Space Gypsies

CHAPTER ONE

The Marintha was three months and four landings away from Earth when it became necessary to change the fuel-ingot in her drive. It had been necessary twice before on this journey. It was routine. It was so normal an operation that only Howell, who owned the space-yacht and acted as skipper, and Ketch in the engine room, were involved. Howell’s part in it was simply to bring the yacht out of overdrive—the state of being in a self-created cocoon of stressed space in which the normal properties of space went haywire. The speed of light, for example, depended on the power of the unit that stretched the nothingness about the Marintha. The increase of mass with velocity was reversed. When Howell threw the switch to end these conditions, the Marintha would break out from the totally opaque and non-reflecting overdrive field. She would find herself somewhere in between-the-stars. It was extremely unlikely that there’d be a solar system within light-years.

That was all Howell had to do. Then Ketch, in the engine room, would unscrew the bolts of the fuel-chamber cover. He’d take out the eroded fuel-ingot, put it aside for later re-smelting, and put a new ingot in its place. He’d put the lid back on, re-tighten the bolts, and then the Marintha could go on her way. Only the two persons did the whole thing. The others aboard paid no attention. Breen, whose speciality was botany, did not interrupt his concoction of a special festive dish to break the monotony of pre-prepared spacecraft rations. Karen, his daughter, was in the tiny control room with Howell. Ketch, of course, was in the engine room. His avocation was big game hunting, but he served as the Marintha’s engineer. The yacht was too small to need intercoms between its compartments. Howell simply called, “Breakout coming!”

Karen didn’t answer. It wasn’t necessary. Her father put down the fluffy dessert he was blending and grunted acknowledgment. Ketch said, “Go ahead.” He stood beside the fuel-chamber. Howell threw the switch.

The acutely uncomfortable sensations of breakout hit them. The four aboard the yacht felt a momentary violent dizziness and a momentary violent nausea, and then a feeling of giddy, twisting fall. But it lasted less than a heartbeat. Then the vision-screens lighted, and all the stars of the galaxy shone in all their innumerable tints and brightnesses. The Marintha was back in normal space in which a ship could not possibly travel faster than the speed of light and in which the nearest solar system might be a lifetime away.

Karen looked at the stars with wonder in her eyes. They were unfamiliar, of course. Except for four landings, the Marintha had driven steadily for three months away from her home port, Earth. She had covered an improbable number of light-centuries of distance. All the star patterns seen from Earth had long since been lost. Only the Milky way remained recognizable among the features of the galaxy—and that seemed curiously askew.

There was the matter-of-fact clicking of the log camera, which photographed the cosmos at each breakout from overdrive for a suitable record of its journey. It happened that this particular breakout was farther from the First Solar System in this particular direction than any human ship had travelled before. But that wasn’t a distinction nowadays. Since the finding of those rubble-heaps which were considered to be the ruins of cities built by mankind’s progenitor’s, space travel went on with a casual confidence earlier times could not have imagined. There were no longer boasts of farthest-from-home journeys. Either somebody had broken the record before one could brag about it, or somebody very shortly would. The rubble-heaps that had been cities were proof, it was believed, that men had nothing to fear but other men.

So as the Marintha lay still in emptiness, out of overdrive, Karen stared at the strange new stars, Howell lounged in the pilot’s chair, Karen’s father went back to his cookery, and Ketch unscrewed the bolts on the fuel-chamber lid. None of the four felt any anxiety. They had perfect confidence in the yacht. They had fuel and food to last almost indefinitely. They couldn’t imagine needing anything else. Ketch was equipped for big game hunting anywhere the Marintha might happen to land. Breen was equipped with the tools of botany. Howell did not own a weapon, and of course Karen was unarmed. The Marintha was wholly without any equipment for battle other than Ketch’s hunting rifles. But the rubble-heaps on four hundred different planets—the Marintha had added two more in its last four landings—assured them that there was nothing in the galaxy to make a yacht need to be able to defend itself.

