Space Gypsies

CHAPTER FIVE

It was a very nasty sort of fighting. The slug-ship creatures had formed a sort of perimeter, though a thin one, within which the Marinthas folk were enclosed. The goggled, writhing monsters shot furiously at, spots where the humans lay hidden, to point out their position to the ship. The rubbery, squirming, seeming eye-stalks of the slug-ship flung giant-sized bolts toward the indicated targets—but every time a ball-lightning bolt struck anything, it exploded. Anything! And that was the one favourable item in the current situation, so far as the humans were concerned.

The ball-lightning bolts did not crash through the jungle as artillery shells would have done, to explode near the humans. They didn’t snap through foliage and boughs and tree-trunks on the way. The lightning-bolts were not projectiles; they were energy-weapons. If even the biggest of blaster-bolts struck a half-inch tree branch, it burst and all its monstrous destructiveness was wasted.

There was fire, of course. There was the incineration of the object struck. But the trees had to be cleared away for the weapons to have range. They had to do the clearing. To destroy something a hundred yards away, in jungle, the giant blaster-bolt launcher had to destroy everything in between it and its final target. To make an open space, every growing thing had separately to be destroyed.

But there could be no shield against the lightning-bolts. A single one, striking the Marintha far from squarely, had crippled her. That was in space. Aground here, no standing growth could survive a hit. But it was necessary to make it hit on every standing growth. The incandescent balls poured out, second after second and minute after minute. Two lanes of smoking devastation began and grew away into the jungle from the two ship-weapons. Steam and flying fragments flew from the detonated jungle trees. The four humans were caught between the two lanes of death, whose inner edges exploded violently and grew wider, always toward each other. When they met, there would be nothing alive anywhere near the meeting-place. Certainly no humans.

Breen and Ketch seemed to have gone primitive, back to the days of savage wars. They used their weapons ferociously. They exposed themselves recklessly to fire at the armoured slug-things. They could be blasted, and any wound must be a fatal one as their suits lost whatever weird atmosphere the creatures required. Breen, particularly, had the air of a baresark made fearless and mad by the zest of battle. He killed a slug-thing, and howled in triumph. Ketch fired more sanely. Karen, deadly pale, used her light rifle steadily making sure of her aim at every shot.

Howell seemed to be the one who had lost his head. He crawled a little distance apart to where he could fire between still-standing trees at the slug-ship. Nothing, of course, could pave been more futile than to fire at a ship with a mere sporting weapon. But he was firing at the muzzles of the twin, squirming weapons on the ship. He aimed at the round openings out of which the flaming bolts emerged. The point was that the bolts were not missiles but energy-weapons—ball-lightning. Anything which broke a blaster-bolt pattern would detonate it. They had been burst by little boughs as well as by tree trunks. It might be possible to burst one even by the tiny bolt of a hunting rifle. In fact, it was bound to be possible.

One of Howell’s rifle-bolts did detonate a lightning-bolt ball of thousands of times its volume. It was then barely out of the tube which ejected it. He fired again and again and again, wholly absorbed and with his rifle braced for the utmost of steadiness.

Then a second bolt from Howell’s rifle hit a blast-ball. It happened to hit it just right. It went into the yawning mouth of the left-hand tube that spat destruction. It struck a giant lightning-ball just formed and not yet flung out. It hit far, far back in the generator of lightning-bolts. It hit inside the slug-ship.

The fireball burst in the tube which should have guided it; it burst inside the source of power for the lightnings. It was like a muzzle-burst in an old-fashioned chemical-explosive cannon.

And it blew the ship apart.

There was a horrible, racking explosion. The slug-ship’s plating ripped and tore. Flames from short-circuits melted and shorted its power units. All its stored power let go, with flamings brighter than the sunshine. Yellow vapour puffed skyward in a gigantic smoke-ring. Masses of plastic-covered metal went flying across the jungle.

For a space there was silence save for the cracklings of burning jungle. Then Ketch’s rifle rasped again. Something thrashed crazily beyond the devastated space.

