Space Gypsies

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was one of those things that nobody could possibly have predicted. There was no use in debating whose fault it might be, or in dividing up the blame. It had happened, and Howell could tell a part of it by his own now-vanished symptoms such as everybody experiences when going into or out of overdrive. But it was a shock to have gone dismally to sleep, having no actual belief that the Marintha could ever be put into overdrive again, and being resolved anyhow to sink her in the deepest sea, and then to wake and find her lifted off the booby trap planet, in overdrive, and now unable to get out again.

He thrust aside the small-men. He tried, himself, to get the front-plate clear for removal, He broke his fingernails in the utterly futile effort, He was sure, with a bitter certainty, that the yacht had been thrown into overdrive solely to verify that it could be done, It had probably been intended to make the briefest of overdrive hops, It was wholly unlikely that a particular line of drive had been chosen. But the Marintha was surely driving away from the unnamed planet of the booby trap on which the others of her crew had been left. With every second it became less likely that she would ever find her way back to it again. And there was unquestionably a squadron or a fleet of fighting slug-ships on the way to that green world now, More, and worse, the Marintha had been detected in overdrive in the first place, and she was subject to detection in overdrive now, and when she broke out of overdrive—as she must, and quickly—there would probably be the consequences of detection by implacable enemies to be faced.

Howell felt trapped, tearing futilely at the instrument-board because the yacht was in overdrive and would not break out, But then he saw the small-men staring hopefully at him, and he was ashamed.

“The devil!” he said disgustedly. “I could have had it off by now!”

He got a screwdriver and with suddenly steady hands removed the polished black plate which was the instrument-board between rows of dials and switches. He peered at the exposed maze of wires and relays and amplifiers. The breakout switch was frozen. When the overdrive field went on, there’d been a surge of current of such extra violence that an arc had formed across a spot on the relay-contacts. The metal surfaces that should have slid past each other to cause breakout were brazed together for a space of perhaps an eighth of an inch. It was the most trivial of operational failures. Only a screwdriver and a hammer were needed. He had the screwdriver in his hand. The hammer was immediately available. He tapped on the screwdriver, cutting through the eighth-inch welded—melted—spot. The relay flipped clear. There was giddiness, there was nausea, there was the feel of a horrible spiral fall through nothingness. Then he was staring at the vision-screens.

Multitudes of stars glowed all about the Marintha. They were, of course, totally unfamiliar. There was a sun of vivid green, seemingly near enough to have a disk if one squinted at it, but it was actually only a pinpoint of brilliance. There was the Milky way, distinctly not itself as seen from Earth. There was an anonymous star-cluster between the Marintha and it. This was what the starboard vision-screens showed. To port there were fewer suns.

Howell threw on all detection-instruments, including the all-wave receiver. He hastily restored it to maximum sensitivity, whether or not it would resonate. He set the, nearest-object radar spinning, outside the hull, to warn him of anything within light-minutes.

The small-men beamed at him, admiring his quick response to the emergency, which was serious enough to produce another emergency even more serious.

“I wish,” said Howell grimly, “that I could talk your language to give you the dressing-down you deserve! Let’s see—”

The small-men continued to regard him with confidence and with admiration. They got out of his way with alacrity. They plainly waited to see what he would do, or what he would want them to do. He surveyed the situation. In part his emotions were purest, unadulterated fury. In part they were pessimistic to the edge of despair.

The Marintha was lost from the world of the booby trap and the small-men’s gypsy encampment and the balance of her proper ship’s company. By past experience, she might expect to be challenged at any instant by a slug-ship which would have followed in overdrive from the instant it detected her. Such a slug-ship might break out beyond the effective range even of its ball-lightning weapon, but it need not, and—

As of the moment, the detector-system announced that space was empty of active enemies. Howell ran his eyes over the small-men. The whiskered expert on space-drives was not among them. He was probably back at the globe-ships, feverishly trying to use the knowledge Howell had given him to make another unit of garbage-disposal equipment.

It was very likely that one of these present luridly-clothed small-men was the engineer or the astrogator of one of the two globe-ships. The very best of the small-race’s qualified pilots might be aboard the Marintha now. It wasn’t likely that the yacht had been lifted off and put into overdrive by incompetents. But none offered to take charge. Each one looked at him blandly and trustfully. He was awake; therefore he was in command of the yacht. Therefore they waited for him to give them orders. They would be intensely interested. They would be helpful to the best of their ability. But above all they would be wholly confident of the wisdom of whatever he chose to do. Because he could make a device to dispose of garbage!

