Space Gypsies (14 page)

The whiskered small-man was at work on the clumsy, plastic-encased object from the slug-ship wreck. When Howell put down the assortment of small parts, he looked up. His eyes shone. He abandoned what he’d been doing. He looked desperately at each and everyone of the objects that would go to make up the garbage-disposal unit, and so fierce was his desire to understand them that Howell changed his original intention. He diagrammed the inward workings of everyone. It wasn’t too difficult, after a vocabulary of picturings had been made from one component taken apart.

The whiskered man had two helpers, and Howell had not known that such intense and concentrated attention could be paid by anybody to anything. They watched him tensely as he worked. He could leave nothing unexplained. He could pass over nothing as self-evident. It was the wave-form of the oscillations in the disintegration-chamber metal which did the work, of course. But the high-frequency current used should have radiated like a broadcast instead of remaining confined to the metal until some organic compound came in contact with it. It was difficult to explain that the air in the ship reflected back what should have been high-frequency, radio-spectrum radiation. The standard illustration was that if an electric lamp were submerged in quicksilver, no light could escape. It would all be reflected back to the light-source. No garbage-disposal unit, surrounded by air, could have any of its radiation escape. Which was why plastic objects inside the ship were unaffected.

Time passed, and the sunlight on the jungle outside the yacht gave way to darkness. There was very probably a spectacular sunset, but Howell did not see it. He laboured at the assembly of a garbage-disposal unit. It was tricky, but the development of apparatus to produce the needed wave-form, which he expected to be most difficult to explain, went through, swimmingly. The whiskered small-man took it in stride. He watched eagerly as Howell soldered this and that, and he urgently insisted on restating, in diagrams and pictures, every item of information to be sure that he had it right—which was praiseworthy, but took up time.

Karen raised the question of dinner. Howell shook his head. He found it ironic and farcical and typical of this whole affair that though there was a friendly civilized race anxious and willing to help the
Marintha
, there was substantially nothing that it could do. That at once there was most desperate need for the
Marintha
to get home-which appeared to be impossible—and there was most imperative reason that she shouldn’t attempt it, lest she be trailed. The yacht should get off this world before a slug-ship fighting-fleet arrived, but it would be wiser to dump it into the deepest depths of the sea. And with such problems demanding impossible solutions—he was making a gadget to dispose of garbage!

Karen brought him sandwiches. He nodded and offered them to the three small-men who alone remained in the
Marintha
after darkness fell. They refused, and waited so yearningly for him to complete his task that he merely took a bite now and then and continued his labour.

Later Karen came again. She said, “Aren’t you going to try to get some sleep?”

“I’ve got no particular use for sleep,” said Howell dourly. “What good would it do me?”

“You should sleep! ” protested Karen.

He did not answer. She said hesitatingly that Ketch was designing weapons. Howell carefully soldered a tiny contact.

She said, “He’s—asked me to learn the language as fast as I possibly can.”

“No harm,” said Howell, “nor any particular good, the way things look now. I suspect he wants you to learn especially military terminology. Which will be about as useful as what I’m doing.”

“I wish—” she stopped and said helplessly, “I wish something—”

He lifted his eyes to her.

“I’m working,” he said grimly, “for you. I can’t do anything that’s really hopeful so I’m doing things that are practically hopeless, in the hope that I may be mistaken about how hopeless they are.”

She went away, looking unhappily behind her. He continued his work. A long time after what was probably midnight, he finished the task. He connected the capacitor from the booby trap. He turned on the current. He gave the completed device to the whiskered small-man, He was very tired then. There is nothing as fatiguing as frustration.

“It’s all yours,” he said wearily. “Do you want to try it?”

He watched as the whiskery small-man picked up a scrap of plastic. He trembled. He dropped the plastic in the new garbage-disposal unit. It seemed to melt very quietly and very quickly except that it did not become a liquid, but a powder. Impalpable powder. It flowed back and forth as the container was tilted. The whiskered man’s two helpers almost solemnly repeated the test. Their eyes shone. They said nothing, as if speech were impossible. But nobody could have been more excited.