“Got him!” said Ketch. “What the devil happened?”

Then he choked. There was the strangling reek of chlorine in the air. Some tendril of yellowish gas had floated near him for an instant. It went away, diluting itself with the normal atmosphere of this particular world.

“It’s been arranged,” said Howell, not quite steadily, “for us to go on living for a while. I don’t know how long. Watch out for any of the beasts that may still be alive. I’ve something to listen to. Karen?”

She followed him with a curiously docile air. They went in the yacht and Howell carefully disconnected the device that would have destroyed the log-tape by which the Marintha’s route from Earth to here might have been deduced. Turning off the destructor was an expression of unexpected hope. Karen watched him, her expression strange.

He put his arms around her.

“I was—scared!” he said shakenly. “You could have been killed, Karen! You could have been killed!”

She kissed him.

“But I wasn’t. Neither were you. So—maybe we’ll live happily ever after, after all!”

Then the all-wave receiver gave out a bleating, mooing noise. It was dismal. It was purely animal. And yet somehow it was inquiring. Howell tensed. It came again.

“That’s the other slug-ship,” he said coldly, “the consort of the one out there.” He waved a hand in the direction of the recent battle. “It could start blasting us from space, and we couldn’t do a thing. But I suspect it has orders—and now they won’t believe we’re unarmed. I think it will go home and say somebody killed its partner. And all its friends will come boiling out to resent our unmannerly behaviour. But it’s calling to make sure that its partner truly doesn’t answer its calls.”

The mooing sound came once more. It was insistent. The noise was somehow abhorrent. It had no human quality at all. It was the inarticulate cry of an animal. It was bestial. Yet the creatures who used such sounds for communication built spaceships and ship-weapons of extreme effectiveness in space. Luckily, they weren’t equally deadly aground.

“No-o-o,” said Howell. “I don’t think it’ll come to see what’s happened to its friend. The humans around here must have put up some good fights if slug-ships travel only in pairs with one hanging back to carry home news of what happened to the other.”

There was a call from outside. Breen, beaming, spoke zestfully as he climbed into the yacht with Ketch close behind him.

“That was quite an adventure, Howell! I’ve watched such things on tape, but I never expected a share in one!”

He obviously didn’t really recognize how close he’d come to being killed. Ketch said nothing. His expression was strange. There had been opinions stated among psychologists back home that the conditioned habits and viewpoints of modern civilized men didn’t mean that primitive behaviour-patterns were destroyed. They were only repressed to different degrees in different people. Howell reflected fleetingly that Ketch had had other but equally primitive impulses during the shooting. Now he wasn’t exuberant, like Breen. He looked watchful. Satisfied. Given experience, he might come to look competent. But insofar as he became adapted to action of the kind just past, he’d become less content with life on a civilized planet.

“It was an adventure, all right,” said Howell, “but it isn’t over yet. How many of the beasts did you see?”

Ketch still said nothing. He turned his eyes to Breen. Breen said, “Six—seven. No—eight of them altogether. And we killed them all!” he said exultantly. “I didn’t know I was as good a shot as that!”

Ketch spoke for the first time. “You weren’t. All of us hit the one that was trying to open the exit-port. It practically disintegrated. I got two more and one after their ship blew up. I think Karen got one…”

“We’ll have to make sure,” said Howell. “I came in to find out—”

The dismal bellowing came from the all-wave receiver yet again. Now, oddly, Howell suddenly realized how it could convey information or ask for it. The mooing was not a single note. It was a chord. It was a dissonant mingling of frequencies. Instead of a tone modulated and changed to vowels and consonants in succession, it was a noise like a dozen instruments sounded together, with some ceasing and others entering the cacophony. The result was an outcry a human ear might eventually learn to analyze and understand. But men would never be able to duplicate it.

“I came inside,” said Howell, “to find out what you just heard. I think that’s the other slug-ship, gone to bring friends to murder us—but thoroughly this time.”