He suddenly realized that he seemed to be alone save for the small-men. None of his companions was visible. They’d allowed the yacht to be lifted off by small-men. They hadn’t insisted that he be consulted. Not one of them—not even Karen—had waked him to tell him of the intended test of the overdrive-field generator. They’d let him be lifted off with the Marintha.

He went to Breen’s cabin. Empty. Ketch’s. Empty. He touched the knob of Karen’s door—and it turned in his hand. The door opened and Karen was staring at him.

“What the dev—” he stopped. “Do you know what’s happened?”

She shook her head. Then she moistened her lips and nodded. “I—think so,” she said in a queer tone. “It was a mistake, I suppose. My mistake.”

He waited.

“You—worked most of the night,” she told him uneasily. “You were—making a garbage thing for the small people. You finished it. You were worn out. You went to sleep while they worked on the overdrive. I was—nervous. I didn’t sleep. But early this morning they’d gone and—there were other small-people outside. My father went out to them. Ketch followed. I heard him talking. They couldn’t understand him, of course, but he talked like—like someone making a speech. Enthusiastic. We were going to do wonderful things for them, he said. Show them how to kill slug-creatures and destroy their ships. Wonderful things. They—listened. But of course they didn’t understand.”

“He’s an idiot,” said Howell coldly. “He thinks he’s in a drama-tape, cast in the role of a great national leader carrying his nation to triumph. Well?”

“He came in and got a rifle,” said Karen. “He went off, I suppose to show them in miniature what we’ll teach them to make in giant size. My father went off in another direction, probably about plants of some sort. I—waited. I thought you’d wake up presently and—I could give you breakfast.”

Howell made an instinctive gesture, and then checked himself.

“Go on.”

“Presently there were even more small-folk about. I heard Ketch’s voice again, but I didn’t hear what he said. Then some of the small people came into the yacht. I assumed he’d told them to. We’ve had no reason to keep them out. But I heard the exit-port close. That was when I made my mistake. I—I didn’t go out to see what they were doing. They must have lifted off and out of the atmosphere. I couldn’t tell, of course, because the artificial gravity adjusts for such things. And then—we went into overdrive and I heard you rush for the control room. I should have found out what they were going to do in the yacht. But I thought Ketch had told them—”

“He probably did,” said Howell grimly. “He’d make a grand gesture authorizing anything without knowing what it was.”

He headed back to the control room, seething. Earth-based humanity very often behaved childishly. With all his surroundings elaborately protective, the average man grew up without burning himself, cutting himself, falling out of a tree, breaking an arm or leg or even going hungry. Nothing injurious ever happened, and he never really learned that they could. It was wholly probable that Ketch was now acting a dramatic role without the apprehensions a suitable past would have developed in him. With small-men admiring him, he could very well have authorized a trial trip by the repaired Marintha without the least idea of what he was doing.

An instrument-needle quivered ever so faintly in the denuded mass of dials and switches.

Howell said harshly, “Overdrive corning!”

He pushed over the switch. There was a very bright spark. The feeling of twisting fall and nausea and giddiness. Then the Marintha felt as steady as a rock. Actually it drove blindly without destination at a rate Howell somehow believed was faster than her previous overdrive rate. But there’d been a lurid spark in the relay. It was again welded fast by the much-greater-than-ordinary current flow. Howell swore under his breath and took up the screwdriver and hammer once more. He snapped instructions to Karen to get a specific high-conductivity dressing for the contact surfaces of the relay. He used it when he’d cleared the melted-together spot again. He threw off the overdrive switch and the Marintha broke out to clear space again. Howell stared grimly at the vision-plates.

The star-cluster he’d noted was visible but slightly moved in relation to the Milky way. Howell could not even guess at relative distances, but he was sure now that the Marintha was faster than she’d ever been before.

“Something broke out near us just now,” he told Karen, “a very short time after we broke out. So I went back into overdrive. We’ll find out if it throws him off the track.”

There were murmurs among the small-men who waited expectantly for Howell to do something or require something of them. He said sardonically, “They’re wondering, I suppose, why I don’t do whatever they’d do in their ships to get away on an occasion like this. But this is all the Marintha will do! Incidentally she’s overpowered now. She could blow out both drives if she felt like it. Maybe she will.”

