Space Gypsies

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 steadied 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.”

Karen looked dubious. Her father said blandly:

“Remember, Karen, civilization is a matter of natural development. On all planets nature invents the equivalent of trees and brushwood and even grass. In the same way savage humans invent clubs, then spears, then bows and arrows. When civilization comes, men invent chemical explosives, then laser weapons, and then blast-weapons in that order. The thing that hit us was a blast-weapon. So the creatures of the slug-shaped ships can’t be too far ahead of us!”

Karen shook her head. Her father took her arm and led her off to the galley, there to discuss a possible substitute for the dessert that had dropped from his hand and was now impalpable wetted dust in the garbage-disposal.

Ketch said unpleasantly, “You’re wrong about the slug-ship panicking when it sighted us! When I go hunting, I’m not panicked by the sight of game! I’m hunting! So were they!”

Howell nodded.

“Don’t you think that’s occurred to me?”

“If I’m right,” said Ketch, with an authoritative air, “they’ll turn up here. They won’t need to trail us! If the voice they used to trick us means they’re hunting men, they’ll know where to look for us!”

Howell looked up sharply. Ketch said, “Hunting deer, you know they’ll head for water. Hunting humans in space, you’d know they’d either high-tail it for home, or else head for the nearest Sol-type solar system to find an Earth-type world to land and bide on.”

Howell ground his teeth. He wasn’t a hunter. He hadn’t thought from that standpoint. But it added very considerably to the things he had to be disturbed about.

“I wish you’d said that earlier,” he said. “We could have fooled them on it. But I did pick up the second nearest, not the first solar system. Still—”

He went over the yacht’s detector systems. One picked up the crackling static which was the short wave broadcast of the sun. Another picked up whisperings that came from the gas-giant world, and peculiar trilling noises from the cloud-planet. All were familiar. But as the time to cut acceleration drew near, Howell became more and more nerve-racked. He had the Marintha aimed and building up velocity to make ninety per cent of her journey to the green world in free fall. She’d float for three days with no drive operating. Then there’d be a quarter hour of manoeuvering—maybe even less—and then the yacht should be safely aground. And if no slug-ship appeared in time to pick up the present solar-system drive whining, and if it went away before the landing operation—why then they could see what could be done in the way of repairs. Which probably wouldn’t be much.

Presently the acceleration ended. The Marintha floated on on stored-up momentum. But Howell was only partly relieved. He had Karen on his mind, and he felt that he would need to fight in her defence, and he had nothing to fight with. He could see no chance of improvement in the yacht’s situation. The capacitor of the overdrive system seemed hopelessly gone, and without it or a substitute he couldn’t get the Marintha back to the civilization they knew, even without an inimical alien race to hinder him. He was bitterly sure that the slug-ships had detected the yacht in overdrive and trailed it, and if, improbably, he was able to head back for home, they’d trail the yacht and if they shot down the Marintha or simply followed it back to Earth—the tall and glittering cities of resurgent mankind would presently be blasted to rubble-heaps again.

Breen puttered in the galley. He was a civilized man. He’d made a hobby of cookery and a career of botany, neither of which was an adventurous pursuit. He’d never been in physical danger in his life before, and he couldn’t quite realize the situation now. He seemed to think that there was some sort of emergency existing, but that it would be taken care of by somebody whose duty it was. Probably Howell.

Karen worried because she saw that Howell did. She was able to be frightened because something might happen to him. Not even civilization can condition a girl not to worry about some man. But it was true that she worried about the state of things that had been developing satisfactorily between herself and Howell. She was only vaguely uneasy about everything else.

And Ketch reacted according to his type of civilized humanity. He’d hunted big game for sport. Until now he’d had no more serious matter to consider. But now he began to think of this as a sport, with the others and himself as hunted game. He responded with something like elation. It was better sport than he’d ever known before. But of course he couldn’t imagine that he or they could actually be killed.

Howell came upon him examining his sporting rifles and preparing them for use on something other than four- or six-legged game.

Howell said abruptly, “When we land, we’ve got to check our overdrive system first thing. Everything depends on our getting it to work.”

“We’ll see about it,” promised Ketch. Then he said interestedly, “What do you think that slug-ship heaved at us?”

“It was an over-sized blaster,” said Howell. “It fired a ball-lightning bolt. It moved too fast to be a material object, and it would be slowed up by air just like a bolt from a blast-rifle. There’s simply no limit in space to how fast or how far it can go.”

Ketch whistled, and then nodded.

“We could build that,” he said thoughtfully. “The creatures after us may not be so far advanced!”