Ketch said briskly, “I’ll go hunt the remaining beasts, if there are any.” As Howell opened his mouth to speak, Ketch added, “I’ve done plenty of big game hunting, but never before of anything that could shoot back at me. I’m the best one for the job, though!”

He swung out the port and dropped to the ground. Howell said quickly, “Stay here with Karen, Breen. And keep listening. If the things wore space-suits today, as they did, there must be a limit to how long they can go on what to them is air. But one of them might try to get into the Marintha and smash things before it dies. They don’t know how badly we’re smashed already. Watch!”

He swung down to the ground behind Ketch. There was a faint sting of chlorine in the air. There was the smell of ozone. There was smoke and the reek of smouldering green stuff. The composite stench was not pleasant. Also there was the smell of scorched flesh,which was revolting.

Ketch was moving toward the blasted-clear space beyond the six craters first-formed about the yacht. He carried his rifle ready for instant use. But in the hunting of dangerous game there is a necessary precaution at least as important as alertness and a ready weapon. Anyone of the remaining slug-ship creatures would be a castaway now, on a planet whose air it could not breathe. It would be, the most dangerous of all possible hunted things, because it could not possibly hope to live longer than its air supply allowed. If one of those creatures survived, it would not flee. It could gain nothing by flight. So it would try to kill members of the monstrous oxygen-breathing animals who had destroyed its ship. It could have no other purpose.

So Howell followed Ketch, making of himself the needed extra precaution no hunter of dangerous game should go without. That precaution was another man with a rifle, ready to use it if the first man needed help.

Ketch needed it. There was nearly no wind, and coiling masses of steam and smoke and smells rose twistily toward the sky. Ketch advanced carefully toward the burned area. The slug-creatures had scattered to be outside it, and from the unscorched outer edge had directed the aim of the ball-lightning weapons by their fire. Ketch went on. His eyes swept back and forth, keenly. There could be no question of his alertness or his caution.

Then there was a stirring among tree branches twenty feet above the ground. Ketch turned his eyes upward. He searched for something that seemed to be shaking a foliage-masked-tree limb overhead. It was in all respects what a hunter should do.

But Howell shot as fast as his rifle would fire. A stream of blaster-bolts—glowing as brightly as ancient tracer-bullets—poured into the jungle at the base of the tree whose upper parts Ketch stared at so alertly.

On the ground a hand-weapon exploded and something jerked violently.

There’d been a slug-creature aground and it had found one of the surprisingly few vines that grew in this jungle. It had tugged on that to call Ketch’s attention aloft. He’d raised his eyes for long seconds, certainly, he’d have stared at that one spot. Which would have made him a perfect target for the slug-creature.

But Howell had seen the lesser stirring at ground-level. He’d flung bolts at it, and he’d killed one of the two slug-creatures possibly still alive.

Ketch raged. It seemed almost as if he’d have preferred to be killed than to have Howell save his life, as Howell had certainly done.

“Why the devil did you do that?” he demanded furiously. “That was my shot!”

“This is no sporting excursion,” Howell told him. “It’s business! And a nasty business, at that! There are only four of us, and none of us can be spared.”

“But that was my shot!” repeated Ketch angrily. “And you took it!”

Howell shrugged. He had too much on his mind to engage in argument now. He said, “There could be another beast around. It’s yours. If you see it aiming at me, I won’t mind a bit if you kill it. We probably ought to check the slug-ship, though. They thought we were all dead, so they shouldn’t have put on spacesuits except for a landing party. But it might be standard for them to have all hands suit up when any kind of action is in prospect. Against another ship, it’d make sense.”

He turned away to the slug-ship. He moved in its direction, using his eyes with a desperate intentness. Ketch followed, still resentful. Howell made a mental note to try to think of some way to placate him. He’d been touchy because he didn’t see their situation as Howell did. His whole life had assumed his safety under any and all conditions. His hunting had been of animals that couldn’t fight back. Now that a dangerous opponent had appeared, he still had the viewpoint of a hunter for sport, and even their present situation hadn’t made him into a practical man in a very bad spot.