It was not the happiest of prospects. The use of a slug-ship capacitor meant, evidently, a storage of energy even greater than the Marintha’s original capacitor had provided. Which meant a flow of raw power her circuits weren’t designed to carry. Which meant that she could blow her drives to smoking scrap at any instant and lie helpless in space for the slug-ships to find. Which would give great pleasure to those chlorine-breathing monstrosities.

One of the small-men diffidently called attention to something. He pointed to a tiny area on one of the vision-screens. Howell blinked.

“He’s pointing to where we came from!” said Karen. “He would be! There’d be nothing else for him to point to.”

Howell considered for seconds. Then he nodded.

“Right! It has to be that.”

It was wholly reasonable. More, it was self-evident that the pilots of the small race’s globe-ships would operate quite differently from the astrogators of ships like the Marintha. Earth-humans voyaged from solar system to solar system, through charted volumes of space. Explorers tied in newly travelled ways to previously charted ones. They always kept the necessary return-journey in mind. But if the globe-ships were in flight from their enemies, they and they alone would habitually break out of overdrive in between-the-stars. They alone would really envision space as having three dimensions, so that star-clusters would serve as beacons and other galaxies as direction-marks. And to them, moving always into unexplored areas and with no thought of return, charts of where they’d been would be useless and of the unknown before them, impossible. For rendezvous they’d develop a system of coordinates that would practically be abstractions, yet by which they could meet each other even in totally strange territory. And a small-man in a red vest-like garment, after two unmeasured overdrive hops at an unknown number of times the speed of light, put his finger confidently on the line to be taken to get back to their starting-point.

“Right!” said Howell again. “That’s where we came from. The only question is whether we dare go back.”

He watched the detector-dials, which would receive and identify and report the surge of power if another ship broke out of overdrive within its very considerable range. Its needle quivered. A ship had broken out somewhere.

“Overdrive coming! ” said Howell savagely.

He threw the switch. Nausea. Giddiness. Falling. The Marintha again drove blindly, isolated from all the universe outside its own overdrive-field. In theory, nothing could touch the Marintha inside that unsubstantial barrier. In theory, nothing could enter that field, whether solid object or radiation. In theory, nothing could leave it. And it had been believed undetectable. But Howell now had appallingly good evidence that a moving overdrive field, carrying a ship at many times light-speed within it, created some signal which another ship in overdrive could detect and home on.

“The answer to the question I mentioned,” he said bitterly, “appears to be, no! We don’t dare go back to the booby trap world! Something’s trailing us. Maybe two somethings. We took another overdrive hop and they or their cousins turned up instantly where we broke out. Now we’re hopping again. If something breaks out of overdrive immediately when we do so again—that’s it!”

The Marintha drove on and on and on. The small-men consulted among themselves. The one with the garment like a vest apparently took the opinion of others and presently nodded satisfiedly to himself. They settled down to wait. Howell paced up and down, scowling as he thought. Presently he paused and regarded the placid, plainly un-alarmed small-men.

“Karen,” he said exasperatedly,“they know what sort of fix we’re in. But they sit there without a care in the world. What’s the matter with them?”

“I think,” said Karen, “they expect you to do something remarkable. After all, we came to this part of the galaxy. It’s full of dangers. They can’t imagine our having got to where we found them without encountering those dangers and defeating them. So they expect you to do it again.”

“But we’d a blown-out capacitor when they found us!” protested Howell. “That should prove we were vulnerable!”

“A bolt from a slug-ship would explain it,” said Karen, “and that could happen to anybody by accident, they’d think. And we did destroy that slug-ship aground—or you did. And there was the booby trap. It had killed some small-people from another and earlier ship. They couldn’t disarm it. You did. So they think you can do remarkable things. And they’re waiting for you to do some more.”

Howell said something explosive under his breath. He beckoned to the small-man in the red vest. That miniature human moved briskly to his side.

“I want you to point out the way back to the booby trap planet,” said Howell. He felt foolish, speaking to someone who wouldn’t understand a word. He made gestures, repeating the one the small-man had used before, when pointing to the screen. “I won’t head there unless we lose whatever’s after us now, but—you can point the way?”

