Space Gypsies

CHAPTER SIX

Communication, of course, was the immediate problem, and Howell was fiercely impatient with its difficulties. But gestures and smiles expressed welcome, which was an abstraction, and everybody concerned discovered unanticipated artistic gifts. They drew pictures which, with gestures and emotions expressed by tones of voice, were much more informative than would have been suspected.

Brisk male members of the small-man race, of whom some were almost up to Howell’s shoulder, settled down with him to exchange information concerning slug-ships and the art of war. It shortly appeared that the art of war consisted, on the part of the slug-ships, of dirty tricks whenever possible. For example, the booby trap on this world. The Marintha had been observed long before her landing by the booby trap. It had been viewed with skepticism, as a possible dirty trick. Even after its landing and after Howell had been seen marching to the booby trap, the fact that he was oversize for a human being of their experience cast doubt upon his authenticity. It had been suspected that he was a new type of space-suit designed to deceive members of the small-man race.

It was, first, the roundabout way he went to the faked globe-ship in the killed space that had silenced those of the small people who insisted that he be shot. But on the way out of the dead area he’d gathered up the child-size skeletons of long-ago victims of the trap. He’d covered them decently, which no slug-creature could be imagined to do. And the small folk were urgently debating the question of making contact with him and the others—who were also oversized, but different from each other—when the slug-ship came in for its landing. And—then the small people were helpless to aid them. Somebody sketched a series of crude pictures which showed successive events in a battle between six small-men spacecraft-globes—and a single armed slug-ship. The small-men countered the lightning-bolts of the slug-ship by throwing out screens of metal pellets to break up the ball-lightning missiles the slug-ship used. They finally got the slug-ship with a guided missile, but lost one of their own number in the fight. So they’d been unable to try to help that strange ship, the Marintha.

They were apologetic about it, but they had women and children aboard and they weren’t even wholly sure that the Marintha was not herself a booby trap. Now they were sure. And would Howell show them how he’d destroyed the slug-ship?

He did, the more willingly because he’d have done exactly as these small folk had done if it were a question of endangering Karen in a hopeless attempt to aid a dubious stranger.

While he talked to the elders, Ketch demonstrated his hunting-rifle to interested younger small-men. They were vastly admiring. Breen worked at communication with still others. His drawings of leaves and flowers were professionally accurate.

He became the centre of an absorbed group interested in food-stuffs. The eight food-plants spread throughout the galaxy by the men of the rubble-heap cities were known to them, of course. Presently Breen went off with a chattering group to see the highly special crops they’d developed, They could scratch-plant a food crop and go away and come back again to harvest it, or even get some sort of harvest in days, if they dared remain aground. And they had some plants which could be gathered at any period of their growth and provide different but substantial foodstuffs at whatever stage of development they had reached.

And Karen talked, or seemed to, with the women. They surrounded her, with children staring as children do stare at strangers. And they spoke and smiled and gestured, and somehow they seemed to be carrying on quite a satisfactory conversation. Howell heard Karen’s voice from time to time.

But Howell was brooding and unsatisfied when he gathered up the others to go back to the Marintha.

“They were disappointed,” he said sourly, “when they learned that the way this slug-ship was wrecked required that it be aground and using its blast-cannon almost directly at somebody with a blast-rifle. But they’re anxious to give us anything they’ve got. They want to be our friends, but they’ve no spare parts for overdrives and there are some questions I can’t seem to get through to them. For one thing, everything they use is beautifully designed, and it works, but there’s something—”

There was a small crowd of the small-people following them, preceding them, walking zestfully on either side.

“Their weapons are hand-made,” said Ketch. “All of them. They’re chemical weapons, too.”

Karen said, “Their clothes are hand-woven, too, when they’re woven at all. The fabrics are fabulous! The women pride themselves on the cloth they make for their families’ clothing!”

Howell shook his head impatiently.

“That’s part of it, perhaps. But I couldn’t ask what I wanted to.”

“Their food crops,” said Breen, puffing a little,“are astonishing! They showed me plants growing. They use foliage in their ships for air-control, by the way. It’s primitive, but in some ways better than our systems.”

Howell stopped short in his walk, and then went on again.

“That’s the word,” he said gloomily. “Primitive! They’ve got spaceships, but their coils are hand-woven. I asked about their cities; their bases. I couldn’t get the question across. I asked where most of their race lived. They sketched globe-ships. I asked about factories—where their globes were built. They sketched half-moons and crescents at random—meaning planets, no doubt. But I drew the skyline of a city and it didn’t seem to mean anything to them.”