They approached the shattered slug-ship, weapons ready. There was silence except for the cracklings and snappings of the dying-out fire. There was the smell of chlorine.

The slug-ship was eighty feet long—twenty more than the Marintha. The smell of chlorine grew stronger as they drew near. It was made of white metal—beautifully white metal, like steel that has never been in contact with oxygen. And every particle of it was coated with transparent plastic. Where the plates were ripped by the internal explosion, they were half an inch thick, and already the totally reflecting broken surface was dulling where the air touched it.

“Aluminum! ” Howell grunted. “How did they ever work it, much less smelt it?”

His mind worked busily, but his eyes searched fiercely for anything that might possibly be alive in the slug-ship. He saw two shapes which he had to force himself to look at. They were crew-members of this ship. They were dead. It was not easy to believe that such creatures could make a ship like this. But, looking into it through a great gash, the ship was itself almost inconceivable.

There was no bare metal in sight. The whole ship was molded in plastic, with metal imbedded here and there for strength. There were differences in the plastic colours. There was a space where instruments were obviously to be read. The generators of lightning-bolts were in the bow, and both had exploded with devastating effect. With some idea of how they must work, Howell could see how an alien psychology had used principles familiar to humans to make devices that were almost unrecognizable. For example, there were no knobs or handles for controls. They were obviously sliding plates instead, with holes in the slides for digits to fit into. There were moulded recesses in the now-shattered walls which could have been bunks for repose, but it could be only a guess to say so. And nothing could be seen of the ship’s working mechanisms. They seemed to be buried deep in opaque plastic, and they wouldn’t be arranged as human equipment was placed at all.

Ketch coughed, stranglingly. Presently he said, “Chlorine, eh?”

“Chlorine,” agreed Howell. “They breathed it. Try to figure out how they’d build a civilization! With any moisture at all—and how could they avoid that?—any metal would be eaten up by the atmosphere they breathed! They had to coat all their metals with plastic to seal out the chlorine, or they’d rot immediately. But they made a civilization! They must have worked in gas-tight factories, or even in a vacuum.”

The two of them stared into the rent and riven slug-ship.

And something twanged behind them. It was like the deepest note of a piano or organ save that it died away abruptly. It was followed by the rasping, nerve-racked sound of a hand-weapon shooting itself empty.

They whirled. Within yards of them, something not human writhed convulsively, partly hidden under a tree toppled by the slug-ship’s weight. From the writhings, blaster-bolts went flaming in all directions. They stopped. The writhings continued, growing feebler—and then there was the dead body of a slug-ship creature. It had crawled or writhed to a distance at which it could not possibly fail to kill them both before either could turn. But now it was dead, and neither of them had killed it.

For long seconds there was silence, except for small cracklings and the diminishing hiss of steam.

Then a clear soprano voice somewhere spoke words. Human-sounding words, though they could have no meaning to Howell or to Ketch. Ketch took a step toward the sound. Howell stopped him.

“Hold it!” he commanded. “We invite creatures that kill slug-creatures. We don’t hunt for them. And they may be men.” He raised his voice: “We’re very much obliged. Will you come out and make friends?”

As he heard his own voice, and the inquiring tone, Howell realized that no slug-creature could have been as convincing. The soprano voice replied, promptly and briskly. Then what appeared to be a twelve-year-old boy stepped out from behind a standing tree trunk and grinned at them. The small figure carried what was almost certainly a weapon.

Howell felt the hairs crawl at the back of his neck. This was no situation for a child to be in!

He said sharply, “The devil! You killed that thing! But you shouldn’t be mixed up in this! Where are your parents? There’ll be a fleet—”

He stopped. Whatever he might say would be meaningless to this small and grinning apparition. There was a rustling, and a second child appeared, also apparently no more than twelve years old. A third. Grinning, they beckoned and led the way toward the Marintha.

