were sixteen million people on Ades. We'll try to do something about them. They aren't likely to be all dead—yet."
The sun of Ades swam in emptiness. For uncountable billions of years it had floated serenely with its single planet circling it in the companionability of bodies separated only by millions of miles, when their next nearest neighbors are light-years away. A sun with one planet is a great rarity.
A sun with no satellites—save for giant pulsing Cepheids and close-coupled double suns—is almost unknown. But for billions upon billions of years that sun and Ades had kept each other company. Then men had appeared. For a thousand years great space-ships had grimly trundled back and forth to unload their cargoes of criminals upon the chilly small world.
Ades was chosen as a prison planet from the beginning. Later, matter-transmitters made the journeys of space-craft useless. For six, seven, eight thousand years there was no traffic but the one-way traffic of its especially contrived transmitter, which would receive criminals from all the Galaxy but would return none or any news of them to the worlds outside.