It was remarkable, if they’d realized it. It was appalling, if they’d thought about it. They could have reasoned quite logically to a conclusion that somewhere, in some direction and at some distance, they must run into some danger that the builders of the now-deserted cities hadn’t been able to counter. Because the cities now were rubble. But no danger ever had turned up, so they’d no faintest suspicion that such a thing was possible.

Ketch removed the last bolt from the fuel-chamber lid. He put aside the almost-used-up fuel-ingot. He put in a fresh one. He replaced the bolts. He began to screw down the lid. Karen’s father worked upon the foamy dessert that was to top off their next meal. He decorated it with delicately sculptured foliage—leaves of one of the eight food-plants found everywhere that rubble-cities were to be found. They were proof that the builders of those cities had carried their own food-plants from world to world as they settled them.

In the control room, Howell looked casually at the stars, and now and again out of habit looked at the instrument-board. One of the instrument-needles quivered very slightly. He didn’t happen to be looking at it. Presently, another. Then a wide-sensitivity receiver clicked loudly. It was an all-wave receiver and could give notice of beamed radiation through most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radar and communicator-beams became audible as they arrived.

Such things were arriving now. Howell stared.

“Queer! ” he said. “That’s queer!”

Frowning, he began to flip switches, one after another. Beam-direction locators. A wave-form analyzer. A recorder.

“What’s the matter?” asked Karen.

“Something out there… I don’t know what. But it couldn’t be another ship! That’s unthinkable! It couldn’t be!”

Nevertheless, the instruments insisted that something was here in between-the-stars where only the Marintha should in reason exist. The beam-direction locator swung to indicate a source of microwave radiation almost dead ahead. The waveform analyzer busily prepared a picture of a distinctly unusual wave-pattern. The recorder whined faintly, its tape storing human speech in the control room as well as all the data brought in by the yacht’s instrumentation.

Howell threw on the yacht’s radar. It took guidance from the beam-locator and flung its peculiar bat-like squeaks in the direction the locator pointed out. Echoes came back. They were audible, via loud-speaker, but they went to the radar-screen, too. A circle appeared on that screen. It shrank and shrank, and double circles appeared and shrank, and then triple ones. There was a blip. Then four circles appeared and shrank on the radar-screen and a second blip appeared. The circles expanded once more until the first blip reappeared. It held steady in position.

“There are two things out there!” said Howell, frowning. “Two of them! One’s about ten thousand miles away. The other’s nearer fifty thousand. What the devil—they’re almost stationary!”

That was not natural. The things themselves were extraordinary. There is much matter accumulated around suns and stars and solar systems. There are meteorites and cosmic-dust particles and cometary masses and shapeless objects up to the size of asteroids. But in between-the-stars there is emptiness. There are no things giving radar indications from ten and fifty thousand miles. There can be dark stars, but not masses of matter which by radar report are only feet or yards in size. Most particularly, there are no objects in between-the-stars which project microwave beams at yachts like the Marintha.

On the other hand, it was the most firmly believed of all the dogmas of science that mankind had nothing to fear but itself. There had been an interstellar civilization once before. There were the ruins of its cities to prove it. It had ended. The same ruins proved that. But it was a human civilization. There couldn’t be a non-human race in the galaxy to constitute a danger to mankind. The lost race of the rubble-heap cities had exterminated all rivals before it grew old and weary and—so the most respected authorities said—committed suicide.

The beam-locator clicked again. Something new had been projected at the Marintha. It was on the order of a radar-beam, but the analyzer made it out to be extraordinarily complex. It ceased. Howell threw the yacht’s electron telescope into circuit. The telescope-screen showed a pattern of stars, but with something indefinite in silhouette between them. He adjusted the controls. The object clarified. There was only starlight, and this was quite at the limit of the telescope’s pick-up power for such faint illumination. But the thing in the telescope field was obviously a spaceship of some sort. Yet it certainly hadn’t been made on any planet Howell knew.

