Space Gypsies Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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.”

  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 stea
died 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.”