Space Gypsies (16 page)

He threw the switch. There was dizziness, but it was not disturbing. There was nausea, but it was trivial. The sensation of falling was hardly more marked than in a swiftly falling elevator. Even the screens did not blank out instantly. They seemed to fade instead of being abruptly extinguished. But the
Marintha
went into overdrive. Because of the adjustment of the generator, she was surrounded by a stress-envelope of strained space which had the properties of an overdrive-field, but barely so. By comparison with the speed at which the usual field-strength carried the
Marintha
, she crawled. She crept. She moved at a snail-like gait.

But it was still faster than the first interstellar voyagers had been able to travel. They, though, took six years to make a four-light-year journey between solar systems.

“We’re crawling now,” said Howell. “It’s just barely possible that whatever detects normal overdrive-fields won’t pick up one that’s so nearly something else. If I’m wrong about it—we’ll probably never know it.”

It was officially accepted theory that nothing could break into an overdrive-field. But it was also officially accepted that if the impossible happened and something did—if, for example, a ship in overdrive drove into a sun—that either the field would bounce and the ship’s occupants know nothing of the event, or else the overdrive-field would break with a simultaneous release of all the energy within the ship it surrounded. And in that case, the ship’s occupants would know nothing of the event because they’d be dead before they could realize it.

Now the
Marintha
drove more slowly than a detection instrument should be willing to credit. For hours on end the space-yacht remained sealed away from all the normal cosmos. It was not possible to see anything, hear anything, or know anything of the universe beyond the overdrive-field’s extension.

Howell said, “It seems to me that for two people who supposedly care for each other, Karen, we act less romantically than any other couple in history.”

Karen smiled faintly.

“But you’re busy taking me to where I’ll be safe, aren’t you?”

“Trying, yes. Succeeding—I don’t know. But at least we’re not acting like characters in a drama-tape!”

Karen looked at him with a peculiarly wry expression. Their chance of living seemed very small. She considered that she and Howell were very probably about to die. Naturally, she would have preferred their romantic state to loom at least as large as the danger they were in. But Howell was acting with complete sanity, trying to find even the last least chance for the two of them. Karen, though, would have settled for a little less sanity and a little more ecstasy in what might be their last moments of life. But a girl can hardly change the character of the man she does care about. Karen submitted to the way Howell happened to be made, because there was nothing else to do.

Still, it was a very long time indeed before Howell raised his eyes from the now-not-registering instruments and said, “Now we’ll see what happens.”

He nodded to Karen, but didn’t smile. His expression was wholly intent instead of impressively emotional. Without any trimmings at all, he threw the breakout switch to find out what might await them in normal space.

The uncomfortable sensations of breakout were singularly mild. The dizziness and the nausea were trivial. The feeling of a spinning fall was almost absent. The vision-screens lighted almost deliberately, taking a good fraction of a second to reach full brightness.

Then the stars of the galaxy surrounded the
Marintha
on all sides. Their number was incalculable, but it is usual to guess the total number of shining suns in the First Galaxy at one hundred thousand millions. Such a figure has no meaning to anybody. But if one counted all the strong bright stars nearby, and the vastly greater number of those just a little less bright, and the still more enormous number of those just a little bit fainter, and so on down to the unthinkable quantity of suns which are the minutest glimmerings the eye can detect… if one did that, the number a hundred thousand million would acquire meaning. It would be the number of the stars that could , be seen from the
Marintha
.

Silence. Stillness, save for infinitesimal cracklings and hissings. Minutes passed. Tens of minutes. The detection instruments read a unanimous zero.

The small-men murmured to each other. Somehow they seemed bewildered, even disappointed. As long minutes went by and Howell did nothing but watch the instruments, the small-men seemed visibly disturbed. The one in the red vest hesitantly asked a question in his own language. Howell did not lift his eyes.

“See if you can make out what he wants, Karen,” he commanded.

