Space Gypsies

CHAPTER EIGHT

Howell threw the overdrive switch. The vision-screens faded. There were the usual symptoms accompanying entry into the isolated, twisted-space cocoon which was an overdrive-field. But again the symptoms were mild. They were almost unnoticeable. They were as much fainter than those usually felt as the speed of the Marintha was now less than the rate at which overdrive usually carried ships between the stars. The yacht, escaping murder-weapons in space, fled at the slowest of crawls.

For one instant the yacht seemed to be surrounded by a buzzing, whining fleet of unseen enemies. Bleatings and hootings had begun all about her, as the nearest murder-ships relayed the detailed information their instruments gave them. Deadly missiles of ball-lightning flashed toward her, any one of which would end her existence.

Then the place where the yacht had been was empty. Instantly other ships—slug-ships—flicked into seeming nothingness to pursue her.

But they drove on full-power. Before they could recover from the anguish all overdrive entries produce, they had flashed far past the place where the Marintha could be said to be. They went on and on, seeking her trail in nothingness, light-weeks and even light-months beyond this planetary system which the Marintha hadn’t left.

It was pure recklessness for Howell to use overdrive amidst all the celestial trash that gathers and floats around a sun. It was far from conservative. No skipper is anxious to find out really what will happen if, in overdrive, his ship rams into an asteroid or even the nucleus of a comet. But the Marintha had no choice. She had to take to overdrive or be blasted in mid-space, and overdrive meant plunging blindly to nowhere with an escort of chlorine-breathing monsters who might—who might!—be able to crack her field and force her back into cosmos where she was helpless. If they could trail a ship in overdrive, they might be able to do more.

In the Marintha the small-men babbled. They were bewildered. They made incredulous gestures to each other. The Marintha had plunged into the very centre of a war-fleet of the slug-creatures, and then plunged out again! They couldn’t understand it! If Howell could blow up a grounded slug-ship with a hand-weapon, and if he could disarm booby traps equipped with killer-fields, in his repaired and refurbished ship he should wreak vast destruction on an enemy-fleet! But he hadn’t. Why?

The man with the red vest went to the garbage disposal unit. He lifted its cover and gazed inside. He shook his head querulously.

“Karen,” said Howell grimly, “come up here and get set to talk. Since the small-folk aground must have detected the slug-fleet, they may be getting set to get away. I’ve got to break out to locate the planet they’re on—if they’re still there. If they are there, I’ll risk landing to put these small-men aboard their own ships. I’ll try to turn you over to your father, to get away with them. Then I’ll make sure the Marintha doesn’t become a source of information for the monsters who’re after us.”

She protested, “But you won’t—you won’t—”

“Get set to call!” ordered Howell grimly. “Never mind what I’m going to do!”

He made ready as she picked up the communicator and turned it on. He said, “Breakout coming!” and threw the switch. He then became wholly intent upon his instruments and what he could see in the vision-screens. The green world was a vividly visible disk. Karen began to speak: “Marintha calling! Marintha calling ground! Come in! Marintha calling ground.”

The all-wave receiver yielded whinings, faint and very many of them. They sounded not unlike the infuriated buzzings of a nest of hornets. But they were far away now. Very oddly, they were too near to use overdrive for travel, especially with debris to be found in such quantities as appear about a sun. But they were too far away to overtake the Marintha on solar-system drive.

The all-wave receiver brought in Breen’s voice.

“Karen! What happened? There’s a slug-ship fleet on the way!”

“I know,” said Karen unhappily. “We’re going to land the small-men if their ships will wait for them, and—”

“Ask if the small-men will take the three of you on board their ships,” ordered Howell. When she protested, he snapped, “Do as I say!”

She obeyed, but her voice wavered.

“Come to ground,” boomed Breen’s voice in the speaker. “The small-men are dancing! They’re celebrating! One of their ships went aloft some hours ago, and since it came back I can’t get any sense out of them! But they say come to ground!”

