Space Gypsies (6 page)

“We’ve got to make something to kill them with!” he said fiercely. “The slug-ship things! Because the trap worked! A human ship—of people whose ships must be globes—a human ship came! Its people went toward the globe. Maybe they guessed they were too late because they got no answers to their calls. But they went there. And—and somewhere near the globe one of them touched a trip-wire or a trigger. And then—a killer-field went on—and everything within a quarter of a mile died instantly!”

His fists were clenched. He was fury and rage incarnate.

“The others of the ship—they probably risked going after some of the bodies. But they didn’t dare go too far. There were three of them they didn’t dare try to reach. They’re still there. And I’m pretty sure they’re—children.”

He went and locked himself in the control room. He heard small cracklings. The all-wave receiver, still muted against self-revelation, emitted the noises associated with a solar flare. It was not important, but it reminded him that there was a slug-ship on the way here, confirmed now in its guess at the
Marintha
’s destination by the drive-sounds made by the solar-system drive during the yacht’s landing.

The slug-ship wasn’t hurrying. It followed the
Marintha
leisurely, like hunters after a game animal whose trail is plain and which cannot possibly hope to get away.

A long time later Howell came out again. Ketch nodded reassuringly to Karen.

“He’s all right now, and with new ideas of what we’re to do and how we’ll do it.”

There could have been a touch of sarcasm in Ketch’s tone, but Howell nodded. He said in a carefully controlled voice:

“I’ve been thinking. We’ll get out the capacitor and see what can be done with it. Maybe not all the plates are ruined. Maybe if we take out the spoiled ones, we can reassemble something with enough capacity to work. Maybe we can improvise extra plates. If it’s absolutely necessary, there’s some material in the scenery the slug-creatures built for their booby trap.”

Karen made a wordless sound of protest.

“I know!” said Howell. “But I think I know how to get to the damned thing and turn it off without tripping it. If it’s necessary I’ll try it. Otherwise not.”

“But there’s no point in taking extra chances!” Ketch protested. “We should think of something to be done—”

Howell said nothing. In drama-tapes, the principal characters always found a last-instant solution to their difficulties. Ketch likened their very real predicament to the contrived ones of taped narratives.

“Breen?” asked Howell.

“Botanizing,” said Karen. “He said he wouldn’t go far.”

Howell grimaced. There was so much work to be done, and Breen went poking about looking at plants! But he wouldn’t be of much use in the engine room. Ketch would be better.

“I’m going to take down the capacitor,” Howell said, without happy anticipation but because it was all that could be done.

“Hold on!” protested Ketch. “Shouldn’t we move the yacht first? Hide it and ourselves?”

“The booby trap hasn’t been visited in a long time,” said Howell, “or they’d have repaired the tear in its plating that gives the whole show away. But we may need some material from it. And also, our drive would be spotted when we moved.”

Ketch shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He said, “Excuse me, Karen. We’ve a problem to solve.”

Howell couldn’t spare the energy to be annoyed by Ketch’s adoption of the manner of a dramatic actor. He went into the control room, and Ketch followed. They set to work. Ketch seemed to expect either Howell or himself to make some startling discovery which would solve all problems. Such triumphs were not rare—in fiction. But here there was danger, about which they could do nothing for their own safety. There was danger to more than themselves, about which apparently they could do even less. If the
Marintha
fell into the hands of the slug-ship creatures, even if the four humans now aboard were not discovered, every item of her design and equipment would be proof that there was another human race somewhere in the galaxy. The absence of fighting-ship weapons would be proof, too, that this other race was totally unprepared for battle. And to creatures who would make booby traps for humans, baited with a call for help that they might murder anyone who responded, the prospect of a wholesale massacre would be delightful. They might still have records or traditions of the long-ago extermination of the race of the rubble-heap cities. They might know where to look for them again, guessing that a pitiful numbers of survivors of that butchery might have rebuilt a civilization while forgetting what had destroyed its forerunner.