Karen stumbled, and a small-man moved quickly to support her. She smiled at him and said quietly to Howell, “It wouldn’t mean anything. They don’t have cities.”

“No cities?” Howell stared, frowning at her and paying no attention to the brightly-coloured small folk about the Marintha’s people.

“The globe-ships,” said Karen, “are their homes. They have wives and children with them. Like gypsies. They live on these ships, or in them. They make their own technical devices and weave their own cloth, and grow their own food, some of it aboard ship where it purifies the air. But some of it is grown aground when they dare stay on a suitable world for a while.”

Howell blinked. But it was true that there were women and children of the small-man race all about them. They wouldn’t be carried in fighting ships. They wouldn’t he aboard ship at all if there were a world of safety for them to live on while men went out to give battle to the slug-ships.

“But—” Howell shook his head.

“Every so often,” said Karen matter-of-factly, “all the ships that can do so gather by appointment on some world they think the slug-ships won’t find for a while. Then they smelt metals and grow crops and exchange the things they’ve made, and they build new ships for the new members of their race grown old enough to be on their own. They exchange crew-members, too, so there’ll be somebody on every ship who knows how to do everything that’s needed, and no kind of knowledge will be limited to one ship. And then they move on before the slug-ships can find them.”

“How’d you find all this out?” demanded Howell.

“From the women,” said Karen. “They told me.” Then she added, “Their babies—they’re adorable! So tiny! Like little dolls! They’re lovely!”

The little crowd moved on through the jungle. It was composed of small-folk in bright-coloured garments, with the four humans from Earth looming tall among them. There was much chattering.

Ketch said eagerly, “We can invent some heavy weapons for them. And if we can get one ship armed decently, I’ll take a I dozen or so of them for a crew—” Then he said, “No. There should be two ships. Then we can take on a patrolling pair at once. That’ll curl the creatures hair! Pairs of their ships vanishing without a trace…”

Howell said drily, “I gather, though, that the slug-fleet whose scouts we ran into is only days in overdrive away. Before we could make designs for weapons, and make patterns and castings and devices to machine them, and then wind the coils and mount and calibrate them—”

“We’ve got to think about it,” said Ketch defensively. “There must be some way to do it!”

Howell did not answer. He went on through the jungle, surrounded and preceded and followed by members of the small-human race. Their attitude toward the Earth quartet and their ship the Marintha was a charmed curiosity. They were going sightseeing to the crippled yacht.

Howell brooded. He’d stumbled on a discovery that should have been of infinite importance—a second race of human beings, separated from Earth-based humanity since the destruction of the rubble-heap cities forty thousand years before. And two races of men with separate cultures should have very much to give to each other. But the small-men were battling a danger the larger race so far had escaped—the slug-ships. The small-men had been forced to contrive a way of life never dreamed of by the branch of humanity to which Howell and the others belonged.

And in making contact with them, the Marintha had inevitably made contact with a monstrous, alien, malignant race of beings who’d almost destroyed all humanity eons ago. It was now seeking out the small-men—murdering them, making booby traps for them, hunting them with murder-ships patrolling space in pairs so that if they could offer effective resistance to one slug-ship, the other would instantly go to bring back an irresistible force for their destruction.

The Marintha had undoubtedly been trailed—in overdrive!—from the instant of its first detection, It had out-tricked one of the trailing pair and destroyed it. Now—the other had gone for reinforcements. And the Marintha could not escape. But it had to! Else the chlorine-breathing monsters would learn of the existence of Earth humanity. Which would well mean a second desolation of the human-occupied part of the galaxy, and rusting, shattered, depopulated masses of wreckage to keep company with rubble-heaps on half a thousand worlds.

Which was enough of disaster. But there were the small-folk, too. They were plainly losing the struggle for survival. There must have been a time when they had cities and laboratories and sciences. Otherwise they could never have developed the ships in which they tried doggedly to stay alive. They’d tried to adapt to their danger by scattering, save that they held widely spaced foregatherings and helped each other build new globe-ships to flee in, and forlornly exchanged news and crew members so their remaining technology would not be lost, But such furtive gatherings could not lead to new discoveries, They had to use every resource they possessed merely to survive—and it wasn’t enough, They could only hide and flee, and flee and hide, while their enemies hunted them mercilessly and for sport. They trapped the small-folk as if they were vermin. They killed them as if they were flies. And the small-folk fought gallantly and to the death when they were cornered, and they were as human as Karen or Ketch or Breen or Howell. Howell felt not sympathy for them. He also felt that irrational, emotional of obligation men feel toward their fellows when they are apparently doomed and yet still could be helped.

