"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."