He was doing sums in his head, because the computer could not handle guesses, He attempted, to feel the incomputable total of speeds and durations and courses such as the
Marintha
had followed. It was actually an attempt to find the total of a series of random motions. The result would be a guess which was more or less plausible. He arrived at it.

Karen made gestures to the small-man, and he gesticulated back. She produced a writing-pad. They drew pictures and made motions, and each of them spoke, from time to time, with the unreasonable feeling that that should help in understanding.

Howell said, “I think we have to take the chance.”

Karen spoke with some doubt.

“You asked what the small-man wants. I think he wants to know why you didn’t destroy the ship that was following us. He’s disturbed because it got away.”

“I’ll be happy enough if we’ve got away,” said Howell. “The happiest ending I can see as possible is a chance to save ourselves and the worlds we know from murder-raids by sinking the
Marintha
in the deepest ocean to be found. I don’t want to have to look for one! If we can get back to the small people’s ships, we’ve the best chance to make our suicide—it may come to that—of some use to the galaxy. I think we should try for it.”

He beckoned to the small-man in the red vest. He made it clear that he wanted a direction in which to drive, for a return to the world they’d started from. The small-men’s globe-ships must feel concern for the test-crew of their own race who’d lifted off in the
Marintha
to try out a cobbled repair, and hadn’t come back. Ketch would be indignant over the space-yacht’s vanishing. He’d envisioned himself in the highly dramatic role of a leader of fighting small-men in a superlatively armed globe-ship. He might anticipate something even more glamorous, since he’d said splendidly that Karen would rather be the wife of a fighting man than anything else. And Breen would be deeply anxious about his daughter Karen.

In the
Marintha
’s control room, the small-man with the red vest looked at the stars on the screen. He put his finger decisively on a particular spot. He even marked off the steady, yellow glow of a Sol-type sun as the centre of the solar system they wished to drive for. Howell was dubious that it was the right one. Nevertheless he lined up the
Marintha
for it with infinite care.

“Overdrive coming,” he said curtly.

He threw the switch. The vision-screens faded. There were other evidences that the yacht had gone into overdrive. It was slow overdrive. It was overdrive so much minimized that it was almost something else. But not quite.

The
Marintha
stayed in overdrive on this course and at this speed for very nearly nine hours. There could be no exact computation of the time required. Howell had a feeling about the speed. The little man in the red vest had something more than a feeling about the proper course. Perhaps he’d ideas about the distance, too, but they couldn’t be communicated. In any case, the
Marintha
drove at the minimum rate possible in overdrive for what seemed much longer than the chronometers said. Then Howell broke out. He expected the little man to give him another bearing from this breakout point.

But he didn’t need it. When the screens lighted, with an extreme of deliberation, there was a yellow sun to starboard. There was a cloud-world, with no markings of any sort from the vapour-layers that covered it from pole to pole. There was a gas-giant planet with reddish striations almost at its equator. And there was a green world with ice-caps and seas and continents.

And the
Marintha
’s all-wave receiver picked up whinings that were all too familiar. There were slug-ships in this solar system. They were here by scores and hundreds. The breakout detector flickered and wavered as more slug-ships arrived from nowhere and began to use their solar-system drives as the only practical way to move about within the limits of a sun’s planetary system.

This was, of course, the slug-fleet Howell had deduced must exist because patrolling slug-ships travelled in pairs. Of the pair first encountered, one had stayed out of the way of possible harm while its companion investigated and tried to destroy the
Marintha
. When that ship went to ground and Howell blew it up with a blaster-bolt down the throat of its lightning cannon, the survivor of the pair had bleated and hooted dismally, and then disappeared. Howell reasoned then that it had gone for help. Now it was back with a fleet of fighting ships that nothing could withstand. And as more and more of the ugly ships broke out and began to organize themselves, Howell was bitterly sure that this was the end of everything.

