Space Gypsies

CHAPTER THREE

There was excellent reason. He had come to a place where bare and interlacing tree trunks made filigree patterns against the sky. All foliage abruptly ceased to be. The trees seemed to thin out, but it was illusory because in the absence of leaves he could see for a long way between them. They hadn’t merely been stripped of leaves though. They were dead. They’d been killed. Their trunks looked dull and lifeless by comparison with the jungle-stuff still alive. There was no trace of anything with life in it ahead. Even the underbrush—there must be some underbrush where there are trees of varied species—even the underbrush appeared only as sticks. The ground was covered with rotted leaves. To right and left, the trees raised bare branches as if making frozen, futile gestures to the sky.

There was a clump of some local species, hundreds of slender saplings merging together thirty feet above the ground. They joined there, and other saplings rose from their junction-places and grew another thirty feet and joined again. It was like a three-story forest. It covered acres—and half of it was dead and half of it was living. The dead part was in the leafless area which from aloft formed an almost perfect circle. The living part was outside it. Howell saw dead ground-cover—creeping stuff with no upright stalks, but only runners and roots going down into the soil. In the brown circle it had been killed. Yet fresh runners already grew inward from the edge.

There was no sound before him. If wind stirred the jungle-tops, Howell did not hear it. There was the silence of death in this leafless portion of the jungle. Behind him things chattered and squeaked and made various mostly high-pitched noises. Ahead—nothing!

It didn’t feel right. It didn’t look right. Men destroying foliage to make a guide and destination for rescuers might have killed the trees. They wouldn’t have bothered with underbrush. They surely would not have troubled with the equivalent of grass. But something, somehow, had killed every trace of vegetation in a circle half a mile across. The trees were left to decay and ultimately to fall, but although the vegetation had been killed, the fertility of the soil was unaffected. The creeping stuff grew back into the area where creeping stuff had died.

It was definitely not right. It felt wrong. All of Howell’s suspicions, which he hadn’t been able to name even to himself, now returned with doubled intensity. He ceased to speak because his mind was filled with observing and suspecting and listening, and trying frantically to understand. He moved—not into the dead space, but along its edges. There was something in a tree, caught in a junction of branches. It had been an animal perhaps the size of a catamount. It was long dead. It had been armoured, like the armadillos of Earth and the small carnivores of Briesis. It had been aloft in the tree and it had been killed and it had fallen and been caught in the tree’s branches. A hunter would have taken it for a trophy most likely, if he’d shot it. But Howell told himself absorbedly that a dead thing found in a place where everything else was dead could have died in the same disaster and from the same cause. His suspicions deepened.

He continued to move along the edge of the dead space. There was a discoloured, dried-up, rotten soft-tissue plant, with a dead flower half a yard across. It had been killed. Death had been indiscriminate, striking everything with life in it. Flowers, trees, ground-cover, animals—all had been victims.

Then Howell saw the metal globe that had seemed the size of a pinhead on a much-magnified picture taken from space. It was a globe, it was metal, it was not a natural object. It had been designed. It had been made. It had been put here. It was perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with the peculiar look of metal which has been plastic-coated to utilize its strength while preserving it from rust and acid conditions. It looked like a spaceship. There seemed to be vents and photo units outside. From within it or from somewhere nearby the moving beam of the distress call must be projected.

But everything around it was dead.

Still utterly absorbed, Howell continued to be oblivious to the people in the Marintha and of his obligation to keep them informed of what he found.

He reached a place where he could see the metal globe almost completely. And now, even if it had occurred to him to speak, he would have been speechless.

A rotted tree had fallen and a pointed, broken limb had struck the still-distant metal globe. It had punctured it. It had ripped away one part of one sheet of absurdly thin plating.

The globe wasn’t a spaceship; it was only a paper-thin shell of metal. It was a dummy, with external details to make it seem designed for a voyage in space, but with no contents to make such a voyage possible. It was scenery, placed on a jungle-clad peninsula of an unnamed and uninhabited world.