They found the two small-people they’d passed on the way the globe-ships when they returned. They were in the Marintha’s engine room, and they’d shifted the useless capacitor from the booby trap and examined the Marintha’s overdrive unit. The original, now-disassembled capacitor still lay where Howell and Ketch had taken it apart, because the garbage-disposal device could not disintegrate metals but only organic compounds with a carbon base.

The small-man with gray whiskers wore a somehow professional air. He lectured his fellows on the subject of space-drives and their components. He wore garments of lurid purple, and he pursed his lips and spoke with a fine authority, Some of the folk of the globe-ship were not interested. They dispersed through the yacht, fascinated by what they saw. Karen did the honours of the ship. Ketch took his coterie of weapon-conscious younger small-men to see his sporting-equipment. Breen went to the survival-cabinet and brought out the seeds and cultures required by law to be carried in all spacecraft. He began to sketch instructive details of what the seeds were for, and what they would do.

But the gray-whiskered small-man continued to lecture on the overdrive-generating system of the Marintha. Sometimes somebody argued a point with him. A highly technical argument was evidently beginning.

Howell listened for a time. Then he went back to those with whom he’d tried to communicate earlier. He wanted to make a bargain with them. If they couldn’t repair the Marintha to journey in deep space, would they find for him the deepest abyss of this planet’s ocean, so he could drop the yacht into it where all the resources of the slug-ship culture couldn’t find it? Or if they found it, couldn’t recover it for study?

He didn’t stipulate for the reception of the four Earth-humans in the small-men’s ships, He didn’t even stipulate for a globe-ship to pick him out of the sea after he’d sent the Marintha on its way to oblivion, He was thinking very grimly of Karen, She wouldn’t want to go home if doing so would lead to the arrival of fleets of monsters to repeat the massacre of the rubble-heap cities. She’d rather be marooned here than lead destruction home. In any case she’d share in the doom that followed her to Earth. And yet, she wouldn’t want to live on here.

He tried urgently to get his question into pictures and gestures and grimaces. The Marintha could lift off with the same limited drive by which she’d landed. She could dive into the deepest deep of all the seas, and thereby at least delay the discovery of Earth-humanity by the monsters of the slug-ships. Would the small-folk help him find a suitable place to sink her?

He didn’t get the question understood, The small-folk could not quite grasp the reasoning by which the Marintha had to be destroyed without attempting to fight. The most useful question he was able to ask was, when would the slug-ship fighting fleet arrive? The miniature humans could answer that. The answer was, between the third and fourth sunsets from now.

A group of the visitors went trooping out of the engine room and the yacht. The whiskered authority on space-drives led them. They seemed to head toward the exploded slug-ship.

Ketch came to Howell. He said abruptly, “Since the Marintha’s wrecked, you’ve made a deal for us to be taken aboard a globe-ship, haven’t you?”

“Not yet,” said Howell. “I’m not sure I can. They’re already pretty crowded. Maybe there’s no room for us. Maybe no air.”

Ketch said feverishly, “But we’ve got to go with them! And we’ve got to take all the technical data the Marintha carries!”

Howell shrugged.

“I’m trying to arrange the Marintha’s destruction. Maybe I can’t even make that absolutely certain.”

“But we have to go with them!” insisted Ketch. His tone was suddenly urgent. “Presently they’ll gather together—all the globe-ships at one place! We’ll have weapons worked out! We’ll demonstrate them! I’ll take a crew of the little men and we’ll go hunting slug-ships! We’ll blast them! We’ll smash them! We’ll curl their hair! And then we’ll begin to make a fleet and we’ll move on the worlds the slug-ships come from—”

“We?” asked Howell politely.

“I’ll need you,” said Ketch, “But if I have to I can make out! But I think you’ll join me! When Karen hears—”

“You have my blessings,” said Howell with irony. “But right now our first impossible task is to keep the slug-creatures from coming back here and learning that there are two human races, not one, and that they’ve made contact. Because if they find that out, they’ll make an all-out attack on the race that’s not used to fighting them and won’t be prepared: Our race! You’ve my blessing on what you want to do, but first things come first!”

