Space Gypsies (15 page)

“He’s an idiot,” said Howell coldly. “He thinks he’s in a drama-tape, cast in the role of a great national leader carrying his nation to triumph. Well?”

“He came in and got a rifle,” said Karen. “He went off, I suppose to show them in miniature what we’ll teach them to make in giant size. My father went off in another direction, probably about plants of some sort. I—waited. I thought you’d wake up presently and—I could give you breakfast.”

Howell made an instinctive gesture, and then checked himself.

“Go on.”

“Presently there were even more small-folk about. I heard Ketch’s voice again, but I didn’t hear what he said. Then some of the small people came into the yacht. I assumed he’d told them to. We’ve had no reason to keep them out. But I heard the exit-port close. That was when I made my mistake. I—I didn’t go out to see what they were doing. They must have lifted off and out of the atmosphere. I couldn’t tell, of course, because the artificial gravity adjusts for such things. And then—we went into overdrive and I heard you rush for the control room. I should have found out what they were going to do in the yacht. But I thought Ketch had told them—”

“He probably did,” said Howell grimly. “He’d make a grand gesture authorizing anything without knowing what it was.”

He headed back to the control room, seething. Earth-based humanity very often behaved childishly. With all his surroundings elaborately protective, the average man grew up without burning himself, cutting himself, falling out of a tree, breaking an arm or leg or even going hungry. Nothing injurious ever happened, and he never really learned that they could. It was wholly probable that Ketch was now acting a dramatic role without the apprehensions a suitable past would have developed in him. With small-men admiring him, he could very well have authorized a trial trip by the repaired
Marintha
without the least idea of what he was doing.

An instrument-needle quivered ever so faintly in the denuded mass of dials and switches.

Howell said harshly, “Overdrive corning!”

He pushed over the switch. There was a very bright spark. The feeling of twisting fall and nausea and giddiness. Then the
Marintha
felt as steady as a rock. Actually it drove blindly without destination at a rate Howell somehow believed was faster than her previous overdrive rate. But there’d been a lurid spark in the relay. It was again welded fast by the much-greater-than-ordinary current flow. Howell swore under his breath and took up the screwdriver and hammer once more. He snapped instructions to Karen to get a specific high-conductivity dressing for the contact surfaces of the relay. He used it when he’d cleared the melted-together spot again. He threw off the overdrive switch and the
Marintha
broke out to clear space again. Howell stared grimly at the vision-plates.

The star-cluster he’d noted was visible but slightly moved in relation to the Milky way. Howell could not even guess at relative distances, but he was sure now that the
Marintha
was faster than she’d ever been before.

“Something broke out near us just now,” he told Karen, “a very short time after we broke out. So I went back into overdrive. We’ll find out if it throws him off the track.”

There were murmurs among the small-men who waited expectantly for Howell to do something or require something of them. He said sardonically, “They’re wondering, I suppose, why I don’t do whatever they’d do in their ships to get away on an occasion like this. But this is all the
Marintha
will do! Incidentally she’s overpowered now. She could blow out both drives if she felt like it. Maybe she will.”

It was not the happiest of prospects. The use of a slug-ship capacitor meant, evidently, a storage of energy even greater than the
Marintha
’s original capacitor had provided. Which meant a flow of raw power her circuits weren’t designed to carry. Which meant that she could blow her drives to smoking scrap at any instant and lie helpless in space for the slug-ships to find. Which would give great pleasure to those chlorine-breathing monstrosities.

One of the small-men diffidently called attention to something. He pointed to a tiny area on one of the vision-screens. Howell blinked.

“He’s pointing to where we came from!” said Karen. “He would be! There’d be nothing else for him to point to.”

Howell considered for seconds. Then he nodded.

“Right! It has to be that.”

