Space Gypsies (2 page)

Howell touched the query-button, and the triple circle on the radar-screen shrank and disappeared. The quadruple circle appeared. The blip beyond it from the second impossible object showed up again. It seemed to be stationary, still nearly fifty thousand miles away.

“That one’s not heading our way, anyhow,” said Howell. “Maybe they feel about us as I feel about them. I’d like to have a consort right now, to carry back word of this affair if we happened to get the worst of it.”

A noise came out of the all-wave receiver. It was not a voice, in any normal sense. It was a mooing, bleating, howling sound, more like the dismal bellow of an animal than anything else. Karen went pale. The idea of a mysterious, alien spaceship operated by men would be alarming enough to a girl—but a spaceship with a crew of beasts who made mere sounds instead of speech…

“If that’s a question,” said Howell grimly, “the answer is ‘no comment’. Not yet! When Ketch has finished his job, maybe! But we act mysterious until he’s finished, anyhow.”

Ketch called from the engine room:

“Two more bolts, and then tightening up all around. Then we’ll be set!”

Howell bit at his knuckles, watching the instruments and the screens. It was not easy to admit to one’s self that humanity’s isolated grandeur and dignity might be an illusion. But a different race, achieving spacecraft, might have better ships than men could make. Which would be bad! They might be so much farther advanced that men would be like savages in comparison! And when a civilized race encounters a primitive one, the result is history—at least on Earth. It isn’t the civilized race that dies of the meeting.

A second mooing, bleating sound. It was horrible because it seemed to be meaningless. It was a noise, and some creature had made it, but it had no discoverable significance. No understandable purpose was served by its utterance.

“Maybe,” said Howell in wholly mirthless amusement, “maybe we should howl back. It might be only polite!”

But his expression did not lighten. He was uneasy. He was very unhappily puzzled. He was genuinely worried, which showed itself in a violent wish that Karen hadn’t come on this cruise. The journey itself was Breen’s idea—to test a theory he’d formed about the eight kinds of food-plants found wherever ancient cities had become mere piles of rubble. Howell had offered the
Marintha
and himself because he knew that Karen would make the trip with her father. Now he wished urgently that he hadn’t, for Karen’s sake alone.

There was a long silence from space. Ketch turned the last bolts. It took time. Then there came an entirely new kind of sound from the far-away but approaching slug-ship. The beam-locator verified its source. It came from the slug-ship—and it was human speech.

It was words, unintelligible but unmistakable. The voice was a clear soprano. It could be a child or a woman or a young girl. It spoke briskly and came to a plain stop, and then there was silence again.

Howell sat up straight in the pilot’s chair. Breen said with satisfaction, “Now, that’s something like it! They don’t use the same language we do, but I’ll accept whoever said that as kissing kin to Karen and me!”

“It was human,” agreed Howell. “No doubt of it! Karen—”

“What?”

“Say something into this microphone,” Howell commanded. “Your voice sounds like that one. It should be as reassuring to them as that was to us. Go ahead!”

Karen was relieved. There were still some people who spoke languages other than the one now considered the galactic tongue. As time went on, it could be expected that dialects would develop on different worlds,and perhaps some day interpreters might be needed. But humans who used any human language would have the beginning of communication if only because they used the same sort of signals: words.

Howell stared at the electron telescope screen as if he expected Karen’s words to make a visible change in the slug-ship’s appearance. She said carefully:

“ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gymble in the wabe—”

There was a brilliant flash of light from the forepart of the approaching slug-shaped ship. A blue-white flame, bright as a sun, streaked toward the
Marintha
. It travelled at incredible speed. No material object could be accelerated to such a velocity so quickly. It moved like a lightning-flash toward the
Marintha
.

By pure, bewildered instinct, Howell threw over the overdrive switch. Relays crashed and contacts arced and there was the beginning of those excessively unpleasant sensations which either entering or breaking out of overdrive invariably produced.