He turned aside and drearily helped display the yacht and its equipment to the raptly admiring small-folk, He gathered the impression that they were astonished at so large a spacecraft built for the use of so few. The globe-ships were crowded with tiny men and women and children. Howell morosely realized that they were crowded because at their infrequent gatherings, they couldn’t build new ships fast enough. They did everything practically by hand, and what machinery they used was itself handmade. Their civilization laboured under the tremendous pressure of constant danger, constant need to move on, to avoid slug-ships, and it need never to stay aground longer than could be helped. Under such a handicap, they’d reach the point of diminishing returns. The small-race of human beings was headed for extinction.

Then a question arose in Howell’s mind. How did they survive at all? Their weapons were pitiful against the slug-ships’. They must have either more sensitive detection devices than their enemies, so they’d always have adequate warning to flee, or else they’d found some way to avoid detection by the slug-ships under some circumstances they could bring about. One or the other they must have.

With all hope for personal escape abandoned, Howell considered the most important thing in the galaxy just now, the prevention of the slug-creatures from examining the Marintha, intact or wrecked, crippled or in perfect shape.

There were noises outside, a small-sized tumult. Howell could imagine nothing positive or good as an explanation. In his present frame of mind, he could anticipate only disasters. So before he went to the entrance-port he snatched up one of Ketch’s weapons.

When he reached the port, there was a cheerful soprano babbling outside. Small folk jumped out of the port, eeling past him. They ran toward a certain spot in the jungle. There were thrashings and movements there. Howell thought instantly of a possible still-surviving slug-ship creature. But the noise didn’t match such an event.

Then, abruptly, there appeared what should have been a heartening though perhaps bewildering sight. A straggling, heaving group of small-men were making their way toward the Marintha with something heavy and burdensome in their midst. They were bringing it to the space-yacht. They had cut down saplings to make poles to hang it from, and they’d ripped fabric strips from somewhere—probably inside the slug-ship’s wreck—to hang it by. They came into view with an entirely unidentifiable object which by its swaying and evident weight caused much staggering and hilarity.

They brought it to the Marintha’s port with a vast amount of chattering and orders given by everybody to everybody else. They got the object up into the yacht. There the gray-whiskered small-man took firm command. Somebody—several somebodies—came out of the engine room with parts of the yacht’s disassembled capacitor. They carried their loads outside, dumping the swollen and punctured plates on the ground. The whiskered small-man judgmentally estimated the space left by the removal of the original capacitor. He turned and briskly began to chip the irregular block of solid plastic his companions had brought. His lips worked, pursing and unpursing, in a fashion peculiar to skilled workmen who have absorbed the knowledge of their trade so they need not take particular thought once they have identified their problem. There are never but so many such men, and all of them do things with their mouths as they work. This one pursed his lips and made small noises to himself.

Howell picked up the sheared-away bits of plastic and dropped them into the garbage-disposal device. As they touched its bottom, they naturally disintegrated. Without fuss, they became an utterly impalpable powder which immediately flowed out of a refuse-vent to the ground, because the space-yacht was in atmosphere.

All activity stopped instantly. Small-men stared, There was an abrupt and violent babble of voices. There was excitement of unprecedented intensity. Small folk came from all over the Marintha, asking questions. Others crowded in from outside, and a hubbub of voices and a flurry of gesticulations followed.

Then silence fell once more. Small-men, crowded together, looked from Howell to the garbage-disposal unit and back again. Some peered over the shoulders of nearer ones. Some had climbed up on the yacht’s built-in furnishings to be able to see. There were gestures, asking Howell to do the same thing once more.

He frowned. This was not sightseeing. There was no more cheerful chatter. Every member of the small-man race had suddenly ceased to be interested in anything at all except the device that took the organic refuse of the space-yacht, and by loosening the valence-bonds of the carbon atoms it contained, caused it to fall apart to powder-particles finer than the smoothest of talc or graphite. The powder was like a fourth state of matter, being neither solid nor liquid nor a gas. It was a powder. The tilting of the yacht caused the powder to flow to the lower side of its container. If blown upon, it would swirl away in tendrils like smoke. But it would become solid again only by the adhesion of its ultra-microscopic particles, one by one, to other matter outside.

The gray-whiskered man spoke. It should have been gruffly. But he was astounded. He was incredulous. He was deeply and agitatedly absorbed in what he’d just seen. He made gestures which were only partly dignified. They tended to be imploring. He begged Howell to do it again.

