Space Gypsies (8 page)

The yacht’s siren went “
Whiro-o-o!
” It would be hearable for miles. Howell came back. He put his arms around Karen again.

“That’ll fetch them,” he said confidently. He kissed her and said, “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”

She said unevenly, “I’ve—been wanting you to.”

“We won’t tell them for now.”

“No… not for now…”

It was insanity, of course. The
Marintha
was crippled and unarmed, and there was a slug-ship descending for a landing somewhere partway around this world. And slug-ships shot on sight at vessels like the
Marintha
. They made booby traps to murder humans, and there could be no doubt that the landing slug-ship would make the space-yacht a target for monstrous blaster-bolts of which one had already crippled her past repair.

The state of things offered no excuse for hope, unless it was that three-quarters of a mile away there were four dummies made from clothing of the
Marintha
’s crew. They lay, those dummies, in a blasted area in which nothing grew. If the slug-ship should notice them—which was doubtful—it might assume that all those who travelled in the
Marintha
had been killed and the yacht needn’t be destroyed before examination. But if it didn’t act on that assumption…

The siren wailed again. The sound would carry over the jungles of an unnamed planet, over hills and hollows, beating upon mountain-flanks and reflected from precipices. Breen and Ketch would hear it and assuredly hasten back. But in the meantime, Karen felt the magnificent uplift of spirit which comes to a girl when she becomes admittedly the most important thing in a chosen man’s life.

They talked pure romantic nonsense, which was doubly foolish because there were things urgently needing to be done. But none of the things that needed to be done were really possible; therefore it would have been quadruply foolish to put aside their sudden and urgent rejoicing in each other’s existence. It would last, it seemed, for only a very short time, but that was all the more reason to rejoice while it was still possible.

The siren wailed again. Its monstrous quaverings went up and down the scale, and flying things launched themselves from jungle treetops and dashed crazily about, and doubtless there were small walking or crawling things that crouched down in their holes and listened to it fearfully, But Howell and Karen hardly noticed it.

They were looking at each other as if they’d never seen each other quite completely before, when Ketch shouted from a little distance away. Then Karen smiled ruefully and drew away from Howell as he released her, and they greeted Ketch and Karen’s father as they came to the port of the yacht.

“We found a rubble-heap,” said Ketch, with a look of shrewdness on his face. “And something else.”

Breen puffed up into the yacht.

“Bad luck!” he grunted. “Very bad luck! There were holes there! Somebody or something dug those holes! Lately!”

Howell nodded unemotionally. Ketch and Breen were agitated by some discovery they’d made. He had now to make them resolute and ready to face what the revelation of a slug-ship’s approach meant. It was, in substance, that they were almost certainly about to be killed. If they reacted as he believed they should—And if they didn’t—He said, “I’ve something to tell you—”

“They were humans,” said Ketch. “They—”

“No doubt about it!” puffed Breen. “No doubt at all! They dug holes down to deposits of metal in the rubble. There was rust left behind. They’d found machinery, maybe. Rusted past recognition, but they can smelt it down, no doubt. Their ships—”

“We found where their ships had grounded,” interposed Ketch. “Brushwood crushed flat. They’d landed, and they’d stayed a while, digging in the rubble-heaps.”

“Must’ve had metal detectors,” said Breen, still partly out of breath. “To tell where the metal was. That’d make them—human. They couldn’t be anything else!”

“They could,” said Howell coldly. “They could be slug-ship beings like those in the one that’s orbiting now, to come down next time around.”

“But they have to be humans! They’re gone now, but—” Then Breen stopped short. “What’s that you say?”

“There’s a slug-ship in orbit,” said Howell. “Karen heard its whine. Considering the booby trap and the
Marintha
plainly visible from the sky, where do you think they’ll turn up?”

There was silence. Then Ketch said almost with zest, “We’ve got to get away fast! Take what we can carry and hide until we can make contact with the humans here. They’re bound to go away again!”