“They’ve got overdrives that work,” said Howell. “And maybe other things we don’t know about yet. Anyhow, our first job after landing is to try to tinker the overdrive.”

Ketch grinned.

“Do that,” he said,“and you’ll head for home, eh? I’m thinking it would be sport to hunt those creatures.” Then he said suddenly, “Or are you thinking all we can hope for is a safe landing on a habitable planet? That if we find one with a rubble-heap city on it we’ll be extra lucky because there’ll be food-plants for us, by courtesy of our ancestors? Is that your idea?”

“We’ll need a lot of luck to get even that,” said Howell dourly. “But we’ve had some. We could be out in between-the-stars with a completely smashed overdrive. We’re not. Or that blaster-bolt could have hit us a fiftieth of a second before it did. And it didn’t. So we’re here.”

Surprisingly, Ketch grinned more widely.

“Ah! Look on the bright side!” he said approvingly. “But what might seem to you the bright side mightn’t appeal to me.”

Howell frowned.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’ve done a lot of hunting,” said Ketch, “but I never had to depend on killing meat for food. It ought to be exciting. I might like it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Howell.

“You wouldn’t,” said Ketch amiably. “I’m just saying that it would be sporting to try to kill some of these creatures that tried to kill us. Like a drama-tape story in reality. Do you watch drama-tapes?”

“No.”

“There’s some good hunting stuff on some of them,” said Ketch. He regarded Howell amusedly. It was singularly like the air of a younger man treating an older man with kindly tolerance because the older man thinks foolish things he’s learned instead of the wise things one invents.

Howell shrugged his shoulders and went back into the control room. And almost immediately he heard the whine of a ship’s solar-system drive. It was what he’d heard at the beginning of the encounter with the slug-ships with which this present situation had begun. It wouldn’t be a human ship. It was a slug-shaped craft, past question, and if Ketch were right, it would be heading for the green world which was the only planet in this system of any possible use to humans. Presently he heard another and fainter whine. That would be the consort of the scout-ship, hanging in the background in case the first ship ran into trouble.

Grimly, Howell cut off all his detection devices. They might reveal the position of the Marintha. They might also fail to give warning if she was discovered, but in that case there was nothing they could do, so it wouldn’t matter.

Pessimism filled him. The vision-screens wouldn’t either broadcast or resonate, so they could be left on. It occurred to him that by cutting down the sensitivity of the all-wave receiver he might make that non-resonant. He did so. Then he could see the universe around him, and he could hear communications between the two slug-ships. He found himself hoping absurdly that when they heard no drive and their detectors found nothing—the Marintha might well be out of their range—they’d simply go away to hunt in a more probable place. But he didn’t believe it. Anyhow, to change the Marintha’s destination from the green world to one—of the other planets would be a blatant advertisement of the yacht’s existence and course.

He tried to think of other matters than purely pessimistic envisionings of disaster. There was the inferred existence of enemies the slug-ships hunted. A recorded human voice from the slug-ship suggested that those enemies were human beings, separated from Earth-humans by light-centuries and by forty thousand years of isolation. If slug-ship scouts travelled in pairs, for one to be sure to escape contact with enemy craft and bring a stronger force to avenge the other—why perhaps the whining he’d heard here wasn’t a slug-ship at all, but a ship of the slug-ship creatures’ antagonists in a war that went on hereabouts in space.

Such feverish attempts to find reason for even the most unlikely hopes kept Howell busy. There was no more profitable thing for him to do. The Marintha floated effortlessly upon the long curved course which should bring her to rendezvous with the green planet. Howell listened for communications between the two slug-ships. Their drives were silent now. He stayed beside the control-board, listening and watching and listening again, until from sheer exhaustion he fell into nerve-racked sleep.

Karen waked him, her eyes anxious.

“I know you need sleep,” she said unhappily, “but there’s something coming in and we don’t know what to make of it.”

He was instantly wide awake. He stared at the screens. The now-familiar pattern of the stars was unchanged. The all-wave receiver gave out only the tiny cracklings of the sun and small other sounds perfectly natural in a planetary system.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“It just stopped. It’ll come back. It—it sounds like words.”

He shook himself. He stood up and moved himself. He ached from the hours of uneasy partial slumber he’d had.

Then there were new sounds. They weren’t whinings. They weren’t the beast-howl, beast-mooing noises with which the Marintha had once been challenged. These new sounds began faintly, and strengthened faintly, and died away again. Karen parted her lips to speak, but he waved her to silence. The sounds came again.