They wore garments of green stuff which apparently wasn’t woven. The pattern was highly suitable for movement through jungle. There was nothing to be caught by protruding twigs or branches. There was a belt, to which not-readily-recognizable objects were hung. Howell had an instant’s bewildered memory of pictures projected during a college seminar on races of men. One had been of an imagined race once believed in on Earth—a race of miniature men and women. But these were children!

The port of the Marintha opened as they approached. Karen stared out of it, her eyes wide and astonished. Her fattier peered over her shoulder.

“What on Earth—?”

“This isn’t Earth,” said Howell. “These small characters killed the last of the slug-things as it was about to shoot Ketch and myself in the back from short range. They seem pleased with themselves. We’ve got to find their parents and warn them what’s on the way. And we’ll ask them for a little help—if they can give it.”

He began almost reluctantly to have hopes. But there were definite reasons against hoping.

“You thought there was something watching the yacht,” he added. “These are some of the eyes.”

The three small figures regarded Karen amiably. They spoke, using their own language with intonations and with gestures. It became clear that they wanted Karen and Breen, as well as Howell and Ketch to go somewhere with them.

“I think,” said Howell, “that we’d better go along. We owe them a small debt of gratitude, Ketch and I.”

Hesitantly, Karen disappeared. She came back with the weapon she’d carried in the fight outside the space-yacht, and with the heavier weapon her father had used. Breen’s expression remained blank and astonished, but he descended to the ground with her. The small figures set out briskly in the lead. The Marintha’s party followed them.

Ketch said in a peculiar voice, “These youngsters are trained. They aren’t even excited over having killed that creature. I’d say they must be a fighting breed.”

“They’re human,” said Howell drily. “That may explain it.”

Ketch said in sudden warmth, “You didn’t pick up any artificial radiation from the whole planet! But here they are! They’ve got weapons! They evidently know a lot about the slug-things! They aren’t even curious about them! So they’ve got a hidden civilization of a pretty high order!”

“They’re not much interested in the Marintha, though.”

“Maybe,” said Ketch with sudden enthusiasm, “maybe they make their cities underground. Then they wouldn’t leak signals to space. The slug-ships wouldn’t find them. Maybe all they need to handle the slug-ships is spaceships and weapons we can design for them! They’ve been driven into hiding. We could bring them out—”

“No evidence,” said Howell. “You’re guessing. But I doubt they’ve survived by hiding. The slug-ships travel in pairs, with one ready to run home if anything happens to the other. They wouldn’t do that if they’d driven this human race into caves! It wouldn’t be necessary!”

Karen said uneasily, “You said they killed a slug-creature when it was—”

“About to kill us. Yes,” he admitted.

He told her he wasn’t pleased with himself for being so incautious that but for a grinning child skipping on ahead, he and Ketch would have died as they looked into the shattered slug-ship.

She went pale and looked at him appealingly.

“I won’t take a chance like that again,” he said reassuringly. Then he reported, “Ketch is expanding. He’s been a big game hunter. This is big game hunting to the nth degree. I think he likes it.”

He hadn’t lowered his voice particularly, but ordinarily Ketch wouldn’t have heard. Ketch did, though, and said with an air of great significance, “We’re shipwrecked, and plenty! It’s not likely we’ll get home again, ever. I’m thinking ahead you’d better do the same.”

Howell shrugged. Ketch was acting oddly, but it could well enough be a reaction to the very unpleasant experience just past for all of them. So far as planning ahead was concerned, there are times when it is quite useless to make plans, but impossible to refrain. Right now the appearance of the three seeming children had changed the entire situation into something that couldn’t be guessed. But already Howell was trying to think ahead—quite uselessly, of course.

The Marintha was another problem. The slug-ships must use units equivalent to those of the space-yacht. Physical laws dictate the use of similar devices for similar purposes. The slug-ship would have the equivalent of a capacitor moulded somewhere in its massive plastic substance. But it might or might not be usable in the Marintha. Certainly to find it and dissect it out and test it and determine its properties, and then install it and modify the other units that had to work with it… It might be done, but it would take either exact information, known in advance, or time to work in that simply couldn’t be had. Long before such a thing could be done, there’d be a whining slug-fleet overhead, sending down lightning from the skies.