The little man seemed to understand. Howell flipped the breakout switch. He grimaced at the sensations of falling and giddiness and nausea. The screens lighted. The small man surveyed them and pointed confidently with his finger. It was the most matter-of-fact of gestures. He probably couldn’t imagine a ship remaining lost in space.

Howell swung the yacht to an entirely new direction. On the dial that told of another ship’s breakout, a needle quivered. It would have to be a slug-ship. On the instant Howell had the Marintha out of normal space again. He hoped it would be before the slug-ship’s detectors acted. He guessed at a reaction-time for that unpleasant ship’s pilot, and was back in normal space at about the instant the slug-ship should have left it. Then he went back into overdrive just as the slug-ship should have returned to normal space.

It was a matter of dodging, of outguessing the unseen pilot of the unseen enemy ship. It was an attempt to bewilder the monster at the controls of the enemy craft. And it seemed to work.

Sweating, Howell cut off all his own detection-instruments except the one that told of the other ship’s breakout, lest they give information as well as receive it. He dodged crazily between the real universe and the artificial one which was the state of being in overdrive.

The shifts back and forth were horrible. With each shift came the vertigo and nausea and the feel of falling. Repeated, it became torment. Karen looked white and ill, and the small-men lost their bland expectancy and became tense and nerve-racked.

And then Howell stopped the jumps into and out of overdrive. The Marintha lay still in space, with ten thousand myriads of stars about her. Howell scowled at the one instrument left in operation. But nothing happened. And nothing happened. And still nothing happened. There was no sign of any spacecraft or—after some minutes—artificial radiation in all of empty space.

After a long, long time, Howell said evenly, “It looks like we’ve lost whatever was after us. The question now is what to do next.”

The small-man with the red vest put his finger on a vision-screen. Howell nodded.

“That’s very likely the way for us to go,” he told Karen as evenly as before. “But we were detected in overdrive going away from there. I don’t know whether or not we’d be detected going back. If we were, their friends—” he nodded toward the now-recovered small-men, “their friends would pay for it unless they got away fast in their globe-ships. And Ketch and your father would definitely pay, unless they were taken on the globe-ships.”

Karen parted her lips to speak, and then did not.

The breakout-detector quivered. Howell did nothing. After minutes, it quivered again.

“We’re not in the clear,” said Howell, “but one of them popped out then and we didn’t react. So it popped back into overdrive. It’s hunting for signs of us there.”

He turned on all the detection-instruments. He’d been playing a very deadly game of blind-man’s-buff, with the Marintha driving blindly at multiples of light-speed between dodgings. Now Howell wiped sweat from his forehead.

“I’m going to try something new,” he said very grimly indeed. “We’ve been trying to dodge and run as fast as possible. Now we’ll try dodging and creeping. Watch this dial for me.”

He went back to the engine room and made adjustments to the overdrive unit. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, a ship going into overdrive instantly attained the maximum speed the overdrive-field could give it. In order to exist, such a field had to move, and whatever was enclosed in it had to move with and in it But the highest speed the Marintha could make wasn’t enough to leave its invisible pursuer behind. So Howell cut down the overdrive velocity to an absurdly small figure. What he did should cut down the flow of power associated with entry and breakout. It should reduce the likelihood of a blow-out. And just possibly, the weakened power-surges might be feeble enough to go undetected.

He went back to the control-board: The small-men watched his every movement. They murmured among themselves. The little man with the red vest went toward the engine room. He stopped and looked inquiringly at Howell. Howell paid no attention. The small-man went into the engine room. Howell continued to regard all the detection-instruments with a specifically grim expression.

Nothing happened. There was no quiver of the overdrive detection device. There was nothing from the all-wave receiver but the infinitesimal cracklings which were the solar flares of far-away suns, and very occasionally those singular flute-like musical notes for which there was as yet no known explanation but which some people called the music of the spheres.

Still nothing happened. The nearest-object indicator registered infinity—and would until its search-pulse had travelled for light-months or years and had been reflected back an equal distance, when the returned signal would be too faint to register.

The little man with the red vest came out of the engine room. He looked puzzled. He went to the garbage-disposal unit and looked it over carefully. Whatever he looked for he did not find. He rejoined the other small-men and they talked among themselves in low tones, as if not to disturb Howell. But they regarded him confidently.