And then Howell saw something else—which made the blood pound in his temples. Red rage surged though him. Now he understood, suddenly and completely.

He saw bones. They were partly covered by scraps of cloth. They were well within the area where everything was dead. They were human bones. But they were quite small ones. There were three complete human skeletons, halfway between the edge of the brown spot and the dummy metal globe.

And by their size, Howell guessed them to be the skeletons of three human children, perhaps twelve years old.

He made inarticulate noises in his throat as he went back to the Marintha. When he arrived where Karen and Breen and Ketch watched anxiously from the exit-port, he was still unable to speak coherently. It was long minutes, with Karen looking frightenedly at him, before he was able to give an understandable account of what he’d seen.

“The—the globe’s a dummy,” he said, his voice still thick with fury. “It’s bait. It’s a trap for—humans, using the message-beam as a lure. The message must say that there’s a human ship aground and calling for help!”

“We’ve got to make something to kill them with!” he said fiercely. “The slug-ship things! Because the trap worked! A human ship—of people whose ships must be globes—a human ship came! Its people went toward the globe. Maybe they guessed they were too late because they got no answers to their calls. But they went there. And—and somewhere near the globe one of them touched a trip-wire or a trigger. And then—a killer-field went on—and everything within a quarter of a mile died instantly!”

His fists were clenched. He was fury and rage incarnate.

“The others of the ship—they probably risked going after some of the bodies. But they didn’t dare go too far. There were three of them they didn’t dare try to reach. They’re still there. And I’m pretty sure they’re—children.”

He went and locked himself in the control room. He heard small cracklings. The all-wave receiver, still muted against self-revelation, emitted the noises associated with a solar flare. It was not important, but it reminded him that there was a slug-ship on the way here, confirmed now in its guess at the Marintha’s destination by the drive-sounds made by the solar-system drive during the yacht’s landing.

The slug-ship wasn’t hurrying. It followed the Marintha leisurely, like hunters after a game animal whose trail is plain and which cannot possibly hope to get away.

A long time later Howell came out again. Ketch nodded reassuringly to Karen.

“He’s all right now, and with new ideas of what we’re to do and how we’ll do it.”

There could have been a touch of sarcasm in Ketch’s tone, but Howell nodded. He said in a carefully controlled voice:

“I’ve been thinking. We’ll get out the capacitor and see what can be done with it. Maybe not all the plates are ruined. Maybe if we take out the spoiled ones, we can reassemble something with enough capacity to work. Maybe we can improvise extra plates. If it’s absolutely necessary, there’s some material in the scenery the slug-creatures built for their booby trap.”

Karen made a wordless sound of protest.

“I know!” said Howell. “But I think I know how to get to the damned thing and turn it off without tripping it. If it’s necessary I’ll try it. Otherwise not.”

“But there’s no point in taking extra chances!” Ketch protested. “We should think of something to be done—”

Howell said nothing. In drama-tapes, the principal characters always found a last-instant solution to their difficulties. Ketch likened their very real predicament to the contrived ones of taped narratives.

“Breen?” asked Howell.

“Botanizing,” said Karen. “He said he wouldn’t go far.”

Howell grimaced. There was so much work to be done, and Breen went poking about looking at plants! But he wouldn’t be of much use in the engine room. Ketch would be better.

“I’m going to take down the capacitor,” Howell said, without happy anticipation but because it was all that could be done.

“Hold on!” protested Ketch. “Shouldn’t we move the yacht first? Hide it and ourselves?”

“The booby trap hasn’t been visited in a long time,” said Howell, “or they’d have repaired the tear in its plating that gives the whole show away. But we may need some material from it. And also, our drive would be spotted when we moved.”

Ketch shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He said, “Excuse me, Karen. We’ve a problem to solve.”

