There was nothing. Ades had vanished.
He aimed for the star Khiv and flashed to its vicinity. The banded planet Khiv Five swam sedately in emptiness. Kim drove for it, at first on mere overdrive, and then on the interplanetary drive used for rising from and landing on the surface of worlds. He landed on Khiv Five.
Women looked at him strangely. A space-ship which landed on Khiv Five—or anywhere else, for that matter—must certainly come from Ades, but ships were not commonplace sights. Kim was no commonplace sight, either. Six years before, the men on Khiv Five had died in one rotation of the planet. Every man and boy was murdered by the killing-beams of the now defunct Sinabian Empire. Now there were only women, save for the very few men who had migrated to it in quest of wives, and had remained to rear families.
The population of Khiv Five was overwhelmingly female.
Kim found his way to the governing center of the capital city. Dona walked with him through the city streets. There were women everywhere. They turned to stare at Kim. They looked at Dona with veiled eyes.
Long years on an exclusively feminine world does strange things to psychology. There were women wearing the badges of mourning for husbands dead more than half a decade.
In a sense it was a dramatization of their loss, because all women, everywhere, take a melancholy pleasure in the display of their unhappiness. But in part to boast of grief for a lost husband was an excuse for not having captured one of the few men who had arrived since the mass murder. As a matter of fact, Kim did not see a single man in the capital city of Khiv Five, but its streets swarmed with women.
He asked for the head of the planet government, and at long last found an untidy woman at a desk. He asked what was known of Ades.
"I was on Terranova," he explained. "The matter-transmitter went off and it did not come back on. I came back by space-ship to find out about it, and went to where Ades should have been. I'm Kim Rendell, and I used to be a matter-transmitter technician. I thought I might repair the one on Ades if it needed repairing. But I could find no planet circling Ades' sun."
The woman regarded him with what was almost hostility.