He said sharply over his shoulder: “Ketch! Hurry up with the drive. There’s something out yonder I don’t like. We may need to get moving—and fast!”

He had cold chills running up and down his spine. The sensation was like what one might expect if one saw a ghost. Howell saw something and didn’t believe it—but still he saw it. There couldn’t be another civilized race! It wasn’t possible! For half a thousand years men had roamed the stars, and at first they were cautious and even timorous because the laws of probability said that pure chance must have produced more than one creature capable of civilization in the hundreds of millions of Earth-type worlds in the galaxy of the Milky way.

But there were none. There never had been even one intelligent race other than the human. The progenitors of modern mankind had possessed a civilization that present-day men hadn’t yet matched. They’d wiped out all possible rivals just as they’d destroyed all dangerous animals on the worlds they’d colonized. Modern man had inherited a galaxy made safe for humanity. He hadn’t inherited anything else, but this much seemed certain—and nothing contrary to it could be imagined!

But some ten thousand miles away there was an object which beamed complex microwaves at the Marintha. It was shaped like an Earth-ecology slug. Now, suddenly, a faint whining sound came from it, and was picked up by the Marintha’s detection apparatus. The whine was like that of a space-drive—the normal-space drive used for journeys between planets and for landings and liftings-off from worlds. It was slow, and quite useless outside a planetary system. But the drive used between suns was too fast to be practical for journeys of only light-hours or even days.

“That’s a drive,” said Howell. All unconsciously, his voice had gone grim. “It’s a ship, and it’s moving toward us! Ketch, can you hurry things up?”

Ketch swore. A spanner clattered on the engine room floor. He’d tried to hurry and his fingers became thumbs.

“These bolts have a lot of threads on them,” he said irritably. “I’m doing the best I can!”

Howell watched the radar-screen. Karen opened her lips to speak, and did not.

“It’s moving toward us,” Howell said tensely. “And it has plenty of acceleration!” He stirred restlessly. “I’ll feel better when we can drive!”

Karen’s father came to the control room door. He’d removed the apron he’d been wearing while, despite his eminence in the science of botany, he acted as ship’s cook for a small, private, and strictly amateur space-exploration expedition. Howell set the controls for a high-speed entry into overdrive the instant it was possible. Breen looked at him benignly.

“What’s up?”

Howell said again, “There’s something out there. It looks like a ship and acts like a ship. But it can’t be—unless it’s a non-human one.”

“Impossible!” said Breen confidently. “Let’s go over and look at it.”

“It’s coming to look at us,” said Howell.

Ketch said angrily from the engine room, “I crossed a thread. Four more bolts to go!”

Then there was silence. By all authoritative opinion, the thing that was happening, couldn’t be. The slug-shaped ship simply couldn’t have been made by men. Its radar—if it was only a radar—wouldn’t have had such a complex wave-form. But there were radar-scopes in existence which instead of returning only the news that something was a certain distance away, bearing such-and-such, gave information about the object’s size and shape and composition. It was expected to be very useful to meteor-miners, but the Marintha wasn’t equipped with it. The slug-ship might have something of the sort, though, in which case it already knew much more about the Marintha than the Marintha knew about it.

Howell touched the query-button, and the triple circle on the radar-screen shrank and disappeared. The quadruple circle appeared. The blip beyond it from the second impossible object showed up again. It seemed to be stationary, still nearly fifty thousand miles away.

“That one’s not heading our way, anyhow,” said Howell. “Maybe they feel about us as I feel about them. I’d like to have a consort right now, to carry back word of this affair if we happened to get the worst of it.”

A noise came out of the all-wave receiver. It was not a voice, in any normal sense. It was a mooing, bleating, howling sound, more like the dismal bellow of an animal than anything else. Karen went pale. The idea of a mysterious, alien spaceship operated by men would be alarming enough to a girl—but a spaceship with a crew of beasts who made mere sounds instead of speech…

“If that’s a question,” said Howell grimly, “the answer is ‘no comment’. Not yet! When Ketch has finished his job, maybe! But we act mysterious until he’s finished, anyhow.”