Puzzled, Howell dropped more scraps of plastic into the garbage-disposal unit. They turned to powder. More scraps. They did the same, And more.

There was an incredible tumult. Some of the miniature human faces were aglow with excitement. Their owners shouted shrilly. Some seemed awed, dazed by the remarkable thing they’d seen. There were small-men who pounded each other on the back, howling in apparent glee. There were some who clasped hands in overwhelming emotion. Howell saw a man in rose-pink garments, making his way forcefully through the crowd. He reached a certain small-race woman. He embraced her, pointing to the garbage-disposal unit and practically babbling to her. She wept quietly.

“Hold on!” protested Howell, “What’s the matter? If you want garbage-disposal, I’ll give it to you! I’ll make one for you! But let Whiskers, here, do his stuff. Clear the way! Clear the way!”

Ketch and Breen came shouldering their way through the crowding, rejoicing small-men. Ketch demanded, “What’s going on here? What’s going on?”

“They saw a garbage unit work,” said Howell wryly, “and they went out of their minds.” Then he said impatiently, “See if you can draw pictures of people going out of their minds and find out what all the fuss is about.”

He moved forward, spreading out his arms and shooing the fascinated small humans out of the space-yacht. Before the last were gone he saw some of them running toward the wreck of the slug-ship. He returned to the whiskered man in purple, who pursed his lips and gazed raptly at the garbage device. He made small sounds to himself. But this time the sounds he made were not comfortable, meditative ones. They were plaintive. They were almost querulous. He could make nothing of the garbage-disposer and he wanted most desperately to do so.

“Look,” said Howell vexedly, “if it means that much to you, I’ll make you one and show you how to make others. But what is this?”

The whiskered man made gestures. It was perfectly clear that he and some of his companions had gone to the slug-ship’s wreck and carved some item of equipment out of the solid plastic which was most of the slug-ship’s hull. The plastic had to be massive, for strength, and it was reinforced with metal imbedded in it. Howell hadn’t recognized the object until he saw the whiskered man estimating its size in comparison with the space the capacitor had been pulled out from. The whiskered man’s gestures were assurance that he proposed to make it replace the capacitor just dumped on the ground outside. But Howell didn’t believe it: the small-men had spaceships, but their technology was still primitive when they had to make even their weapons by hand.

“Go ahead and try it,” said Howell skeptically. “By all means try it! If it takes us away from here until we can lose our trailers—if we can lose them—that’ll be perfect. But if it only blows up the Marintha I won’t complain!”

The small-man, of course, did not understand. But Howell had spoken to him, and he spoke back. Somehow his tone conveyed desperate entreaty because of the dignity with which he expressed it. What he wanted Howell to do was of the utmost possible urgency.

Breen said puzzledly, “I’ve given them part of the seeds from our emergency-kit, and Ketch has been drawing things that can be used for weapons. What more can they want?”

“Apparently,” said Howell sardonically, “they want something to handle garbage with! I can’t make him out as wanting anything else.”

He made a pantomime of removing the garbage-disposer and presenting it to the whiskered small-man. That undersized person looked horrified. He wanted something else. It was Karen who interpreted.

“He doesn’t want to take this one,” she said convincedly. “This one is too much to take from us. But if we’ll show him how to make one—”

“It’s a slightly tricky job,” said Howell, “but tell him I’ll try. It’s not more hopeless than the job he’s undertaken—to power our overdrive by a slug-ship capacitor! If he can do that…”

Three small people came bashfully into the yacht. Howell had chased them out minutes before. Now they were back again. They carried chopped-off bits of the plastic of the slug-ship. With signs and gestures they asked ingratiatingly if they might drop these bits of plastic into the garbage-disposal device.

“Go ahead!” said Howell impatiently. “Have your fun!”

And they did. And it was fun. They were incredibly pleased and hopeful.

But Howell was in no enviable frame of mind. The fact was, of course, that his thoughts could never stray far from the hopeless state of affairs that lay before Karen. The contact with the small race hadn’t improved her situation. Now it was obvious that even if the Marintha should somehow be repaired—but he was unable to believe it could happen—it should not return to the worlds of Earth-humanity without absolute assurance that it wasn’t trailed by slug-ships. And Howell was convinced now that such trailing was standard practise for the chlorine-breathers, though the small-men must have some way to evade it.