Then he heard the small-men. They made a tumult of triumph and rejoicing. They grinned at him, beaming. From doubt and disappointment, they’d changed instantly to hilarious anticipation. They believed that up to this moment he had seemed to flee so that no companion slug-ship would report that a new and ultra-deadly enemy was in action against its race. Because of that forebearance, they believed, he’d now assembled the now-present fleet to become the victims of his remarkable abilities. They grinned in ecstatic triumph as they waited for him to annihilate the slug-ship fleet.

And more and ever more slug-ships broke out of overdrive and drove to take their places in battle-formation.

Then a bleating, hooting outcry came from the all-wave receiver. A slug-ship was broadcasting something in the chlorine-breathers’ substitute for language. A sun-bright blue-white flame appeared from nowhere and flashed past the
Marintha
. It seemed to miss the yacht by inches. More of the monstrous lightning-bolts shot out—

Howell threw the overdrive switch. The vision-screens faded. There were the usual symptoms accompanying entry into the isolated, twisted-space cocoon which was an overdrive-field. But again the symptoms were mild. They were almost unnoticeable. They were as much fainter than those usually felt as the speed of the
Marintha
was now less than the rate at which overdrive usually carried ships between the stars. The yacht, escaping murder-weapons in space, fled at the slowest of crawls.

For one instant the yacht seemed to be surrounded by a buzzing, whining fleet of unseen enemies. Bleatings and hootings had begun all about her, as the nearest murder-ships relayed the detailed information their instruments gave them. Deadly missiles of ball-lightning flashed toward her, any one of which would end her existence.

Then the place where the yacht had been was empty. Instantly other ships—slug-ships—flicked into seeming nothingness to pursue her.

But they drove on full-power. Before they could recover from the anguish all overdrive entries produce, they had flashed far past the place where the
Marintha
could be said to be. They went on and on, seeking her trail in nothingness, light-weeks and even light-months beyond this planetary system which the
Marintha
hadn’t left.

It was pure recklessness for Howell to use overdrive amidst all the celestial trash that gathers and floats around a sun. It was far from conservative. No skipper is anxious to find out really what will happen if, in overdrive, his ship rams into an asteroid or even the nucleus of a comet. But the
Marintha
had no choice. She had to take to overdrive or be blasted in mid-space, and overdrive meant plunging blindly to nowhere with an escort of chlorine-breathing monsters who might—who might!—be able to crack her field and force her back into cosmos where she was helpless. If they could trail a ship in overdrive, they might be able to do more.

In the
Marintha
the small-men babbled. They were bewildered. They made incredulous gestures to each other. The
Marintha
had plunged into the very centre of a war-fleet of the slug-creatures, and then plunged out again! They couldn’t understand it! If Howell could blow up a grounded slug-ship with a hand-weapon, and if he could disarm booby traps equipped with killer-fields, in his repaired and refurbished ship he should wreak vast destruction on an enemy-fleet! But he hadn’t. Why?

The man with the red vest went to the garbage disposal unit. He lifted its cover and gazed inside. He shook his head querulously.

“Karen,” said Howell grimly, “come up here and get set to talk. Since the small-folk aground must have detected the slug-fleet, they may be getting set to get away. I’ve got to break out to locate the planet they’re on—if they’re still there. If they are there, I’ll risk landing to put these small-men aboard their own ships. I’ll try to turn you over to your father, to get away with them. Then I’ll make sure the
Marintha
doesn’t become a source of information for the monsters who’re after us.”

She protested, “But you won’t—you won’t—”

“Get set to call!” ordered Howell grimly. “Never mind what I’m going to do!”

He made ready as she picked up the communicator and turned it on. He said, “Breakout coming!” and threw the switch. He then became wholly intent upon his instruments and what he could see in the vision-screens. The green world was a vividly visible disk. Karen began to speak: “
Marintha
calling!
Marintha
calling ground! Come in!
Marintha
calling ground.”

The all-wave receiver yielded whinings, faint and very many of them. They sounded not unlike the infuriated buzzings of a nest of hornets. But they were far away now. Very oddly, they were too near to use overdrive for travel, especially with debris to be found in such quantities as appear about a sun. But they were too far away to overtake the
Marintha
on solar-system drive.