Space Gypsies (3 page)

From the habitual complacent confidence of a very few hours back, Howell had become the most confirmed of pessimists. Now he was guessing that the
Marintha
might be trailed, even in overdrive. He planned now on that assumption.

“I don’t guarantee anything,” repeated Ketch. “If we can get to ground somewhere, maybe I can improve on this. But this is the best I can do just now.”

“I didn’t ask for a guarantee,” said Howell irritably. “What good would a guarantee be if we’re stuck out here? Let’s try the thing!”

He returned to the control room. He swung the yacht about. He flipped on the small round screen which served the purpose of a compass for course-setting on a planetary sea. This small instrument was incredibly accurate, and it had been adjusted to unbelievable precision. It indicated the line of travel the
Marintha
would be following when it was driving blindly in the blackness of overdrive. It was also comparable to the sights of a rifle, except that the yacht would be the bullet on its way.

He centered the sun he’d chosen in the very middle of the screen. Then he displaced it the fraction of a hair, because he couldn’t know the proper motion to make allowance for. He set the overdrive timer for the best guess he could make for distance.

“Ready for overdrive?”

Karen’s father protested: “Wait a second! I dropped my dessert-dish when we broke out without warning. I’m still cleaning up the mess.”

“Do it in overdrive,” commanded Howell. “Ketch?”

“Go ahead,” said Ketch dourly. “But don’t blame me—”

Howell threw the switch. There was vertigo. There was nausea. There was an appalling sensation of tumbling fall. Then everything was as it had been for most of the time the
Marintha
had been away from Earth and all the time she’d been driving at many times light-speed in overdrive. There was a complete black-out of the cosmos. There was a feeling of absolute solidity. Instruments read zero. The
Marintha
was again, if precariously, in overdrive.

“I’m almost surprised,” said Ketch. “But still—”

He didn’t look surprised. Nor did Breen. Breen grumbled. The elaborate dessert he had almost completely decorated had fallen from his hands some time earlier and it was still only partly cleaned up. Now he finished that job, and wiped the floor with a towel and dumped the dessert, the plastic dish, and the towel together into the garbage-disposal unit. He pressed the activating button. The assorted organic substances of the refuse shivered and collapsed. The garbage unit had the rather remarkable ability to suppress all carbon valence-bonds in objects in its special high-frequency field. Consequently any organic substance put into it collapsed into impalpable powder when the unit was turned on. The powder-particles were of colloidal, barely molecular size, and the powder itself flowed like a liquid. And it was perfectly safe because its anti-valence frequency and wave-form was totally reflected by air. Nothing could happen outside the unit, but refuse from the ship thrown into it became something easy to dispose of. It was peculiar that humans hadn’t found any other use for it.

Howell was restless and uneasy. There was very much to be thought about, with very little information to go on. The soprano voice which had spoken definite if unintelligible words could have been, of course, a taped voice. But where had it been taped? Not in the part of the galaxy known to the humans of Earth and all its colonies! If a slug-ship carried a recording that to use as a trap for victims to be murdered, it was like a weapon in that it wouldn’t be carried unless in anticipation of something to use it on. But it would only work on humans! So there must either be humans here, or else creatures with human voices and throats and tongues and lips to form vowel-and-consonant sounds that would seem normal to the human ear. But the presence of humans seemed much more likely.

It had been guessed that when the race of the rubble-heap cities destroyed itself, there were some isolated survivors on non-colonized worlds. Some were on Earth, it was supposed, and modern humankind was descended from them. If they hadn’t been numerous enough to sustain a technological culture, they’d have gone back to savagery as tools they couldn’t replace wore out.

But Howell now guessed that there might somewhere else have been other groups of survivors. Some might have died out, and some might have increased and built up a civilization—which might have been found by the slug-ships and might now be fighting the previously unsuspected murderers of their remoter ancestors. If the
Marintha
could join forces with them… But they’d naturally be suspicious of traps.