He saw no conceivable hope for Karen, other than a lifetime of furtive hiding among the small people, plus the knowledge that if she were ever found, their own race would be sought for and discovered and massacred as its forbears had been so many thousands of years before.

So there could be no good fortune for any of them. But not all of them shared Howell’s pessimism. Ketch was developing a new psychology since the fight with the slug-creatures. It was based, ultimately, on tape-dramas he had watched. He’d experienced combat, as in those excellently staged dramatic tales. He hadn’t been hurt, and he’d liked it. He’d acquired a dramatic hatred of the slug-creatures because such a hatred fitted into daydreams of an armed spacecraft with himself as skipper and admiring small-men as his subordinates, roving space to destroy slug-ships in a frenzy appropriate to a drama-tape but to nothing else.

The yearning of the small-men for garbage-disposal units, too, Was irritating because seemingly so senseless. But they couldn’t seem to think of anything else, now. With other reasons for angry frustration, Howell developed a savage mood.

More of the small-folk came into the yacht, persistently, apologetically and even bashfully, to drop some morsel of plastic into the garbage unit and watch it become powder. Howell went angrily to search in the ship’s stores for small parts to make a spare disposal unit for a globe-ship, meaningless as the idea seemed to be.

Ketch followed him. He spoke with an air of fine authority: “Howell, you’re making a very bad mistake. You’ve acted as leader on this expedition up to now, but you’re showing fewer and fewer qualifications for making decisions on which the lives of the rest of us depend. We’ve got to design some weapons!”

“Well?” said Howell.

He picked out the small parts he’d need. It occurred to him that the small, useless capacitor from the booby trap could be used in the thing he’d foolishly promised to make.

“If that whiskered small-man cobbled the Marintha to drive again, we’ll need designs for weapons to defend ourselves with. But we can do more. I can recruit some of those small characters to come along with us and use the weapons.”

Howell turned his head to look at Ketch.

“We’ve got to learn their language,” said Ketch decisively. “We’ve got to build weapons. We’ve got to join the globe-ships when they gather at their next rendezvous. We’ve got to have a record of slug-ships destroyed and proof that we can lead the small-men with our new weapons to something more than a stalemate against the beasts who hunt them now!”

“It’s at least not yet certain,” Howell told him, “that the Marintha can be repaired, Besides that, there’s Karen. If you did turn the yacht—my yacht, by the way—into a fighting ship, do you think you should make Karen enforcedly part of the crew?”

“Karen,” said Ketch in the same authoritative tone, “is a woman. And a woman glories in being the wife of a fighting man.”

“That’s the way it is on drama-tapes,” snapped Howell. “You’re a fool! This is reality!”

He pushed Ketch out of the way and went back to the engine room. He had the parts he needed, and paper on which to sketch.

The whiskered small-man was at work on the clumsy, plastic-encased object from the slug-ship wreck. When Howell put down the assortment of small parts, he looked up. His eyes shone. He abandoned what he’d been doing. He looked desperately at each and everyone of the objects that would go to make up the garbage-disposal unit, and so fierce was his desire to understand them that Howell changed his original intention. He diagrammed the inward workings of everyone. It wasn’t too difficult, after a vocabulary of picturings had been made from one component taken apart.

The whiskered man had two helpers, and Howell had not known that such intense and concentrated attention could be paid by anybody to anything. They watched him tensely as he worked. He could leave nothing unexplained. He could pass over nothing as self-evident. It was the wave-form of the oscillations in the disintegration-chamber metal which did the work, of course. But the high-frequency current used should have radiated like a broadcast instead of remaining confined to the metal until some organic compound came in contact with it. It was difficult to explain that the air in the ship reflected back what should have been high-frequency, radio-spectrum radiation. The standard illustration was that if an electric lamp were submerged in quicksilver, no light could escape. It would all be reflected back to the light-source. No garbage-disposal unit, surrounded by air, could have any of its radiation escape. Which was why plastic objects inside the ship were unaffected.

Time passed, and the sunlight on the jungle outside the yacht gave way to darkness. There was very probably a spectacular sunset, but Howell did not see it. He laboured at the assembly of a garbage-disposal unit. It was tricky, but the development of apparatus to produce the needed wave-form, which he expected to be most difficult to explain, went through, swimmingly. The whiskered small-man took it in stride. He watched eagerly as Howell soldered this and that, and he urgently insisted on restating, in diagrams and pictures, every item of information to be sure that he had it right—which was praiseworthy, but took up time.