Howell couldn’t spare the energy to be annoyed by Ketch’s adoption of the manner of a dramatic actor. He went into the control room, and Ketch followed. They set to work. Ketch seemed to expect either Howell or himself to make some startling discovery which would solve all problems. Such triumphs were not rare—in fiction. But here there was danger, about which they could do nothing for their own safety. There was danger to more than themselves, about which apparently they could do even less. If the Marintha fell into the hands of the slug-ship creatures, even if the four humans now aboard were not discovered, every item of her design and equipment would be proof that there was another human race somewhere in the galaxy. The absence of fighting-ship weapons would be proof, too, that this other race was totally unprepared for battle. And to creatures who would make booby traps for humans, baited with a call for help that they might murder anyone who responded, the prospect of a wholesale massacre would be delightful. They might still have records or traditions of the long-ago extermination of the race of the rubble-heap cities. They might know where to look for them again, guessing that a pitiful numbers of survivors of that butchery might have rebuilt a civilization while forgetting what had destroyed its forerunner.

Howell worked with a grim, set face. Ketch helped with a tendency to make unnecessary, dramatic gestures. They got the capacitor out of its built-in niche. They took it apart. It was hopelessly wrecked. There wasn’t an unpunctured plate or a not-cracked dielectric sheet.

“It’s no go,” said Howell. “We’ve got to work out something else.”

Ketch considered. Then he said, “It seems to me that we should be able to hide somewhere on this planet and live on game we shoot and so on.”

His tone was not that of someone suggesting a regrettable possibility. Howell made no answer at all, but his silence was a more definite disagreement than any possible statement of disapproval would have been.

Breen came back. He was placidly pleased. He had highly interesting botanical specimens, indicating a biological invention paralleling but not duplicating a cross-fertilization process worked out by vegetation on Handel’s Planet. It was a triumph. But there was more.

“There’s a rubble-heap city somewhere near,” he announced. “Look!”

There were eight plant-species—all food-plants—which were found on every planet formerly occupied by the last race of mankind. They did not fit into the evolutionary lines of the worlds on which they were found. They had been introduced by the lost race, the builders of the cities now reduced to debris. Breen had found three of the eight species here. This was evidence that there must be a smashed city somewhere on this world. To Breen, it was splendid progress in the purpose of the Marintha’s voyage. It was his aim to find the planet on which the eight species had developed by evolutionary mutation and selection. If he found that world, he’d have found the home world of the lost race, where it began and developed until it was vastly greater and more civilized than mankind of today. If Breen made the discovery and it was verified by other sciences, he would feel that he had not lived in vain.

Karen readied a meal while her father talked expansively of his discovery. There was nothing to be done outside the yacht, and rather less to be done within it, now that the capacitor was known to be destroyed rather than damaged. Howell was not capable of casual conversation, he was so disturbed. His former pessimism had returned when the possibility of making contact with enemies of the slug-ship had vanished. The Marintha could support the four of them almost indefinitely, if left alone. It could travel to the other planets of this system, with the same proviso. But there was only one way in which the situation could imaginably be improved. He considered that one way practically hopeless—but it must be tried.

He was silent and moody while the others talked. Karen looked distressed. Breen was absurdly elated—but he blandly waited for the situation to be resolved favourably. Ketch argued plausibly for various implausible courses of action, all of them more or less dramatically appealing but with nothing else to recommend them.

Eventually Breen got out the pictures made from space and examined them under high magnification. Presently he chortled. He’d found where there ought to be a rubble-heap that thousands of years before had been a city. It was within a reasonable distance of the Marintha where she lay aground.

Howell couldn’t take their insensitivity to the appalling state of things. He went to his cabin to escape it, and to try to sleep. What he planned couldn’t be done in darkness. He had to wait for day. He noticed that Karen seemed particularly distressed when he left the others, but he didn’t dwell on it now, though most of his thinking was directly or indirectly concerned with Karen.