There were other things to be debated. One slug-ship had essayed to deal with the
Marintha
. Another remained far away, yet well within communicator-range. That made unpleasant sense. There was no way to put messages, as such, into overdrive. The only way to carry news faster than light was in a ship. So one could guess that the ship that had fired on the
Marintha
was a scout-ship, hunting for whatever it had believed the space-yacht to be. The farther-away ship was on hand to flee with a report of anything the first ship could not handle. That implied warfare. It implied that the fighting was not entirely one-sided, nor yet a knock-down-drag-out affair with fleets of fighting ships seeking each other out. There might be war fleets of space, but there were scout-ships, too, travelling in pairs so one could always get back to tell what had happened to the other.

All this was logical deduction from recent events. But there were many, many other bits of information to be extracted from what had happened. And there were matters of immediate concern, too. Howell looked at his watch and took his seat at the control-board.

“Thirty seconds to breakout,” he said curtly. A little later he said, “Twenty.” Still later, “Ten.” Then he counted down, “Five, four, three, two, one—”

Hell broke loose in the engine room. The enormous surge of power from the overdrive-field, seeking its normal storage-space when the field was broken, went free. The choke that should have controlled it burned out. The surge of power went shatteringly into the capacitor. Its plates couldn’t adjust in time. They swelled. They made arcs of flame. There was dense smoke and the smell of electric sparks and a deafening roaring sound.

And then there was sudden silence.

Howell went to see the damage. There was no point in speech. He saw catastrophe undiluted. The
Marintha
’s overdrive appeared to be shot, ruined, wrecked, and blown out, and she was a considerable number of light-centuries from Earth. If her normal-space drive could run that long, it would take a thousand years to get back home. Which meant that she wouldn’t.

Howell’s lips tensed. He turned around. The vision-screens were bright with a thousand million stars. But there was one break in the space-yacht’s favour. The breakdown had come at the instant of breakout, and because of it. And Howell had done a good job of astrogation. There was a yellow sun nearby, a G-type, Sol-type sun with a disk a full half-degree in diameter. It was of that family of suns which most often have habitable planets in the third or fourth orbit out from them. It was the sun Howell had aimed for, but the point of breakout was extraordinary good luck.

“Anyhow we’ll probably get to ground,” he said evenly. “We’ve that much good luck—if that’s what it is.”

He searched for planets. There was a world. The electron telescope enlarged it. It was featureless, pure white. It was a cloud world. Sunlight would never penetrate to its surface. There was another world. It was a gas-giant, with striations almost about its equator. A third world. It had ice-caps and green foliage and the curious dark muddy areas which are always seas.

He made painstaking observations. He used the yacht’s computer. He swung the
Marintha
, and steadied it, and then threw on the normal-space drive-switch. There was a whining sound. It rose in pitch, and rose and rose. At its highest, Howell leaned back.

“We drive at full acceleration for so long,” he said evenly, “and then we coast. If they can trail us by our drive, they’ll have to start trailing while we’re driving. And we may start coasting before then.”

Karen said incredulously, “You don’t think they could trail us from where they shot at us, do you?”

“N-no,” said Howell, not altogether truthfully. “But in theory it’s possible, and they might be a long way ahead of us in technology. I’m looking on the dark side of things, so I can feel good when they don’t happen.”

Actually, his pessimism had increased since it had occurred to him how utterly improbable it was that a slug-ship had challenged within minutes after the yacht broke out to change fuel-ingots. It couldn’t have happened by accident. Ships don’t break out in between-the-stars except for such reasons as the
Marintha
had. There’s nothing to be done in it or with it. It’s simply thousands of thousands of millions of miles in which nothing ever happens. But something had happened. So the
Marintha
must have been detected in overdrive and trailed in overdrive and challenged and attacked as soon as she broke out.

Karen said, distress in her voice, “But if they’re that fat ahead of us—we can’t hope to—to get back home! Can we?”

“We’re not sure they’re ahead of us,” said Howell, again not quite truthfully. Then he said least truthfully of all: “Anyhow, there are the humans with voices like yours. The slug-ship panicked when your voice reached it. Maybe the owners of human voices like yours are so far ahead of the characters who shot at us that they started to run away as soon as they let off one whack in our general direction.”