“After studying the
Marintha
,” said Howell savagely, “and learning that there’s another human race than the one they know and set traps for! After possibly guessing that this other human race was wiped out and now has built up again from survivors of the rubble-heap cities after they were smashed thousands of years ago!”

“What—” Ketch’s mouth dropped open.

“And after very probably learning,” continued Howell, still savagely, “that they can do another massacre now, because they’ll have traditions if they haven’t records of smashing the civilization of the rubble-heap men! And they’ll know where to find it. Surely! Do we have to go and hide so they can do that all over again?”

Breen asked querulously, “What else can we do?”

Then Howell told them what else they could do. Their response was almost unbelievable. They were civilized men, citified men, generations removed from any real danger of sudden death. But they were not generations removed from drama-tapes, in which they’d experienced vicariously all sorts of thrills and splendid adventures. Watching them, they developed a fine confidence that they’d survive unharmed all the dangers and dramatic twists of the plot. Now they found themselves cast in roles of a highly dramatic type. Howell’s instructions sounded like stage directions. Breen obediently took one of Ketch’s sporting rifles. Ketch hesitated. He spoke to Karen—but Karen had received Howell’s orders as if there could be no possible other course of action. She, herself, picked out a light rifle with which she’d made good scores at targets. The
Marintha
’s company, save for Howell, prepared for an essentially hopeless battle as if for amateur theatricals.

Only Howell’s grimness was real. He’d handled the three small skeletons which appeared to be those of children. He did not look upon coming events as adventures in which nothing lethal or final could happen to the human participants. He could envision Karen killed: Karen the victim of such a blaster-bolt as had disabled the
Marintha
; Karen wounded, injured, dying. He didn’t envision himself as killed; nobody can really do that. But even generations of total safety hadn’t erased the instinct of man to face lions or slug-ships in defence of a girl he cares for.

So Howell was the one member of the
Marintha
’s crew who knew bloodthirstiness in anticipation of the slug-ship’s landing. He couldn’t imagine what sort of beings manned—or creatured—a slug-ship, but already he hated them with a violence that harked back to the ancient days when men carried stone hammers and spears to kill with.

Breen and Ketch had only enthusiasm to urge them on, but with an infinite amount of luck it might not matter. It could be that long-buried instincts would reappear when the fighting began. Target-shooting was a standard sport and on most worlds a man was expected to make a good score at the flip-targets as in much older days a man was expected to play a good hand of bridge. Living targets might help.

“How about the radar?” asked Ketch briskly. “We want to be warned when they come.”

“No!” said Howell angrily. “This is to be an ambush! The
Marintha
has to seem dead to make it one. They could pick up a radar-pulse!”

“An ambush! ” Breen said zestfully. “Yes! I’ve seen them on drama-tapes. And we’re to lie in ambush!”

Howell pointed out one of the
Marintha
’s view-ports. If the slug-ship landed on this side, here was a good bit of cover. That spot would have a good field of fire. This other would be good concealment from which to shoot.

“Try not to spoil the skins! ” said Ketch.

Howell didn’t protest the confusion of a hunter’s thinking with that of a man fighting for considerably more than his own life.

“Now, over on this side—”

There was a whining noise from the control room. The all-wave receiver had picked up the drive of a slug-ship. Howell’s jaws clamped tightly. He was assuming that the slug-ship creatures thought like men, though they might have very different motives.

But intelligence that arrived at space-drives like those of men, and booby traps such as men have been known to set for each other, and weapons like those of men—the huge blaster-bolt that had hit the
Marintha
was simply an oversized ball-lightning missile—if the slug-creatures paralleled human achievements, they must think like humans, though they need not feel like them at all.

The whine of the distant space-drive stopped. It cut in again. Off once more. Howell could tell what the unseen space-vessel was doing. It was decelerating, of course, to come down and view the
Marintha
from nearby for its destruction, or whatever alternative the slug-creatures had in mind. If the eyes of the slug-creatures were no better than men’s, or their telescopes not more useful, it would want to arrive over the
Marintha
moderately low down. If it suspected powerful weapons of human ships, it would tend to stay high. In any case it would not land before it had in some fashion tested out those supposed weapons. If the four dummies in the dead space were seen and accepted as corpses, the testing might not be elaborate. But the
Marintha
had to lie perfectly still as if all its crew were dead or destroyed. And it might be destroyed anyhow.