Howell risked raising the sensitivity of the all-wave receiver by a trifle. The sounds came once more, and louder.

“They’re words,” said Howell.

He wanted to rejoice. He wanted to feel that something was breaking for the four of them in the Marintha. He wanted desperately to credit fate or chance or destiny with some sense of fairness—which would result in Karen’s safety. But there’d been too many bad breaks.

“If,” he said deliberately, after a long time, “if that isn’t another decoy-call like the one you answered, Karen, this may be what we haven’t really hoped for. But I’m not going to answer it. Not yet!”

He settled down to listen to it. Hours after the first hearing, he believed he recognized certain sequences in the sounds. They came again and again. The sounds came at intervals of about a quarter of an hour. They continued for a minute or more. Then they faded out. Presently they came back, and he recognized the same sequences of syllables.

It was a taped message, transmitted without a pause by an automatic transmitter. But the way it faded in and out again was proof that it was a beamed message, sweeping back and forth so that a large volume of space would receive a reasonably strong signal at the cost of its being audible only at intervals. It was like a position-indicator on a seacoast. It was like a traffic-lane marker for atmospheric fliers. It was like the lighthouses—of ancient days, at least identifying themselves and possibly telling more than their own identity. It could even be a distress signal.

Or it could be a trick of the slug-ship’s crew.

Howell doubted everything except the most undesirable of interpretations. But even he had to admit that if it were a human broadcast, it could mean that this was an area and a solar system where slug-ships did not come. Otherwise the human-voiced people would not have dared—No! It might mean that here humans were not afraid of the slug-ships! It could be a matter-of-fact announcement of the location of a city the slug-ships dared not attack. It could be a combat-base ,I of enemies of the slug-ship creatures. It could have a fighting force strong enough to give battle to any force brought against it.

It could be almost anything. Those were the encouraging ideas which Howell regarded with pessimistic suspicion. There was the possibility that the Marintha actually neared safety, but that one slug-ship dared make a foray here, and that it would rush upon and destroy the Marintha before help could come from the green world.

In any case, if there were humans aground on the green planet, it should be possible to communicate with them and make friends with them and have Karen at least in no such danger as she was in now.

But there was the slug-ship! Howell wouldn’t risk a call to the planet ahead. Not until the Marintha was much nearer. Not until he began to pick up the radiation-signals that fill all space near a centre of civilization. The most he would risk—so great was his distrust of all things that might harm Karen—the utmost he’d risk was the energizing of the beam-locator. And it indicated that the beamed broadcast came from the green planet toward which the Marintha floated. More, it pointed to one spot where now-visible continents almost divided a muddy-coloured sea.

The electron telescope told more and more about the planet as the Marintha floated nearer. It was a good world. There were seas and islands and continents between two ice-caps of which one was larger than the other. There was an area which was probably desert, and there were mountain-ranges which said that there should be rain-forests. But he saw no sign of agriculture. At that, though, foodstuff on this world might grow mainly on trees, and there would be no need for vast clearings and seasonally planted crops.

But there were no signs of cities. Not one. The beam-direction locator, tuned to pin-point the source of the monotonous, fading-in-and-fading-out broadcast, said that it came from a peninsula jutting out into a world-girdling sea, just where two continents almost came together. There was a small circular area here which looked different from its surroundings. But the most painstaking search showed no sign of civilized development.

Howell, having yielded to faint and desperate hopes, now felt himself sinking back into complete discouragement.

“The worst I can imagine,” he told Karen gloomily, “is that either it’s a trick of the slug-ship creatures, or else instead of being help for us, it’s a call for help for someone else. It could be a distress-call from a human ship, in a part of space the slug-ships usually stay away from. Even that could be a break—maybe! It wouldn’t be too good, but we need anything good we can get. But I’m not sure! I’m suspicious of I-don’t-know-what. Yet I can’t bring myself to believe that we shouldn’t give it a good close look.”

“I think you’re exactly right,” said Karen. She looked at him with a certain anxiety. “My father thinks so too.”

Breen said comfortably, “Ketch thinks the same. He was telling Karen so.”

At just this moment Ketch appeared and said amiably, “What was I telling Karen? It was probably a lie.”

Howell said doggedly, doubting his own wisdom but with thoughts of the slug-ship haunting him, “I’m going to make one orbit low down, swinging over the peninsula the beam-cast comes from. We’ll all use our eyes, and there’ll be the cameras. We’ll be moving too fast to use the electron telescope. If we’re not shot down—we’ll be going fast, and even artillery-sized blasters have a limited velocity in air—if we’re not shot down and there’s no attempt at it, we’ll land on the second orbiting. Right?”