Ketch called from the engine room:

“Two more bolts, and then tightening up all around. Then we’ll be set!”

Howell bit at his knuckles, watching the instruments and the screens. It was not easy to admit to one’s self that humanity’s isolated grandeur and dignity might be an illusion. But a different race, achieving spacecraft, might have better ships than men could make. Which would be bad! They might be so much farther advanced that men would be like savages in comparison! And when a civilized race encounters a primitive one, the result is history—at least on Earth. It isn’t the civilized race that dies of the meeting.

A second mooing, bleating sound. It was horrible because it seemed to be meaningless. It was a noise, and some creature had made it, but it had no discoverable significance. No understandable purpose was served by its utterance.

“Maybe,” said Howell in wholly mirthless amusement, “maybe we should howl back. It might be only polite!”

But his expression did not lighten. He was uneasy. He was very unhappily puzzled. He was genuinely worried, which showed itself in a violent wish that Karen hadn’t come on this cruise. The journey itself was Breen’s idea—to test a theory he’d formed about the eight kinds of food-plants found wherever ancient cities had become mere piles of rubble. Howell had offered the Marintha and himself because he knew that Karen would make the trip with her father. Now he wished urgently that he hadn’t, for Karen’s sake alone.

There was a long silence from space. Ketch turned the last bolts. It took time. Then there came an entirely new kind of sound from the far-away but approaching slug-ship. The beam-locator verified its source. It came from the slug-ship—and it was human speech.

It was words, unintelligible but unmistakable. The voice was a clear soprano. It could be a child or a woman or a young girl. It spoke briskly and came to a plain stop, and then there was silence again.

Howell sat up straight in the pilot’s chair. Breen said with satisfaction, “Now, that’s something like it! They don’t use the same language we do, but I’ll accept whoever said that as kissing kin to Karen and me!”

“It was human,” agreed Howell. “No doubt of it! Karen—”

“What?”

“Say something into this microphone,” Howell commanded. “Your voice sounds like that one. It should be as reassuring to them as that was to us. Go ahead!”

Karen was relieved. There were still some people who spoke languages other than the one now considered the galactic tongue. As time went on, it could be expected that dialects would develop on different worlds,and perhaps some day interpreters might be needed. But humans who used any human language would have the beginning of communication if only because they used the same sort of signals: words.

Howell stared at the electron telescope screen as if he expected Karen’s words to make a visible change in the slug-ship’s appearance. She said carefully:

“ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gymble in the wabe—”

There was a brilliant flash of light from the forepart of the approaching slug-shaped ship. A blue-white flame, bright as a sun, streaked toward the Marintha. It travelled at incredible speed. No material object could be accelerated to such a velocity so quickly. It moved like a lightning-flash toward the Marintha.

By pure, bewildered instinct, Howell threw over the overdrive switch. Relays crashed and contacts arced and there was the beginning of those excessively unpleasant sensations which either entering or breaking out of overdrive invariably produced.

But the flame-missile hit. It hit obliquely, but it hit. And there were spitting sparks and jettings of burned-out insulation smoke in the engine room. The Marintha teetered on the very borderline between escape into overdrive and collapse back to normal space. The sensations of the four in the yacht were intolerable-dizziness and nausea and spinning fall… They seemed to last for hours. But, obviously, they didn’t.

The vision-screens went dark. Instantly all instruments read zero. The Marintha was in overdrive, racing for nowhere at multiples of the speed of light. Nothing could touch her. She was utterly out of communication with the universe of stars and suns and galaxies. She had no contact with anything outside herself. And when she broke out of overdrive again, she should be almost infinitely far away from the place where an impossible, alien spacecraft had fired an incredible weapon at her from thousands of miles away—and had made a partial hit with it.

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.