There came a mooing, bleating, howling sound from the all-wave receiver. It was beast-like, animal; it formed no words. It sounded like a monster bellowing defiance.

“That’s a challenge,” said Ketch brightly.

“We don’t answer it,” said Howell curtly.

The unthinkably dismal sound came again. Karen’s features showed fear. But she looked quickly at Howell, and her uneasiness disappeared.

There came words from the unseen ship overhead. They were spoken in a clear soprano voice. There were consonants and vowels. It seemed to Howell that he recognized some of the sounds that the booby trap bait-beam had repeated so often. They would be words that happened to occur both in the planetary broadcast and this other mocking, derisive challenge.

This was mockery and it was derision. Howell ground his teeth. He was convinced now that the slug-ship overhead was the same that had challenged the space-yacht in the first place ,with a beastly sound like these last. It had trailed the
Marintha
in its overdrive escape from the encounter. It had followed the overdrive change-of-course to this system. Its breakout point, here, happened to be farther from the green planet than the
Marintha
’s, so it had arrived there on solar-system drive much later. But now it was overhead and the
Marintha
was grounded below, and a ship cannot go into overdrive in atmosphere. It will vaporize itself. So the slug-ship aloft could mock the
Marintha
. And it did.

“I think,” said Howell detachedly, “that things depend now on whether or not they saw or see the dummies I set out.”

Breen and Ketch now seemed to feel the high excitement of men participating in the high adventure of a drama-tape. Howell couldn’t believe that they were desperate like himself, but he needed to keep them in this frame of mind since it was the best he could hope for. When action began they might panic and flee, or they might react as most men have always done when they found their backs against a wall.

More bestial sounds. The soprano voice again.

Breen said, “Too bad the diggers at the rubble-heap city went away! They’d have fought with us.”

“They’re humans,” said Ketch. He listened to the sounds from emptiness. “No doubt about it. Not like whoever’s making that racket.”

This was admirable, sophisticated, tape-dramatic reaction to imminent danger awaiting the moment of its arrival. Howell needed to confirm them in their roles of calm and confident combatants-to-be. He said, “How do you know they’re human?”

“He found—”

“I found something,” said Breen. “An anthropologist could make deductions from it. I make the obvious one—that one of the diggers’ children lost it.”

He drew a small and draggled object from his pocket. It was a stick and a bit of paper or something of the sort. It was coloured. It was very small.

It was a pinwheel, a child’s toy, made out of unimportant materials on a miniature scale. A child would run with it and be charmed by its spinning, or hold it gleefully in a wind to see it turn from the wind’s pressure. But it was no more than three or four inches across.

Howell almost paid attention. But he couldn’t keep his eyes from the screens that showed the sky. There was a ship up there which mocked the
Marintha
. It just barely might see the dummies, and if so it might just barely think the
Marintha
empty of its crew—that all its occupants had gone to be killed by the booby trap.

There was a spark in mid-sky. It was a lurid, furious, deadly blue-white speck of incandescence. It grew. It was coming down. To the
Marintha
. Exactly where it would strike would depend, of course, on the thinking of the creatures in the slug-ship. But in matters of technology they thought like men. They had to! So the one remote chance Howell had seized upon was a guess at further similarity of thinking processes. If the human race in this part of the galaxy built spaceships in the form of globes, the
Marintha
’s hull-design would make the skipper of the slug-ship want to examine something so strange and new. In that case he wouldn’t want to destroy it if he could help it. He might smash a part of it as a precaution. But he might—

The ravening, flaming missile came down. In air, it did not move with the limitless velocity of the bolt that had been fired in between-the-stars. It grew, and sped ferociously for the yacht. Its brilliance was intolerable. Only at the last instant could Howell he sure that it would be a miss.