Ketch said, “There’s nothing else to do, is there?”

Breen agreed complacently. “You’re the skipper,” he said.

He beamed, and Howell felt a certain astonished annoyance that any man could be so blithely and blindly confident that everything would come out all right in the end. Howell was acutely aware that he might be making a decision that would doom all of them. But in his best judgment they were already doomed. And neither of the others offered to take charge. They didn’t even object to what he proposed. It threw all the responsibility on his shoulders.

It was a heavy load. He took observations. He listened with straining ears to the small crackling sounds from the nearby sun. He re-computed: his rendezvous with the green planet while the Marintha floated on, losing momentum ever so gradually to the gravitational field of the sun, changing velocity hour by hour, yet always moving toward that imaginary point in space where she would fall into orbit around the green world, at the very limit of its atmosphere.

Then would come the moment of decision. Absolutely anything could be waiting for the yacht. It was already certain that a slug-ship floated on as the Marintha did, with the same ice-capped planet as its destination. But it had broken out of overdrive on the far side of the sun. It would not arrive before the Marintha had either made contact with a human civilization on the planet, or with a wrecked ship of the presumably human race—or possibly had run into a trap from which there was no escape.

Howell tried to fit the pieces of the Marintha’s situation into a pattern from which predictions could be made. But he failed completely. There was simply no alternative to the action he was taking. It offered only the remotest of favourable possibilities, but all other actions than this offered no favourable chances at all.

The Marintha floated on toward the meeting place with the green world. Clouds could be seen to move across its sunward hemisphere. As the Marintha approached, Howell hooked up an extremely high-precision directional receiver and tried to pick up other signals such as any civilized planet must let escape to space. There were no spark-signals. There were no amplitude-modulated signals. No frequency-modulated sounds. There was static from thunderstorms. There was nothing else—except the endlessly repeated broadcast call and minute-long spoken message.

“It can’t be a beacon,” said Howell harassedly, when the world he’d chosen was a huge round target shutting off much of the firmament. “It hasn’t range enough. It can’t be anything but a call for help! But what are the odds against our making contact with a civilized race by coming upon one of its space craft in distress?”

“What are the odds,” Ketch asked, “against the four of us being alive and coming to a landing here, with our overdrive damaged where it was when there wasn’t a star-disk to be seen?”

“That’s drama-tape coincidence,” said Howell impatiently. “Such things happen, as we know. But it’s only on the tapes that coincidences happen in succession for the benefit of the actors playing hero.” Then he said, “I’ll make one orbit as nearly over that peninsula as I can make it. We’ll try to see what’s down there. We’ll probably see nothing. If we’re not shot at, I’ll land on the second time around. This is the only liveable planet we can reach. We might as well land at the only place where there are signs of civilization. The beam-message is certainly that!”

They were very near, now. The green world filled half the sky before the Marintha. It seemed to grow visibly as they looked. The yacht would go on past the sunset line, and be swung around behind it by the planet’s gravitational field, and deep into its shadow. Then, to eyes watching from the peninsula, it would seem to come out of the sunrise and pass overhead. But the sky should be bright enough to make it difficult to follow. Those above, in the yacht, might have a quarter of a minute or a little more in which to examine the beam-signal site and to take photographs.

Darkness fell. The night-side of the green world was utterly black. Howell moved quickly. Radar told him the yacht’s distance from solidity, There was a magnetic field. There were no moons. Radar again, to check the height. Howell used the yacht’s solar-system drive to correct the altitude. They were far into the planet’s shadow then, with the planet itself a monstrous darkness that seemed to grope blindly for the Marintha.

They came out abruptly into sunshine, with dawn plucking mountains and islands and continents out of blackness below them. Two hundred miles high. The Marintha went hurtling onward, cameras making overlapping pictures of all that could be photographed at so low an orbital height.

Howell said at last, “Orbit’s an hour ten minutes. That peninsula should be coming over the horizon any time now.”

He listened with desperate attention to the all-wave receiver, still cut down considerably lest it call attention to itself by re-radiation. He heard no menacing whine of a slug-ship solar-system drive.

The peninsula appeared ahead, foreshortened almost past identification. Cameras recorded it as the yacht swept on. No signals came up. No blaster-bolts; Nothing, except once the soprano voice reiterating the message beamed out continuously to space. Its volume was tremendous.—so near, but they passed through the beam in seconds.