But the flame-missile hit. It hit obliquely, but it hit. And there were spitting sparks and jettings of burned-out insulation smoke in the engine room. The
Marintha
teetered on the very borderline between escape into overdrive and collapse back to normal space. The sensations of the four in the yacht were intolerable-dizziness and nausea and spinning fall… They seemed to last for hours. But, obviously, they didn’t.

The vision-screens went dark. Instantly all instruments read zero. The
Marintha
was in overdrive, racing for nowhere at multiples of the speed of light. Nothing could touch her. She was utterly out of communication with the universe of stars and suns and galaxies. She had no contact with anything outside herself. And when she broke out of overdrive again, she should be almost infinitely far away from the place where an impossible, alien spacecraft had fired an incredible weapon at her from thousands of miles away—and had made a partial hit with it.

Howell called, “Ketch! Any damage?”

Ketch said bitterly, “The devil, yes! Shorts! Blasts! Fusings! And enough insulation burned to make it tricky to move around in here! We’re damaged, all right, but I don’t know how badly. And I won’t dare try to find out before we’re near something solid!”

Breen said querulously, “They fooled us! Tricked us!”

“Y-yes,” said Karen. “but at least we got away! And they can’t follow us in overdrive!”

Howell said in a peculiarly dry voice, “Probably not.”

He went to the engine room. Ketch was in the act of getting past wires and bus-bars whose insulation-coatings were : scorched and shrivelled. Incredible currents had flowed for the fraction of a second. If they’d flowed even milliseconds longer, the yacht would have been a total wreck in space. Even now the engine room was not a place in which it was safe to move about. Ketch got out into the corridor and seemed to shake himself.

“A very tight moment,” he said wryly. “And I don’t mean only what we ran away from. I include what we ran away
with
—this damage! I hope I can patch things up!”

Howell said shortly, “We’d better set the
Marintha
down somewhere before we try that. What worries me is that they made beast-noises at us, and we didn’t answer. So then they made a human noise, and we answered, and instantly they shot at us. The human voice was a test, a shibboleth, a trap, to see if we were people. And we were, so they tried to kill us. Evidently they don’t like people. But that means there are people here! And if this is typical of space-encounters, why the people are as likely to shoot on sight as whoever or whatever is in the ship we saw!”

Karen said incredulously, “People? Here?”

“And fighting people,” Howell told her. “That slug-shaped ship had a weapon to fight with. They must have something—the people we were supposed to be—to fight back with. This is a very nasty mess!”

“But if there are people here, and if we can get in touch with them,” said Karen hopefully, “they might help us fix the drive that’s damaged. Or maybe we can help them somehow…”

“Unfortunately,” said Howell, “our friends of a little while ago are tricky. They proved it. If we came upon people here, they might think we were another trick.” Then he said impatiently, “Just see what you can find out about the damage, Ketch, without taking any chances. I’d like to get well away from where we were shot at, then break out, pick a Sol-type sun and run for it, and get to ground on an Earth-type planet and, if possible, under cover while we make what repairs we can. Maybe I sound scared. I am. We’ve believed there was no other intelligent race in the galaxy. Now we know there’s at least one and probably two. It isn’t good!”

“Very true,” said Ketch sardonically. “We know there’s at least one other race, because it challenged us. And we know it’s civilized because it tried to kill us!”

He brushed soot and insulator particles off his clothing.

“I’ll look in the door here and see what I can find out about the damage while risking nothing.”

Howell went back to the engine room. He stared at the unregistering instruments and the blank dark vision-screens. He set his lips angrily. This was a private yacht, and they’d used it as such. The people on the
Marintha
had essayed a very long journey, in the mood of people going on a picnic. People on a picnic do not expect to find themselves in an ambush. They don’t expect to encounter people or creatures who will instantly try to murder them. It isn’t timorous to be appalled when such things happen. It isn’t disgraceful to want to get out of the ambush instead of fighting through it—especially with a girl to think of. It is completely natural to be disturbed by the discovery that one’s murder has been attempted—and may be attempted again. And when one has no weapons at all to discourage would-be murderers with, it produces a queasy feeling.