The whiskered small-man reached up and patted Howell on the shoulder. He urged him away.

He and his two helpers threw themselves into the work of adapting the plastic-surrounded capacitor from the wrecked slug-ship to the wrecked overdrive unit of the
Marintha
. They worked feverishly. It was a very delicate job. If it didn’t work at all there’d be little harm, considering everything, and if it did work it wouldn’t do much good. But it would certainly require very precise knowledge of slug-culture equipment if it was to work at all.

Howell watched for a certain length of time. They did seem to know what they were doing. But the
Marintha
would still be unarmed even if the overdrive field was again available, and there was no time to create weapons, and there was no way to evade pursuit even if they could flee. The small-men had some device—

Howell was worn out by pessimism and a grim despair. On the morrow he’d try to arrange for Karen to have asylum among the small-folk, If possible he’d transfer some technical books with her, and she could translate them later. If Breen and Ketch could be accepted, of course they’d try to pass on Earth science too, And if he could explain to the small people, and if they had room for him also, they might follow him to where he’d send the
Marintha
to dive down until her hull-plates buckled from the pressure, And they might pick him up from the water—if it was worth while. And after that—

He flung himself on a couch and was instantly asleep.

He woke with an appalling sensation of giddiness and nausea and of a twisting; spiral fall. He was bewildered. It couldn’t be! Then he heard agitated babblings, and suddenly he knew it was so. He was on his feet even before the nausea ended. He bolted for the control room. He rushed into it to find the vision-screens blank. The
Marintha
was not only in space, but in overdrive. And half a dozen of the small-men, in the control room, struggled to get the face-plate off the instrument—board to get at the relays behind it. While Howell slept, the capacitor from the slug-ship had been installed. While he slept, the yacht had been lifted off for a matter-of-fact, wholly confident check on the improvised repair. But the
Marintha
was now in overdrive, headed in an unknown direction at an unknown multiple of the speed of light—and the small-men were struggling to get behind the instrument-board to fix whatever was wrong that was preventing the
Marintha
from breaking out of overdrive.

It was one of those things that nobody could possibly have predicted. There was no use in debating whose fault it might be, or in dividing up the blame. It had happened, and Howell could tell a part of it by his own now-vanished symptoms such as everybody experiences when going into or out of overdrive. But it was a shock to have gone dismally to sleep, having no actual belief that the
Marintha
could ever be put into overdrive again, and being resolved anyhow to sink her in the deepest sea, and then to wake and find her lifted off the booby trap planet, in overdrive, and now unable to get out again.

He thrust aside the small-men. He tried, himself, to get the front-plate clear for removal, He broke his fingernails in the utterly futile effort, He was sure, with a bitter certainty, that the yacht had been thrown into overdrive solely to verify that it could be done, It had probably been intended to make the briefest of overdrive hops, It was wholly unlikely that a particular line of drive had been chosen. But the
Marintha
was surely driving away from the unnamed planet of the booby trap on which the others of her crew had been left. With every second it became less likely that she would ever find her way back to it again. And there was unquestionably a squadron or a fleet of fighting slug-ships on the way to that green world now, More, and worse, the
Marintha
had been detected in overdrive in the first place, and she was subject to detection in overdrive now, and when she broke out of overdrive—as she must, and quickly—there would probably be the consequences of detection by implacable enemies to be faced.

Howell felt trapped, tearing futilely at the instrument-board because the yacht was in overdrive and would not break out, But then he saw the small-men staring hopefully at him, and he was ashamed.

“The devil!” he said disgustedly. “I could have had it off by now!”