Karen raised the question of dinner. Howell shook his head. He found it ironic and farcical and typical of this whole affair that though there was a friendly civilized race anxious and willing to help the Marintha, there was substantially nothing that it could do. That at once there was most desperate need for the Marintha to get home-which appeared to be impossible—and there was most imperative reason that she shouldn’t attempt it, lest she be trailed. The yacht should get off this world before a slug-ship fighting-fleet arrived, but it would be wiser to dump it into the deepest depths of the sea. And with such problems demanding impossible solutions—he was making a gadget to dispose of garbage!

Karen brought him sandwiches. He nodded and offered them to the three small-men who alone remained in the Marintha after darkness fell. They refused, and waited so yearningly for him to complete his task that he merely took a bite now and then and continued his labour.

Later Karen came again. She said, “Aren’t you going to try to get some sleep?”

“I’ve got no particular use for sleep,” said Howell dourly. “What good would it do me?”

“You should sleep! ” protested Karen.

He did not answer. She said hesitatingly that Ketch was designing weapons. Howell carefully soldered a tiny contact.

She said, “He’s—asked me to learn the language as fast as I possibly can.”

“No harm,” said Howell, “nor any particular good, the way things look now. I suspect he wants you to learn especially military terminology. Which will be about as useful as what I’m doing.”

“I wish—” she stopped and said helplessly, “I wish something—”

He lifted his eyes to her.

“I’m working,” he said grimly, “for you. I can’t do anything that’s really hopeful so I’m doing things that are practically hopeless, in the hope that I may be mistaken about how hopeless they are.”

She went away, looking unhappily behind her. He continued his work. A long time after what was probably midnight, he finished the task. He connected the capacitor from the booby trap. He turned on the current. He gave the completed device to the whiskered small-man, He was very tired then. There is nothing as fatiguing as frustration.

“It’s all yours,” he said wearily. “Do you want to try it?”

He watched as the whiskery small-man picked up a scrap of plastic. He trembled. He dropped the plastic in the new garbage-disposal unit. It seemed to melt very quietly and very quickly except that it did not become a liquid, but a powder. Impalpable powder. It flowed back and forth as the container was tilted. The whiskered man’s two helpers almost solemnly repeated the test. Their eyes shone. They said nothing, as if speech were impossible. But nobody could have been more excited.

The whiskered small-man reached up and patted Howell on the shoulder. He urged him away.

He and his two helpers threw themselves into the work of adapting the plastic-surrounded capacitor from the wrecked slug-ship to the wrecked overdrive unit of the Marintha. They worked feverishly. It was a very delicate job. If it didn’t work at all there’d be little harm, considering everything, and if it did work it wouldn’t do much good. But it would certainly require very precise knowledge of slug-culture equipment if it was to work at all.

Howell watched for a certain length of time. They did seem to know what they were doing. But the Marintha would still be unarmed even if the overdrive field was again available, and there was no time to create weapons, and there was no way to evade pursuit even if they could flee. The small-men had some device—

Howell was worn out by pessimism and a grim despair. On the morrow he’d try to arrange for Karen to have asylum among the small-folk, If possible he’d transfer some technical books with her, and she could translate them later. If Breen and Ketch could be accepted, of course they’d try to pass on Earth science too, And if he could explain to the small people, and if they had room for him also, they might follow him to where he’d send the Marintha to dive down until her hull-plates buckled from the pressure, And they might pick him up from the water—if it was worth while. And after that—

He flung himself on a couch and was instantly asleep.

He woke with an appalling sensation of giddiness and nausea and of a twisting; spiral fall. He was bewildered. It couldn’t be! Then he heard agitated babblings, and suddenly he knew it was so. He was on his feet even before the nausea ended. He bolted for the control room. He rushed into it to find the vision-screens blank. The Marintha was not only in space, but in overdrive. And half a dozen of the small-men, in the control room, struggled to get the face-plate off the instrument—board to get at the relays behind it. While Howell slept, the capacitor from the slug-ship had been installed. While he slept, the yacht had been lifted off for a matter-of-fact, wholly confident check on the improvised repair. But the Marintha was now in overdrive, headed in an unknown direction at an unknown multiple of the speed of light—and the small-men were struggling to get behind the instrument-board to fix whatever was wrong that was preventing the Marintha from breaking out of overdrive.