"Murray Leinster - The Boomerang Circuit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

increase the population of the new galaxy. There should be a constant flow of them. Governments which
could not be overthrown existed everywhere. They were maintained by the device of the disciplinary
circuit which enabled a tyrant or a group of oligarchs to administer intolerable torture to any individual
they chose, wherever he might hide upon a planet's surface.
Revolt was utterly impossible. But there were some who revolted, nevertheless. And Ades had been
a planet of hopeless exile to which such sturdy rebels could be sent as to a fate more mysterious and
hence more terrible than death. On the whole, the newcomers were of the stuff of pioneers. The principal
drawback was that so few women were rebels.
Events begun by the Empire of Sinab had solved even that problem of a superabundance of males,
by reversing it. The Sinabian Empire had expanded by a policy of seemingly irresistible murder. By that
policy, modified fighting-beams swept over a planet which was to be added to the empire, and in a single
day slew every man and boy-child on it, leaving the women unharmed. And as time passed and years
went by, when the women had grown numbed by their grief and then their despair that their race must
die—why, then male colonists from Sinab appeared, and condescended to take the place of their
victims.
They had planned to add Ades to their empire,* (See "THE MANLESS WORLDS." Thrilling
Wonder Stories, February, 1947) but the end was the exile of the men of Sinab to a planet and a
universe so remote that men had not even conceived of such a distance before. And the widows of
murdered men—not sharing that exile— accepted the wiveless men of Ades as their deliverers. From
that time until now, it had seemed that only triumphs could lie before the exiles. Duplicates of the
Starshine roamed among the new and unnamed stars of the Second Galaxy. Infinite opportunities lay
ahead. Until now!



Now the matter-transmitter had ceased to operate. Five millions of human beings in the Second
Galaxy were isolated from the First. Ades was the only planet in the home galaxy on which all men were
criminals by definition, and hence were friendly to the people of the new settlements. Every single other
planet—save the bewildered and almost manless planets which had been subject to Sinab—was a
tyranny of one brutal variety or another.
Every other planet regarded the men of Ades as outlaws, rebels, and criminals. The people of
Terranova, therefore, were not only cut off from the immigrants and supplies and the technical skills of
Ades. They were necessarily isolated from the rest of the human race. And it could not be endured. And
then, besides that, there were sixteen millions of people left on Ades, cut off from the hope that
Terranova represented.
Kim Rendell was called on immediately. The Colony Organizer of Terranova, himself, went in person
to confer and to bewail.
Kim Rendell was peacefully puttering with an unimportant small gadget when the Colony Organizer
arrived. The house was something of a gem of polished plastic—Dona had designed it—and it stood on
a hill with a view which faced the morning sun and the rising twin moons of Terranova.
The atmosphere flier descended, and Dona led the Organizer to the workshop in which Kim
puttered. The Organizer had had half an hour in which to think of catastrophe. He was in a deplorable
state when Kim looked up from the thing with which he was tinkering.
"Enter and welcome," he said cheerfully in the formal greeting. "I'm only amusing myself. But you look
disturbed."

THE Colony Organizer bewailed the fact that there would be no more supplies from Ades. No more
colonists. Technical information, urgently needed, could not be had. Supplies were called for for
exploring parties, and new building-machines were desperately in demand, and the storage-reserves
were depleted and could last only so long if no more came through.