He got a screwdriver and with suddenly steady hands removed the polished black plate which was the instrument-board between rows of dials and switches. He peered at the exposed maze of wires and relays and amplifiers. The breakout switch was frozen. When the overdrive field went on, there’d been a surge of current of such extra violence that an arc had formed across a spot on the relay-contacts. The metal surfaces that should have slid past each other to cause breakout were brazed together for a space of perhaps an eighth of an inch. It was the most trivial of operational failures. Only a screwdriver and a hammer were needed. He had the screwdriver in his hand. The hammer was immediately available. He tapped on the screwdriver, cutting through the eighth-inch welded—melted—spot. The relay flipped clear. There was giddiness, there was nausea, there was the feel of a horrible spiral fall through nothingness. Then he was staring at the vision-screens.

Multitudes of stars glowed all about the
Marintha
. They were, of course, totally unfamiliar. There was a sun of vivid green, seemingly near enough to have a disk if one squinted at it, but it was actually only a pinpoint of brilliance. There was the Milky way, distinctly not itself as seen from Earth. There was an anonymous star-cluster between the
Marintha
and it. This was what the starboard vision-screens showed. To port there were fewer suns.

Howell threw on all detection-instruments, including the all-wave receiver. He hastily restored it to maximum sensitivity, whether or not it would resonate. He set the, nearest-object radar spinning, outside the hull, to warn him of anything within light-minutes.

The small-men beamed at him, admiring his quick response to the emergency, which was serious enough to produce another emergency even more serious.

“I wish,” said Howell grimly, “that I could talk your language to give you the dressing-down you deserve! Let’s see—”

The small-men continued to regard him with confidence and with admiration. They got out of his way with alacrity. They plainly waited to see what he would do, or what he would want them to do. He surveyed the situation. In part his emotions were purest, unadulterated fury. In part they were pessimistic to the edge of despair.

The
Marintha
was lost from the world of the booby trap and the small-men’s gypsy encampment and the balance of her proper ship’s company. By past experience, she might expect to be challenged at any instant by a slug-ship which would have followed in overdrive from the instant it detected her. Such a slug-ship might break out beyond the effective range even of its ball-lightning weapon, but it need not, and—

As of the moment, the detector-system announced that space was empty of active enemies. Howell ran his eyes over the small-men. The whiskered expert on space-drives was not among them. He was probably back at the globe-ships, feverishly trying to use the knowledge Howell had given him to make another unit of garbage-disposal equipment.

It was very likely that one of these present luridly-clothed small-men was the engineer or the astrogator of one of the two globe-ships. The very best of the small-race’s qualified pilots might be aboard the
Marintha
now. It wasn’t likely that the yacht had been lifted off and put into overdrive by incompetents. But none offered to take charge. Each one looked at him blandly and trustfully. He was awake; therefore he was in command of the yacht. Therefore they waited for him to give them orders. They would be intensely interested. They would be helpful to the best of their ability. But above all they would be wholly confident of the wisdom of whatever he chose to do. Because he could make a device to dispose of garbage!

He suddenly realized that he seemed to be alone save for the small-men. None of his companions was visible. They’d allowed the yacht to be lifted off by small-men. They hadn’t insisted that he be consulted. Not one of them—not even Karen—had waked him to tell him of the intended test of the overdrive-field generator. They’d let him be lifted off with the
Marintha
.

He went to Breen’s cabin. Empty. Ketch’s. Empty. He touched the knob of Karen’s door—and it turned in his hand. The door opened and Karen was staring at him.

“What the dev—” he stopped. “Do you know what’s happened?”

She shook her head. Then she moistened her lips and nodded. “I—think so,” she said in a queer tone. “It was a mistake, I suppose. My mistake.”

He waited.

“You—worked most of the night,” she told him uneasily. “You were—making a garbage thing for the small people. You finished it. You were worn out. You went to sleep while they worked on the overdrive. I was—nervous. I didn’t sleep. But early this morning they’d gone and—there were other small-people outside. My father went out to them. Ketch followed. I heard him talking. They couldn’t understand him, of course, but he talked like—like someone making a speech. Enthusiastic. We were going to do wonderful things for them, he said. Show them how to kill slug-creatures and destroy their ships. Wonderful things. They—listened. But of course they didn’t understand.”