Howell worked with a grim, set face. Ketch helped with a tendency to make unnecessary, dramatic gestures. They got the capacitor out of its built-in niche. They took it apart. It was hopelessly wrecked. There wasn’t an unpunctured plate or a not-cracked dielectric sheet.

“It’s no go,” said Howell. “We’ve got to work out something else.”

Ketch considered. Then he said, “It seems to me that we should be able to hide somewhere on this planet and live on game we shoot and so on.”

His tone was not that of someone suggesting a regrettable possibility. Howell made no answer at all, but his silence was a more definite disagreement than any possible statement of disapproval would have been.

Breen came back. He was placidly pleased. He had highly interesting botanical specimens, indicating a biological invention paralleling but not duplicating a cross-fertilization process worked out by vegetation on Handel’s Planet. It was a triumph. But there was more.

“There’s a rubble-heap city somewhere near,” he announced. “Look!”

There were eight plant-species—all food-plants—which were found on every planet formerly occupied by the last race of mankind. They did not fit into the evolutionary lines of the worlds on which they were found. They had been introduced by the lost race, the builders of the cities now reduced to debris. Breen had found three of the eight species here. This was evidence that there must be a smashed city somewhere on this world. To Breen, it was splendid progress in the purpose of the
Marintha
’s voyage. It was his aim to find the planet on which the eight species had developed by evolutionary mutation and selection. If he found that world, he’d have found the home world of the lost race, where it began and developed until it was vastly greater and more civilized than mankind of today. If Breen made the discovery and it was verified by other sciences, he would feel that he had not lived in vain.

Karen readied a meal while her father talked expansively of his discovery. There was nothing to be done outside the yacht, and rather less to be done within it, now that the capacitor was known to be destroyed rather than damaged. Howell was not capable of casual conversation, he was so disturbed. His former pessimism had returned when the possibility of making contact with enemies of the slug-ship had vanished. The
Marintha
could support the four of them almost indefinitely, if left alone. It could travel to the other planets of this system, with the same proviso. But there was only one way in which the situation could imaginably be improved. He considered that one way practically hopeless—but it must be tried.

He was silent and moody while the others talked. Karen looked distressed. Breen was absurdly elated—but he blandly waited for the situation to be resolved favourably. Ketch argued plausibly for various implausible courses of action, all of them more or less dramatically appealing but with nothing else to recommend them.

Eventually Breen got out the pictures made from space and examined them under high magnification. Presently he chortled. He’d found where there ought to be a rubble-heap that thousands of years before had been a city. It was within a reasonable distance of the
Marintha
where she lay aground.

Howell couldn’t take their insensitivity to the appalling state of things. He went to his cabin to escape it, and to try to sleep. What he planned couldn’t be done in darkness. He had to wait for day. He noticed that Karen seemed particularly distressed when he left the others, but he didn’t dwell on it now, though most of his thinking was directly or indirectly concerned with Karen.

In the morning he was up the first of them all. He took a blast-rifle and went quietly out of the ship. It could have been extremely unwise, but he couldn’t abandon completely the confidence of humans in their own safety. He knew there was danger, but he could not quite believe in danger from anything but the slug-ship now floating confidently—perhaps gloatingly—out to attempt again the murder of the humans in the
Marintha
. So he went out without leaving word of his purpose. Besides the rifle, he carried two lengths of rope and two of the rope-hooks used for lashing objects fast in ships’ storage holds.

He made his way through the jungle he’d traversed the day It seemed less thick than he remembered it. But jungle tend to seem thinner when one has some familiarity with it.

He came out presently exactly where he’d first glimpsed the dead area the day before. Again he moved around the edge of the killed space, not yet venturing inside it. In a little while he could see the metal globe. And then he moved back and forth, with his eyes raised above ground-level, examining the trees in relation to each other.

