The Boomerang Circuit
By MURRAY LEINSTER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
Damaged Transmitter
Kim Rendell had almost forgotten that he was ever a matter-transmittertechnician. But then the matter-transmitter on Terranova ceased tooperate and they called on him.
It happened just like that. One instant the wavering, silvery filmseemed to stretch across the arch in the public square of the principalbut still small settlement on the first planet to be colonized inthe Second Galaxy. The film bulged, and momentarily seemed to formthe outline of a human figure as a totally-reflecting, pulsatingcocoon about a moving object. Then it broke like a bubble-film and awalking figure stepped unconcernedly out. Instantly the silvery filmwas formed again behind it and another shape developed on the film'ssurface.
Only seconds before, these people and these objects had been on anotherplanet in another island universe, across unthinkable parsecs of space.Now they were here. Bales and bundles and parcels of merchandise.Huge containers of foodstuffs—the colony on Terranova was still notcompletely self-sustaining—and drums of fuel for the space-ships busymapping the new galaxy for the use of men, and more people, and a hugetank of viscous, opalescent plastic.
Then came a pretty girl, smiling brightly on her first appearanceon a new planet in a new universe, and crates of castings for morespace-ships, and a family group with a pet zorag on a leash behindthem, and a batch of cryptic pieces of machinery, and a man.
Then nothing. Without fuss, the silvery film ceased to be. One couldlook completely through the archway which was the matter-transmitter.One could see what was on the other side instead of a wavering,pulsating reflection of objects nearby. The last man to come throughspoke unconcernedly over his shoulder, to someone he evidently believedjust behind, but who was actually now separated from him by the abyssbetween island universes and some thousands of parsecs beyond.
Nobody paid any attention to matter-transmitters ordinarily. They hadbeen in use for ten thousand years. All the commerce of the FirstGalaxy now moved through them. Space-ships had become obsolete, and thelittle Starshine—which was the first handiwork of man to cross thegulf to the Second Galaxy—had been a museum exhibit for nearly twohundred years before Kim Rendell smashed out of the museum in it, withDona, and the two of them went roaming hopelessly among the ancient,decaying civilizations of man's first home in quest of a world in whichthey could live in freedom.
It seemed a hopeless quest, at first. Every government wasabsolute, and hence every ruler had become tyrannical. And the verylimitations of space-ships, which had caused their supplantation bymatter-transmitters, had seemed to doom their quest to futility.
But Kim had adapted the principle of the transmitter to the drive ofhis ship, and with the increased speed and range they'd found freedomon the prison world of Ades, where alone there was no tyranny. Andlater Kim had crossed to this new galaxy, and set up a transmitterhere—the one which had just failed—and the exiled rebels andrecalcitrants of Ades had begun to move through to a new universewhere, they swore, men should be forever free.<