In short, there was no point in making plans for the Marintha. Howell grimly decided that the yacht could be written off.

And there was no point, either, in making plans based on contact with three children of a certainly human race, before the meaning of the contact was clear. Howell knew that he could hope, and the temptation was extreme. But he resolutely clung to his pessimism. On the whole, it was a sounder way to look at things.

They went on and on, toward the tip of the peninsula jutting out into a world-girdling sea. They picked their way through not impassable jungle-growths. Presently they came upon two other small figures, coming from ahead and moving smartly toward the Marintha and the alien spaceship. There was an exchange of greetings only, but it seemed that these two already knew what had happened. They spoke briefly to the three guiding small ones, and cordially if unintelligibly to Breen—whose eyes opened wider than before, if that were possible—and then to Ketch, and then to Howell and Karen walking together. The two small figures went on to the rear.

Karen said in an astounded whisper, “Did you see that? One of them had whiskers! Gray whiskers!”

Howell nodded stiffly. He’d seen, and all his speculations had to be revised again. The children were not children. But they were human. After a dozen paces his pessimism took firm hold of him again. He was partly amazed, and partly disappointed, but much of his feeling was simple, grim loss of any hope of real help from the other human race he’d only guessed at before. Because such miniature creatures—

“They’re grown-up, but tiny! ” protested Karen bewilderedly, “Are they midgets?”

“No,” said Howell drearily. “There were small races back on Earth. It’s reasonable enough! If their ancestors and ours built the rubble-heap cities together, and the slug-ships came out of nowhere, there were no survivors on most worlds. But on Earth, where there was no city, there were some few people—maybe hunting parties or yachting parties like ours. They weren’t spotted by the slug-ships, and we’re descended from them.”

“I know,” said Karen anxiously. “You’ve guessed at that before.”

Howell went on, doubting his own words:

“Somewhere else, on another world probably with heavier gravity than Earth’s, there were some other accidental survivors. Their home worlds were blasted. They didn’t know but that the murderers might come again. So they stayed where they were, They adapted to heavier gravity by not growing so large. They built up a civilization. And now they’ve run into the slug-creatures again.”

It was not an improvisation. He’d worked out a part of it for a guess at how the skeletons of human children could be found in a booby trap light-centuries from the part of the galaxy he knew. But he hadn’t guessed that they weren’t children. Now he spread out his hands.

“They can’t be doing so well,” he said, pessimistically. “The slug-ships travel in pairs, like patrols. One of each pair is ready to take back news of any concentration of human ships to wherever the slug-ships come from. That’s proof that the slug-creatures have the stronger fleet. They want to use it. The humans fight hit-and-run. They haven’t a war fleet that can stage a full-scale space-battle. You can tell it by the patrol system. They’re losing. And how can we get any help from men—miniature men!—who’re already losing and already spread out so thin that the slug-ships set booby traps for them? Maybe we can hope for no more than help in destroying the Marintha so there’ll be nothing to tell the slug-creatures that she came from where there’s still another race of men.”

Five paces. Ten. Twenty. Karen said, distressed,“If that—has to be done—what becomes of us?”

“That,” said Howell, with foreboding, “is what we’re going to find out now.”

The three seeming children shouted. There were cries in reply. The four from the Marintha came out of the jungle to a place where gigantic trees grew in a forest, widely spaced. Their foliage was dense, so that beneath their out-flung branches there was only twilight. Here there was no underbrush at all. And here, hidden to eyes aloft by the leafage, there were two metal globular ships. They were smaller even than the Marintha. The larger of the two was no more than thirty feet in diameter. And there seemed to be innumerable small folk moving about around them.

Allowing for the difference between globular spacecraft and caravans, and between mongrel dogs and the distinctly not-canine animals that moved assuredly about among the small people—allowing for such things, there lay before them a perfect gypsy encampment.