He took some time to make his selection. Then he threw a doubled rope with a lashing-hook at its farther end. At the third try he caught the hook on the tree. He tested it. Then he swung himself up on the rope. He was thirty feet above-ground in a very few minutes. He braced himself and flung the rope again. He caught it on a second tree. He tested it, and the limb broke. He hooked on to another. Very shortly he was in the second tree and tossing the lashing-hook into the branches of a third. Again he had trouble making the hook lodge properly, but it could be released by tugging on one side of the doubled cable.

It was very hard work and very slow progress, but he moved into the dead area. The purpose behind approaching the trap by way of treetops was simply, of course, that the globe was the bait of a booby trap. Somewhere in the now-dead space, there was a trigger or a trip-wire. More probably, there were several. Anybody going to the seeming spaceship would normally go on foot. It would be absurd to mount triggers or trip wires in treetops. So Howell moved toward the dummy globe by swinging laboriously from a succession of tree limbs on doubled slender ropes. He chose his aerial route three and four trees ahead.

Ultimately he arrived where trees had been felled to make room for the fake spacecraft, where the booby trap centered.

He searched this space very painstakingly before he swung down to it. For minutes he moved with infinite caution, making quite sure that he would not touch anything—not even a wire as thin as a spiderweb—by any accident.

He found the booby trap unit itself. Very carefully and very painstakingly, he jammed the relay which would take a tiny dollop of power from the trigger or the trip, and send a monstrous surge of current through the killer-field generating unit. He smashed that unit. Then he worked for some time getting a part of its power-assembly separated from the rest. He was more or less puzzled by the plastic coating, not only of the unit as a whole, but of each part of it separately. It was a hard, transparent substance. Cables were coated with it; where they were joined, the joint had the glassy coating. In the whole device, including the connections; there wasn’t the fraction of a square millimetre of bare metal exposed.

He tried to make deductions from the fact as he went, staggering a little from his burden, back to the edge of the formerly deadly space. He passed the small and pathetic skeletons. He went to the edge of the brown space. He put down the capacity-storage unit from the killer-field device. He went back. Unhappily, he gathered up the skeletons. They were small. They were fragile. They seemed definitely to be those of twelve-year-old children. Doggedly—perhaps he was ashamed of his sentimentality—he placed them neatly and respectfully under a cover of green stuff. He recovered the alien capacitor and went back to the
Marintha
with it.

The others of the
Marintha
’s company had his own generations-old, automatic confidence in their safety under all circumstances not specifically pointed out as dangerous. Karen was the only one left in the ship. She greeted him with a little indrawn breath of relief.

“We didn’t know where you’d gone!” she told him. “My father and Ketch went to see the rubble-heap the photograph says isn’t far away.”

Howell frowned. He’d taken appalling chances himself. He was just back from taking them. But it seemed to him that Karen shouldn’t have been left by herself. There wouldn’t be dangerous animals if there was a shattered city on this planet, of course, but it was still far from certain that nothing else inimical existed here.

“I’ve had a queer feeling,” said Karen uncertainly, “that there was something watching the yacht just now. Hiding—and peering at me.”

Howell, struggling, got the object he’d brought back up upon the exit-port sill.

“It’s not likely,” he said. He got up into the port and picked up the burden again. “Why not close the port?”

“My father and Ketch are out.”

“They’ll bang on the hull if necessary,” he told her. He put down his load in the engine room. “I brought this back to see how far ahead of us the slug-ship creatures may be. I rather hope it’s a long way.”

He cracked the hard plastic coating on the bus-bars of the package he’d brought back. He made contacts. He set up circuits. He hooked in instruments.

“I’m going to do some tests,” he explained, “to see how this compares with our ruined capacitor. It functioned like a capacitor in the circuit I took it from. If they’re way ahead of us, they’ll have designed more power-storage capacity in this than we had in our capacitor of several times the size. If so, we may repair our overdrive around it. If not, we don’t. We’ll be better off if we can, but the rest of humanity will be better off if the slug-creatures aren’t too far advanced.”

“You think they’ll—attack Earth some day?”