“They still expect a miracle,” said Howell coldly, with his eyes moving swiftly from one instrument to another. “They’re going to be disappointed, unless…” he shrugged and said curtly, “Overdrive coming!”

He threw the switch. There was dizziness, but it was not disturbing. There was nausea, but it was trivial. The sensation of falling was hardly more marked than in a swiftly falling elevator. Even the screens did not blank out instantly. They seemed to fade instead of being abruptly extinguished. But the Marintha went into overdrive. Because of the adjustment of the generator, she was surrounded by a stress-envelope of strained space which had the properties of an overdrive-field, but barely so. By comparison with the speed at which the usual field-strength carried the Marintha, she crawled. She crept. She moved at a snail-like gait.

But it was still faster than the first interstellar voyagers had been able to travel. They, though, took six years to make a four-light-year journey between solar systems.

“We’re crawling now,” said Howell. “It’s just barely possible that whatever detects normal overdrive-fields won’t pick up one that’s so nearly something else. If I’m wrong about it—we’ll probably never know it.”

It was officially accepted theory that nothing could break into an overdrive-field. But it was also officially accepted that if the impossible happened and something did—if, for example, a ship in overdrive drove into a sun—that either the field would bounce and the ship’s occupants know nothing of the event, or else the overdrive-field would break with a simultaneous release of all the energy within the ship it surrounded. And in that case, the ship’s occupants would know nothing of the event because they’d be dead before they could realize it.

Now the Marintha drove more slowly than a detection instrument should be willing to credit. For hours on end the space-yacht remained sealed away from all the normal cosmos. It was not possible to see anything, hear anything, or know anything of the universe beyond the overdrive-field’s extension.

Howell said, “It seems to me that for two people who supposedly care for each other, Karen, we act less romantically than any other couple in history.”

Karen smiled faintly.

“But you’re busy taking me to where I’ll be safe, aren’t you?”

“Trying, yes. Succeeding—I don’t know. But at least we’re not acting like characters in a drama-tape!”

Karen looked at him with a peculiarly wry expression. Their chance of living seemed very small. She considered that she and Howell were very probably about to die. Naturally, she would have preferred their romantic state to loom at least as large as the danger they were in. But Howell was acting with complete sanity, trying to find even the last least chance for the two of them. Karen, though, would have settled for a little less sanity and a little more ecstasy in what might be their last moments of life. But a girl can hardly change the character of the man she does care about. Karen submitted to the way Howell happened to be made, because there was nothing else to do.

Still, it was a very long time indeed before Howell raised his eyes from the now-not-registering instruments and said, “Now we’ll see what happens.”

He nodded to Karen, but didn’t smile. His expression was wholly intent instead of impressively emotional. Without any trimmings at all, he threw the breakout switch to find out what might await them in normal space.

The uncomfortable sensations of breakout were singularly mild. The dizziness and the nausea were trivial. The feeling of a spinning fall was almost absent. The vision-screens lighted almost deliberately, taking a good fraction of a second to reach full brightness.

Then the stars of the galaxy surrounded the Marintha on all sides. Their number was incalculable, but it is usual to guess the total number of shining suns in the First Galaxy at one hundred thousand millions. Such a figure has no meaning to anybody. But if one counted all the strong bright stars nearby, and the vastly greater number of those just a little less bright, and the still more enormous number of those just a little bit fainter, and so on down to the unthinkable quantity of suns which are the minutest glimmerings the eye can detect… if one did that, the number a hundred thousand million would acquire meaning. It would be the number of the stars that could , be seen from the Marintha.

Silence. Stillness, save for infinitesimal cracklings and hissings. Minutes passed. Tens of minutes. The detection instruments read a unanimous zero.

The small-men murmured to each other. Somehow they seemed bewildered, even disappointed. As long minutes went by and Howell did nothing but watch the instruments, the small-men seemed visibly disturbed. The one in the red vest hesitantly asked a question in his own language. Howell did not lift his eyes.

“See if you can make out what he wants, Karen,” he commanded.

He was doing sums in his head, because the computer could not handle guesses, He attempted, to feel the incomputable total of speeds and durations and courses such as the Marintha had followed. It was actually an attempt to find the total of a series of random motions. The result would be a guess which was more or less plausible. He arrived at it.

Karen made gestures to the small-man, and he gesticulated back. She produced a writing-pad. They drew pictures and made motions, and each of them spoke, from time to time, with the unreasonable feeling that that should help in understanding.