It was wholly reasonable. More, it was self-evident that the pilots of the small race’s globe-ships would operate quite differently from the astrogators of ships like the
Marintha
. Earth-humans voyaged from solar system to solar system, through charted volumes of space. Explorers tied in newly travelled ways to previously charted ones. They always kept the necessary return-journey in mind. But if the globe-ships were in flight from their enemies, they and they alone would habitually break out of overdrive in between-the-stars. They alone would really envision space as having three dimensions, so that star-clusters would serve as beacons and other galaxies as direction-marks. And to them, moving always into unexplored areas and with no thought of return, charts of where they’d been would be useless and of the unknown before them, impossible. For rendezvous they’d develop a system of coordinates that would practically be abstractions, yet by which they could meet each other even in totally strange territory. And a small-man in a red vest-like garment, after two unmeasured overdrive hops at an unknown number of times the speed of light, put his finger confidently on the line to be taken to get back to their starting-point.

“Right!” said Howell again. “That’s where we came from. The only question is whether we dare go back.”

He watched the detector-dials, which would receive and identify and report the surge of power if another ship broke out of overdrive within its very considerable range. Its needle quivered. A ship had broken out somewhere.

“Overdrive coming! ” said Howell savagely.

He threw the switch. Nausea. Giddiness. Falling. The
Marintha
again drove blindly, isolated from all the universe outside its own overdrive-field. In theory, nothing could touch the
Marintha
inside that unsubstantial barrier. In theory, nothing could enter that field, whether solid object or radiation. In theory, nothing could leave it. And it had been believed undetectable. But Howell now had appallingly good evidence that a moving overdrive field, carrying a ship at many times light-speed within it, created some signal which another ship in overdrive could detect and home on.

“The answer to the question I mentioned,” he said bitterly, “appears to be, no! We don’t dare go back to the booby trap world! Something’s trailing us. Maybe two somethings. We took another overdrive hop and they or their cousins turned up instantly where we broke out. Now we’re hopping again. If something breaks out of overdrive immediately when we do so again—that’s it!”

The
Marintha
drove on and on and on. The small-men consulted among themselves. The one with the garment like a vest apparently took the opinion of others and presently nodded satisfiedly to himself. They settled down to wait. Howell paced up and down, scowling as he thought. Presently he paused and regarded the placid, plainly un-alarmed small-men.

“Karen,” he said exasperatedly,“they know what sort of fix we’re in. But they sit there without a care in the world. What’s the matter with them?”

“I think,” said Karen, “they expect you to do something remarkable. After all, we came to this part of the galaxy. It’s full of dangers. They can’t imagine our having got to where we found them without encountering those dangers and defeating them. So they expect you to do it again.”

“But we’d a blown-out capacitor when they found us!” protested Howell. “That should prove we were vulnerable!”

“A bolt from a slug-ship would explain it,” said Karen, “and that could happen to anybody by accident, they’d think. And we did destroy that slug-ship aground—or you did. And there was the booby trap. It had killed some small-people from another and earlier ship. They couldn’t disarm it. You did. So they think you can do remarkable things. And they’re waiting for you to do some more.”

Howell said something explosive under his breath. He beckoned to the small-man in the red vest. That miniature human moved briskly to his side.

“I want you to point out the way back to the booby trap planet,” said Howell. He felt foolish, speaking to someone who wouldn’t understand a word. He made gestures, repeating the one the small-man had used before, when pointing to the screen. “I won’t head there unless we lose whatever’s after us now, but—you can point the way?”

The little man seemed to understand. Howell flipped the breakout switch. He grimaced at the sensations of falling and giddiness and nausea. The screens lighted. The small man surveyed them and pointed confidently with his finger. It was the most matter-of-fact of gestures. He probably couldn’t imagine a ship remaining lost in space.

Howell swung the yacht to an entirely new direction. On the dial that told of another ship’s breakout, a needle quivered. It would have to be a slug-ship. On the instant Howell had the
Marintha
out of normal space again. He hoped it would be before the slug-ship’s detectors acted. He guessed at a reaction-time for that unpleasant ship’s pilot, and was back in normal space at about the instant the slug-ship should have left it. Then he went back into overdrive just as the slug-ship should have returned to normal space.