They saw the circular space, half a mile in diameter, that the electron telescope had pointed out. It still looked distinctly different from the,rest of the vegetation about it. From two hundred miles they couldn’t tell just what the difference was, save that its colour was not that of its surroundings.

The Marintha went by. No sign of life. No hummings, no whines, no cracklings save of storms somewhere unseen. The yacht hurtled onward. Before it reached the sunset line again, Karen and her father and Ketch were examining the pictures the cameras had made, magnifying them to try to see what existed at the spot from which the beam-signal originated.

Karen spotted it. A round, silvery object, the size of a pinhead even with the picture enlarged. It was in the centre of a half-mile circle of brownish appearance. It was not a slug-ship. It was not a ship made by the humanity of Earth. It appeared to be a globe of metal. Ketch made the one guess which seemed plausibly to explain what they saw.

“It’s defoliation,” he said. “It’s a wreck. They burned away or destroyed the foliage for a quarter of a mile all around, so a rescue ship could find it without trouble. Maybe we should have called down to say we’re coming.”

“No!” said Howell. “The slug-ship heard Karen’s voice and thought we were—these people. If they hear our voices, not using their language, they may think we’re a slug-ship. I’ll land an unthreatening distance away. Not in the defoliated area. If I did, they might start shooting.”

He listened again for the whine of a slug-ship’s drive. He heard nothing disturbing, except that he heard nothing. The Marintha dived into darkness and drove on into oblivion. Again Howell used the solar-system drive to bring the yacht into the exact line at the exact height for the action he planned.

Presently they came once more to the sunrise, and Howell used the drive with grim precision to lose height. When the strangely foreshortened peninsula appeared ahead for the second time, he brought his velocity down to tolerable atmospheric speed by further use of the space-drive. There was the roaring of split atmosphere about them. The speed checked and checked. The circle of brown colour appeared. Howell dived the yacht for it.

The Marintha was only thousands of feet above the surface, now. She came down and down. Ten thousand feet. Eight. Six. Four. At two thousand feet he levelled off, dived again, and the small craft skimmed across treetops, leaving a wake of wildly thrashing foliage behind it. Then she slowed. She stopped only tens of yards high. Then she settled deliberately, straight down. There was an enormous cracking and crackling of tree trunks and branches asher weight bent and tilted and then broke them.

She touched ground. Howell said crisply, “Call to them, Karen. By space-phone. We have to take the chance. Keep your voice going.”

Karen obediently picked up the transmitter. She said clearly, “We are friends. We are people from Earth. We heard your call and we will try to help you, though we need help ourselves.” Then, seeing Howell about to leave, “Wait!”she said anxiously to him, “you’re not going outside!”

“I am,” said Howell curtly. “If we delay, we may seem to be preparing to do them some dirt. And only one of us should go, for the same reason. But I’ll take a rifle.”

He slung a talkie over his shoulder. He took the sporting rifle Ketch handed him, He went to the exit-port. There he said peremptorily, “Talk, Karen!”

To Ketch and Breen he said in a low tone, “We’re in a very tight fix. I’ll try to keep you posted by talkie, but if there’s trouble, about all you can do is lift off and find somewhere else aground here where you can try to keep from being found. Don’t try to help me.”

He opened the port and jumped to the ground. All about him was jungle, though not unduly filled with underbrush. He headed through it for the sere brown area in which a globular metal object had been photographed from space.

The jungle was thick but by no means impassable. He forced his way through it. Almost immediately he began to speak into the talkie. His voice was not soprano, but it wasn’t likely that it would sound like a creature from a slug-ship. He spoke deliberately to be overheard. Those back in the Marintha heard every sound.

“This is a pretty thick jungle,” they heard him say. “A few vines, not many, and very few thorns. The smells aren’t unpleasant. Some are even attractive.”

He went on. He wished to be heard moving openly toward the defoliated area. A man or any other creature intending mischief would either move silently or else with the equivalent of roarings intended to intimidate those who heard him. Coming openly, and talking, he’d be less likely to seem menacing.

“… Things are singing in the trees. I can’t spare the time to try to see them. I need to keep moving and advertising myself as not sneaking up…”

Karen tried to obey his orders to keep her voice going out on a communicator-frequency not too far removed from the signal-beam. But she was afraid, for him. Her throat clicked shut. She could not speak. She listened as he continued to advance and to talk. Presently—

“Things are opening out ahead,” he reported. “No sign of anybody coming to meet me or take a pot shot. I’m nearly at the place where the foliage ends. Still plenty of tree trunks, though.”

His voice stopped.