Karen looked dubious. Her father said blandly:

“Remember, Karen, civilization is a matter of natural development. On all planets nature invents the equivalent of trees and brushwood and even grass. In the same way savage humans invent clubs, then spears, then bows and arrows. When civilization comes, men invent chemical explosives, then laser weapons, and then blast-weapons in that order. The thing that hit us was a blast-weapon. So the creatures of the slug-shaped ships can’t be too far ahead of us!”

Karen shook her head. Her father took her arm and led her off to the galley, there to discuss a possible substitute for the dessert that had dropped from his hand and was now impalpable wetted dust in the garbage-disposal.

Ketch said unpleasantly, “You’re wrong about the slug-ship panicking when it sighted us! When I go hunting, I’m not panicked by the sight of game! I’m hunting! So were they!”

Howell nodded.

“Don’t you think that’s occurred to me?”

“If I’m right,” said Ketch, with an authoritative air, “they’ll turn up here. They won’t need to trail us! If the voice they used to trick us means they’re hunting men, they’ll know where to look for us!”

Howell looked up sharply. Ketch said, “Hunting deer, you know they’ll head for water. Hunting humans in space, you’d know they’d either high-tail it for home, or else head for the nearest Sol-type solar system to find an Earth-type world to land and bide on.”

Howell ground his teeth. He wasn’t a hunter. He hadn’t thought from that standpoint. But it added very considerably to the things he had to be disturbed about.

“I wish you’d said that earlier,” he said. “We could have fooled them on it. But I did pick up the second nearest, not the first solar system. Still—”

He went over the yacht’s detector systems. One picked up the crackling static which was the short wave broadcast of the sun. Another picked up whisperings that came from the gas-giant world, and peculiar trilling noises from the cloud-planet. All were familiar. But as the time to cut acceleration drew near, Howell became more and more nerve-racked. He had the
Marintha
aimed and building up velocity to make ninety per cent of her journey to the green world in free fall. She’d float for three days with no drive operating. Then there’d be a quarter hour of manoeuvering—maybe even less—and then the yacht should be safely aground. And if no slug-ship appeared in time to pick up the present solar-system drive whining, and if it went away before the landing operation—why then they could see what could be done in the way of repairs. Which probably wouldn’t be much.

Presently the acceleration ended. The
Marintha
floated on on stored-up momentum. But Howell was only partly relieved. He had Karen on his mind, and he felt that he would need to fight in her defence, and he had nothing to fight with. He could see no chance of improvement in the yacht’s situation. The capacitor of the overdrive system seemed hopelessly gone, and without it or a substitute he couldn’t get the
Marintha
back to the civilization they knew, even without an inimical alien race to hinder him. He was bitterly sure that the slug-ships had detected the yacht in overdrive and trailed it, and if, improbably, he was able to head back for home, they’d trail the yacht and if they shot down the
Marintha
or simply followed it back to Earth—the tall and glittering cities of resurgent mankind would presently be blasted to rubble-heaps again.

Breen puttered in the galley. He was a civilized man. He’d made a hobby of cookery and a career of botany, neither of which was an adventurous pursuit. He’d never been in physical danger in his life before, and he couldn’t quite realize the situation now. He seemed to think that there was some sort of emergency existing, but that it would be taken care of by somebody whose duty it was. Probably Howell.

Karen worried because she saw that Howell did. She was able to be frightened because something might happen to him. Not even civilization can condition a girl not to worry about some man. But it was true that she worried about the state of things that had been developing satisfactorily between herself and Howell. She was only vaguely uneasy about everything else.

And Ketch reacted according to his type of civilized humanity. He’d hunted big game for sport. Until now he’d had no more serious matter to consider. But now he began to think of this as a sport, with the others and himself as hunted game. He responded with something like elation. It was better sport than he’d ever known before. But of course he couldn’t imagine that he or they could actually be killed.