Howell said, “I think we have to take the chance.”

Karen spoke with some doubt.

“You asked what the small-man wants. I think he wants to know why you didn’t destroy the ship that was following us. He’s disturbed because it got away.”

“I’ll be happy enough if we’ve got away,” said Howell. “The happiest ending I can see as possible is a chance to save ourselves and the worlds we know from murder-raids by sinking the Marintha in the deepest ocean to be found. I don’t want to have to look for one! If we can get back to the small people’s ships, we’ve the best chance to make our suicide—it may come to that—of some use to the galaxy. I think we should try for it.”

He beckoned to the small-man in the red vest. He made it clear that he wanted a direction in which to drive, for a return to the world they’d started from. The small-men’s globe-ships must feel concern for the test-crew of their own race who’d lifted off in the Marintha to try out a cobbled repair, and hadn’t come back. Ketch would be indignant over the space-yacht’s vanishing. He’d envisioned himself in the highly dramatic role of a leader of fighting small-men in a superlatively armed globe-ship. He might anticipate something even more glamorous, since he’d said splendidly that Karen would rather be the wife of a fighting man than anything else. And Breen would be deeply anxious about his daughter Karen.

In the Marintha’s control room, the small-man with the red vest looked at the stars on the screen. He put his finger decisively on a particular spot. He even marked off the steady, yellow glow of a Sol-type sun as the centre of the solar system they wished to drive for. Howell was dubious that it was the right one. Nevertheless he lined up the Marintha for it with infinite care.

“Overdrive coming,” he said curtly.

He threw the switch. The vision-screens faded. There were other evidences that the yacht had gone into overdrive. It was slow overdrive. It was overdrive so much minimized that it was almost something else. But not quite.

The Marintha stayed in overdrive on this course and at this speed for very nearly nine hours. There could be no exact computation of the time required. Howell had a feeling about the speed. The little man in the red vest had something more than a feeling about the proper course. Perhaps he’d ideas about the distance, too, but they couldn’t be communicated. In any case, the Marintha drove at the minimum rate possible in overdrive for what seemed much longer than the chronometers said. Then Howell broke out. He expected the little man to give him another bearing from this breakout point.

But he didn’t need it. When the screens lighted, with an extreme of deliberation, there was a yellow sun to starboard. There was a cloud-world, with no markings of any sort from the vapour-layers that covered it from pole to pole. There was a gas-giant planet with reddish striations almost at its equator. And there was a green world with ice-caps and seas and continents.

And the Marintha’s all-wave receiver picked up whinings that were all too familiar. There were slug-ships in this solar system. They were here by scores and hundreds. The breakout detector flickered and wavered as more slug-ships arrived from nowhere and began to use their solar-system drives as the only practical way to move about within the limits of a sun’s planetary system.

This was, of course, the slug-fleet Howell had deduced must exist because patrolling slug-ships travelled in pairs. Of the pair first encountered, one had stayed out of the way of possible harm while its companion investigated and tried to destroy the Marintha. When that ship went to ground and Howell blew it up with a blaster-bolt down the throat of its lightning cannon, the survivor of the pair had bleated and hooted dismally, and then disappeared. Howell reasoned then that it had gone for help. Now it was back with a fleet of fighting ships that nothing could withstand. And as more and more of the ugly ships broke out and began to organize themselves, Howell was bitterly sure that this was the end of everything.

Then he heard the small-men. They made a tumult of triumph and rejoicing. They grinned at him, beaming. From doubt and disappointment, they’d changed instantly to hilarious anticipation. They believed that up to this moment he had seemed to flee so that no companion slug-ship would report that a new and ultra-deadly enemy was in action against its race. Because of that forebearance, they believed, he’d now assembled the now-present fleet to become the victims of his remarkable abilities. They grinned in ecstatic triumph as they waited for him to annihilate the slug-ship fleet.

And more and ever more slug-ships broke out of overdrive and drove to take their places in battle-formation.

Then a bleating, hooting outcry came from the all-wave receiver. A slug-ship was broadcasting something in the chlorine-breathers’ substitute for language. A sun-bright blue-white flame appeared from nowhere and flashed past the Marintha. It seemed to miss the yacht by inches. More of the monstrous lightning-bolts shot out—