"If it took a year each way, there'd be two years between the robot's observation of something to be acted on," Kim continued, "and the signal that would make it act. So this man proposed very tiny matter-transmitters. One on the robot and one on the home planet. A solid object would receive all the information the robot's instruments gathered.
"The transmitter would send it back to the control-board at transmitter-speed, and the board would impress orders on it and send it to the robot again. It could shuttle across the width of a galaxy a hundred times a second, and make robot-control at any distance practical. A few of them were made, but not used. This is one of them.
"I had it for measuring the actual speed of transmitter-travel between here and Ades. We thought the distance would be enough for a good measurement. It wasn't. But this is a transmitter like the big one, and it has a mate on Ades, and its mate is a hemisphere away from Ades' main transmitter. And neither one works. Something's happened on Ades, that involves both hemispheres. And the transmitter couldn't have been knocked out by something that only killed people. It looks as if Ades may have been destroyed."
There was an instant's uncomprehending silence. Then the realization struck home. In all of human history no planet had ever been completely destroyed. Dozens, even hundreds, had been devastated, before wars came to an end by the discovery of a weapon too terrible to be used. Four had been depopulated by that weapon, the fighting-beam. But never before had it even been imagined that a planet could be wiped out of existence.
"There are theoretic considerations," said Kim, dry-throated, "which make a material weapon like atomic explosive unthinkable. There are other considerations which make it certain that any immaterial weapon that could destroy a planet would have infinite speed and therefore infinite range. If Ades has been destroyed, all the human race, including us, must sooner or later be subject to those who control such a weapon." Kim Rendell paused and cleared his throat. "If they start off by destroying the only world on which men are free, I don't think I like it. Now I must go back home. I'd better get over to the First Galaxy in the Starshine and find out what's happened."
The thousand million suns of the First Galaxy swam in space, attended by their families of planets. Three hundred million worlds had been populated by the human race. For thirty thousand years the descendants of the people of Earth—that almost mythical first home of humanity—had spread through the vastness of what once had seemed to them the very cosmos itself.
In the older, long-settled planets, civilization rose to incredible heights of luxury and of pride, and then took the long dive down into decadence and futility while newer, fresher worlds still struggled upward from the status of frontier settlements.
But at long last humanity's task in the First Galaxy was ended. The last planet suitable for human occupancy had been mapped and colonized. The race had reached the limit of its growth. It had reached, too—or so it seemed—its highest possible point of development. Matter-transmitters conveyed parcels and persons instantly and easily from rim to rim of the Galaxy.
Disciplinary Circuits enforced the laws of planetary governments beyond any hope of evasion or defiance. There were impregnable defenses against attacks from space. There could be no war, there could be no revolt, there could be no successful crime—save by those people who controlled governments—and there could be no hope. So humanity settled back toward barbarism.