In the morning he was up the first of them all. He took a blast-rifle and went quietly out of the ship. It could have been extremely unwise, but he couldn’t abandon completely the confidence of humans in their own safety. He knew there was danger, but he could not quite believe in danger from anything but the slug-ship now floating confidently—perhaps gloatingly—out to attempt again the murder of the humans in the Marintha. So he went out without leaving word of his purpose. Besides the rifle, he carried two lengths of rope and two of the rope-hooks used for lashing objects fast in ships’ storage holds.

He made his way through the jungle he’d traversed the day It seemed less thick than he remembered it. But jungle tend to seem thinner when one has some familiarity with it.

He came out presently exactly where he’d first glimpsed the dead area the day before. Again he moved around the edge of the killed space, not yet venturing inside it. In a little while he could see the metal globe. And then he moved back and forth, with his eyes raised above ground-level, examining the trees in relation to each other.

He took some time to make his selection. Then he threw a doubled rope with a lashing-hook at its farther end. At the third try he caught the hook on the tree. He tested it. Then he swung himself up on the rope. He was thirty feet above-ground in a very few minutes. He braced himself and flung the rope again. He caught it on a second tree. He tested it, and the limb broke. He hooked on to another. Very shortly he was in the second tree and tossing the lashing-hook into the branches of a third. Again he had trouble making the hook lodge properly, but it could be released by tugging on one side of the doubled cable.

It was very hard work and very slow progress, but he moved into the dead area. The purpose behind approaching the trap by way of treetops was simply, of course, that the globe was the bait of a booby trap. Somewhere in the now-dead space, there was a trigger or a trip-wire. More probably, there were several. Anybody going to the seeming spaceship would normally go on foot. It would be absurd to mount triggers or trip wires in treetops. So Howell moved toward the dummy globe by swinging laboriously from a succession of tree limbs on doubled slender ropes. He chose his aerial route three and four trees ahead.

Ultimately he arrived where trees had been felled to make room for the fake spacecraft, where the booby trap centered.

He searched this space very painstakingly before he swung down to it. For minutes he moved with infinite caution, making quite sure that he would not touch anything—not even a wire as thin as a spiderweb—by any accident.

He found the booby trap unit itself. Very carefully and very painstakingly, he jammed the relay which would take a tiny dollop of power from the trigger or the trip, and send a monstrous surge of current through the killer-field generating unit. He smashed that unit. Then he worked for some time getting a part of its power-assembly separated from the rest. He was more or less puzzled by the plastic coating, not only of the unit as a whole, but of each part of it separately. It was a hard, transparent substance. Cables were coated with it; where they were joined, the joint had the glassy coating. In the whole device, including the connections; there wasn’t the fraction of a square millimetre of bare metal exposed.

He tried to make deductions from the fact as he went, staggering a little from his burden, back to the edge of the formerly deadly space. He passed the small and pathetic skeletons. He went to the edge of the brown space. He put down the capacity-storage unit from the killer-field device. He went back. Unhappily, he gathered up the skeletons. They were small. They were fragile. They seemed definitely to be those of twelve-year-old children. Doggedly—perhaps he was ashamed of his sentimentality—he placed them neatly and respectfully under a cover of green stuff. He recovered the alien capacitor and went back to the Marintha with it.

The others of the Marintha’s company had his own generations-old, automatic confidence in their safety under all circumstances not specifically pointed out as dangerous. Karen was the only one left in the ship. She greeted him with a little indrawn breath of relief.

“We didn’t know where you’d gone!” she told him. “My father and Ketch went to see the rubble-heap the photograph says isn’t far away.”

Howell frowned. He’d taken appalling chances himself. He was just back from taking them. But it seemed to him that Karen shouldn’t have been left by herself. There wouldn’t be dangerous animals if there was a shattered city on this planet, of course, but it was still far from certain that nothing else inimical existed here.

“I’ve had a queer feeling,” said Karen uncertainly, “that there was something watching the yacht just now. Hiding—and peering at me.”