It was a matter of dodging, of outguessing the unseen pilot of the unseen enemy ship. It was an attempt to bewilder the monster at the controls of the enemy craft. And it seemed to work.

Sweating, Howell cut off all his own detection-instruments except the one that told of the other ship’s breakout, lest they give information as well as receive it. He dodged crazily between the real universe and the artificial one which was the state of being in overdrive.

The shifts back and forth were horrible. With each shift came the vertigo and nausea and the feel of falling. Repeated, it became torment. Karen looked white and ill, and the small-men lost their bland expectancy and became tense and nerve-racked.

And then Howell stopped the jumps into and out of overdrive. The
Marintha
lay still in space, with ten thousand myriads of stars about her. Howell scowled at the one instrument left in operation. But nothing happened. And nothing happened. And still nothing happened. There was no sign of any spacecraft or—after some minutes—artificial radiation in all of empty space.

After a long, long time, Howell said evenly, “It looks like we’ve lost whatever was after us. The question now is what to do next.”

The small-man with the red vest put his finger on a vision-screen. Howell nodded.

“That’s very likely the way for us to go,” he told Karen as evenly as before. “But we were detected in overdrive going away from there. I don’t know whether or not we’d be detected going back. If we were, their friends—” he nodded toward the now-recovered small-men, “their friends would pay for it unless they got away fast in their globe-ships. And Ketch and your father would definitely pay, unless they were taken on the globe-ships.”

Karen parted her lips to speak, and then did not.

The breakout-detector quivered. Howell did nothing. After minutes, it quivered again.

“We’re not in the clear,” said Howell, “but one of them popped out then and we didn’t react. So it popped back into overdrive. It’s hunting for signs of us there.”

He turned on all the detection-instruments. He’d been playing a very deadly game of blind-man’s-buff, with the
Marintha
driving blindly at multiples of light-speed between dodgings. Now Howell wiped sweat from his forehead.

“I’m going to try something new,” he said very grimly indeed. “We’ve been trying to dodge and run as fast as possible. Now we’ll try dodging and creeping. Watch this dial for me.”

He went back to the engine room and made adjustments to the overdrive unit. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, a ship going into overdrive instantly attained the maximum speed the overdrive-field could give it. In order to exist, such a field had to move, and whatever was enclosed in it had to move with and in it But the highest speed the
Marintha
could make wasn’t enough to leave its invisible pursuer behind. So Howell cut down the overdrive velocity to an absurdly small figure. What he did should cut down the flow of power associated with entry and breakout. It should reduce the likelihood of a blow-out. And just possibly, the weakened power-surges might be feeble enough to go undetected.

He went back to the control-board: The small-men watched his every movement. They murmured among themselves. The little man with the red vest went toward the engine room. He stopped and looked inquiringly at Howell. Howell paid no attention. The small-man went into the engine room. Howell continued to regard all the detection-instruments with a specifically grim expression.

Nothing happened. There was no quiver of the overdrive detection device. There was nothing from the all-wave receiver but the infinitesimal cracklings which were the solar flares of far-away suns, and very occasionally those singular flute-like musical notes for which there was as yet no known explanation but which some people called the music of the spheres.

Still nothing happened. The nearest-object indicator registered infinity—and would until its search-pulse had travelled for light-months or years and had been reflected back an equal distance, when the returned signal would be too faint to register.

The little man with the red vest came out of the engine room. He looked puzzled. He went to the garbage-disposal unit and looked it over carefully. Whatever he looked for he did not find. He rejoined the other small-men and they talked among themselves in low tones, as if not to disturb Howell. But they regarded him confidently.

“They still expect a miracle,” said Howell coldly, with his eyes moving swiftly from one instrument to another. “They’re going to be disappointed, unless…” he shrugged and said curtly, “Overdrive coming!”