The
Marintha
drove on at the unbelievable speed of a ship in overdrive. There was no faintest indication in the feel of the ship that it moved at all. It felt as solid and as stable as if it were aground on a normal-gravity planet. It was as completely isolated from the cosmos outside its overdrive field as if it were buried in the heart of a mountain.

But this was a very bad fix. Howell wished bitterly that Karen were safe at home. But then it occurred to him that she wouldn’t be safe, even back home on Earth. For centuries, humankind had believed that no other, inimical race could exist to represent a danger. But if that was wrong, if the slug-ship was the product of a race and a civilization implacably hostile to men—which seemed the case—and if that race were technically farther advanced than the human race—which looked intolerably likely—there was a very, very bad situation to be faced. The survival of the
Marintha
became starkly necessary, not because its people did not want to die—but because they had to get home with the news.

A suspicion hit Howell with all the suddenness and the shock effect of a blow. The rubble-heaps that once had been cities were found on more than four hundred planets spread across two thousand light-years of space. Those cities had been destroyed with a thoroughness that seemed to rule out their destruction by enemies. They hadn’t been looted. They’d simply been smashed. There’d been no conqueror-occupation of the worlds they’d ruled, The wrecked cities looked convincingly as if their own inhabitants had gone deliberately about shattering them and destroying themselves to make the race and all its achievements as nearly as possible as if it had never been.

Howell now wondered with exceeding grimness if that interpretation might not be a mistake. Maybe—possibly—conceivably the race that travelled in slug-ships and broadcast a recorded human voice to deceive a human ship—maybe that race had destroyed the lost race of humanity. Maybe some few individuals had survived to father the humanity of Earth and today. Modern men hadn’t yet built back to the civilization of the rubble-heap cities. If the slug-ship civilization had destroyed the ancient cities thousands of years ago, in the time since then, the slug-ship race might have advanced so far beyond humankind that it would be simply a matter of finding the human race again before destroying it. And the
Marintha
in its every item of design and equipment would reveal that it was the human race the slug-ship had tested with a human voice-recording. So the
Marintha
could cause Earth-humanity to be searched for and found—and destroyed.

There was the rasping sound of an electric arc—a short-circuit. The sound of a blow somewhere. Something broke in the galley. Then there was dizziness and nausea and the feeling of a second spiral fall. The vision-screens lighted. The air smelled of ozone and vaporized metal. The
Marintha
had broken out of overdrive by a breakdown of her overdrive-field generator. It might or might not be possible to make a repair.

Howell found himself hoping desperately that the slug-ship couldn’t trail the unarmed
Marintha
in overdrive. Human technology wasn’t up to doing it. Not yet. But in theory it could be done. Howell hoped very fiercely that the beings in the slug-ship couldn’t do it.

Later, Ketch said dubiously that the overdrive-field generator might be tried again, but he promised nothing. Howell was just finishing an improvised device he couldn’t have imagined a few hours earlier. It was a setup which would destroy the yacht’s log-tape if a button was pressed or if the
Marintha
lost her air to space. It was not a contrivance to defend the yacht; that was out of the question. It was a device to defend Earth. If the yacht was wrecked and fell into the hands of the slug-ship creatures, with the log-tape destroyed they wouldn’t be able to find out where it came from by means of the tape. He hoped that all star-charts would share in the destruction. He’d tried to arrange that, too. The whole idea was pure defeatism, and he wasn’t pleased with it, but it was the best he could do. The slug-creatures could still learn that the human race existed, by the way the yacht was designed. It would be a definite stimulus to a search for that race. But there was simply no way to hinder that.

Howell’s expression was grimness itself as Ketch explained that he’d made a strictly jury rig of the almost shattered overdrive unit, and that it might just possibly work once or twice or even three times more before it blew out past any hope of cobbling.

“All right,” said Howell. “We’ll try it. I’ve picked out a sun that’s G-type, like Earth, and ought to have planets. It’s not the nearest, but we’ll go close to at least one other in getting to it, and it’s our best bet.”