Howell, struggling, got the object he’d brought back up upon the exit-port sill.

“It’s not likely,” he said. He got up into the port and picked up the burden again. “Why not close the port?”

“My father and Ketch are out.”

“They’ll bang on the hull if necessary,” he told her. He put down his load in the engine room. “I brought this back to see how far ahead of us the slug-ship creatures may be. I rather hope it’s a long way.”

He cracked the hard plastic coating on the bus-bars of the package he’d brought back. He made contacts. He set up circuits. He hooked in instruments.

“I’m going to do some tests,” he explained, “to see how this compares with our ruined capacitor. It functioned like a capacitor in the circuit I took it from. If they’re way ahead of us, they’ll have designed more power-storage capacity in this than we had in our capacitor of several times the size. If so, we may repair our overdrive around it. If not, we don’t. We’ll be better off if we can, but the rest of humanity will be better off if the slug-creatures aren’t too far advanced.”

“You think they’ll—attack Earth some day?”

“Eventually,” admitted Howell, “they’re bound to, with crazy confident amateurs riding around the galaxy without the least precaution. Like us! Just a minute—”

He had his instruments ready. He threw a switch. He read and rearranged the instruments. He threw the switch yet again. He tried still another instrumental setup.

“Not good enough!” he said grimly. “Very good, but not the kind of goodness that would be of use to us.” Then he said, “But we don’t want to kill people. It’s powerful enough for that!”

He hadn’t really hoped the booby trap’s capacitor would substitute for the Marintha’s ruined one. But he couldn’t afford to overlook any chance, however slim. But it was still depressing to have even the most unlikely fail him.

He sat down drearily. His expression was very bitter. Karen said nervously, “You don’t think there can possibly be anybody—watching us?”

“Slug-creatures? No. They’d blast us aground as they tried to blast us in space.”

He stared apathetically at nothing. Pessimism overwhelmed him again. Karen tried something else, to rouse him.

“But we don’t really know… We assume that the slug-people are deadly and murderous. But they might assume that we are deadly and murderous! They might even have reason—”

“The booby trap answers that, Karen,” he said tiredly. “I don’t feel like talking. Do you mind?”

She was silent. Presently she went to the still-open port. She looked out unhappily for a long time. Something moved in the jungle nearby. She ran back to Howell.

“S-something moved!” she panted. “Really!”

He got up and went to the port. He looked out. Nothing stirred, but he did get the feeling that something watched him. After some moments he drew back and found a place where he could look out the port with a blast-rifle handy. Karen looked fearfully from him to the port and back again.

A very considerable time later, Howell stirred. He’d been lost in dread anticipations. But without realizing it he’d studied each envisioned disaster for that weak point which would make it possible for the disaster to happen. The feeling of frustration persisted. He couldn’t really imagine any replacement of the absolutely necessary capacitor, and therefore he couldn’t imagine flight from a part of space in which slug-ships set up elaborate booby traps. The one here hadn’t been set up to kill the company of the Marintha. It had been set up to destroy members of the race of which Howell could know only that it existed and used words, and that the skeletons of seeming twelve-year-old members were wholly human.

This was no clue as to how to communicate with this local race of human beings. There was no way to avoid discovery by a slug-ship actually on the way here now. The only subject left to think about was the obtaining of a high price for the murder of Karen and Breen and Ketch and himself. So he’d been thinking about that.

“I want some clothing,” he said heavily. “I want to make some dummy humans representing us.”

Karen stirred, relieved that he’d come partly out of what was almost pathological depression. She brought garments. Her father’s. Her own. Howell’s own.

Howell said, “We’ll stuff them with crumpled paper.”

He set to work and Karen joined him. It was a curious occupation for people under an effective sentence of death or perpetual imprisonment light-centuries from the worlds they knew. They were, in substance, hiding from creatures they’d never seen, but which would blast them on sight. They knew there was another race than the inimical one. But there was a war in existence of which their predicament was proof, and they would be blasted by any ship of either side because ships of either race might consider the Marintha a stratagem of the enemy. They had no weapons greater than those designed for game hunting. They were practically, game themselves. And Howell dourly fastened garments together and painstakingly stuffed them with crumpled paper to make them look like human beings. Karen, inwardly anxious and uneasy, helped as if it were the most normal of occupations.

“Something’s occurred to me,” said Howell, only a little less heavily than before. But even that slight change of intonation encouraged Karen. “We can’t get away from a slug-ship if there’s one handy—which there is. Especially we can’t get away from two. They’ve got overdrive, and we haven’t. They saw us and shot at us. They may know that we aren’t the enemy they carry artillery-sized blast-weapons to destroy—but they do know we’re not them. And so to them we’re enemies.”

“Yes,” said Karen. She showed him a dummy. “Do you think this is all right?”

“Probably,” said Howell. He went on. “If we’re enemies, they want to kill us. But our ship is peculiar to their eyes. They ought to want to know what we’re all about. We haven’t used a weapon against them, but they’re not sure we’re unarmed. In fact, they probably can’t imagine us as unarmed. So—in this particular solar system, what would they do?”

Karen looked at him. She and Howell had been almost continuously in each other’s society for three months. They were of suitable ages to find each other interesting. Under such circumstances, as normal individuals they’d tend either to dislike each other intensely, or else like each other very much. But in the present situation of the Marintha, they wouldn’t show their feelings. Not if they were Karen and Howell, at any rate.

Still, Karen acted as any girl would act when she wanted desperately to be the most important thing in a man’s life. She tried to be necessary to him, leaving to him the larger and more vital matters such as how they were to survive in this dangerous situation. Howell, in turn, acted as if the most important thing in his life were endangered—and it was: Karen could not but share in the fate of her father and Ketch and Howell. If they were killed, she’d be killed. So Howell devoted all his energy and much the greater part of his thoughts to trying to ensure that Karen might be made safe.

For that he’d performed every action since the first breakout in between-the-stars, when a slug-ship challenged the Marintha. Now he made dummies. But he felt that he had to explain.

“If a slug-ship comes to this solar system,” he said detachedly, “it will know about the booby trap here, or else it would try to land and murder the shipwrecked crew it would believe were calling for help. But suppose it comes here. It would see the Marintha—aground near the booby trap. It would be only reasonable to guess that we followed the message-beam to here—which we did. It should seem probable that some of us were killed by the booby-trap—which we very well could have been. If it could see our apparent corpses in the dead space, the fact that the Marintha remained aground ought to suggest that we all went to the booby trap to answer the supposed globe-ship’s calls for help, and all of us were killed.”

Karen considered.

“That’s the way we’d think,” she admitted. “But they might not think the same way. If they’re really an alien race, and not human at all, couldn’t their minds work quite differently from ours?”

“No,” said Howell flatly. “They might not feel like we do about innumerable things. They might react emotionally in ways we can’t imagine, But the purpose of intelligence or intellect in the human sense is to know and understand and make use of reality. And reality is a logical whole. To understand it, an intelligent race would have to think logically. So any alien race that develops a civilization will have to think very much as we do.”

He worked a few moments longer on the dummy he was stuffing with crumpled paper.

“Anyhow,” he said curtly, “I’m betting that they may decide that their booby trap killed us all off, and that we left a new arid interesting type of spaceship for them to study and speculate about. They ought to be very much interested in new kinds of spaceships! They ought to want to take the Marintha with as little damage as possible. They made a trap for their enemies—and got some of them. Maybe we can set a trap for them.”

He stood up and picked up the bulky but very light objects he and Karen had made together.

“The only bad feature,” he said thoughtfully, “is that even if we trap them, it may not do us a bit of good.”

He went out of the exit-port, carrying the dummies.