Howell nodded, his features set.

“I’ve got our overdrive set so low I can make another jump,” he observed. “It’ll save hours. Overdrive coming!”

The vision-screens faded. Howell counted minutes and seconds. Then he said, “Breakout coming!”

The screens lighted. To the left there was a monstrous mass of utter blackness, blotting out almost half the firmament. It was the night side of the green planet. Howell swung the yacht’s nose about and dived for the blackness’ edge. As he saw the situation, he was bound to lose Karen and his own life in any case. The only long-range good he could hope to do would develop indirectly through Breen and Ketch—if all went well. If they were accepted as guests of the small-man race, in time they might persuade their hosts to search for the civilization that had produced the Marintha. Such an encounter would give warning to the Earth-human race. They might prepare. They might arm. They might meet and smash the chlorine-breathing monsters who had smashed the cities and the civilization of humanity’s forefathers.

If that happened, it would justify Howell’s own reluctant mission, to be carried out when the others were gone from the green planet and before the slug-ships arrived. He meant to drive the Marintha straight down into the deepest chasm of the green world’s oceans, until the stout hull of the space-yacht collapsed. He’d do this so the slug-creatures couldn’t learn from her of the race of which Karen was a member.

The night side of the booby trap world blotted out half the stars. The Marintha plunged on. Presently a thin faint rim of reddish light appeared ahead. The Marintha raced onward toward the brightness. It was the dawn-line, where day began at this time on this planet. Howell dived. Normally a ship coming in for a landing will make at least one orbital turn to lose velocity. But Howell swung the Marintha about and used full solar-system drive to kill her speed.

He was almost exactly over the peninsula when the yacht’s rate of motion matched that of the ground. The space-yacht hovered for an instant, and then descended swiftly.

“Get your baggage set, Karen,” commanded Howell. “Pack up technical reference books too. Ketch and your father can translate them eventually.”

Karen said rebelliously, “I’m not going to go away with anybody while you sink the Marintha and you in it!”

There were creakings and crashings outside. Trees resisted the yacht’s landing. A tree trunk toppled and the Marintha touched ground. Howell strode to the exit-port and opened it The small-men who’d been his passengers went out in a subdued, bewildered fashion. Other small-men came running to meet them. There was eager, ecstatic exchange of news. There was wild hilarity. Those who’d been so disappointed because Howell in the Marintha inexplicably spared the ships of slug-creatures, and who just before landing had been quite bewildered—those same small-folk suddenly turned beaming faces back to him as he stood in the exit-port. They waved. They shouted. Those who’d come to meet them led the way back toward the globe-ships. But all the party turned to wave and shout joyously until they were out of sight.

“It would be interesting,” said Howell sardonically, “to know what they’re so pleased about!”

“My father will know,” said Karen. “Or Ketch.”

More tumult in the distance. Breen and Ketch came through the jungle, with an escort of the miniature men. Some members of the escort carried parcels. All wore grins wide enough to cut their throats. But Breen and Ketch didn’t seem to share their hilarity.

“You’re all right,” said Breen heavily, when he stood beside Karen in the exit-port. “I was pretty badly worried. I thought something had blown out in the engine room.”

Ketch said somewhat displeased, “What did happen? We thought you’d run into a slug-ship! The small-folk thought so too. They’d arranged to take us aboard, because they knew this fleet would be coming. They were ready to lift off, happy about something but disturbed about something else. Then Karen called. Then everything changed. Everybody was happy! Nobody was disturbed any more. They brought us here. Then—”

The small-men who’d escorted Ketch and Breen turned and made their way back toward their ships. But they turned and grinned happily and waved exuberantly. Then they disappeared.

Howell swore suddenly, under his breath. Ketch said suspiciously, “What’s the matter? What’s the program? What do we do?”

“I’ve got to sink the Marintha! We can’t let it be examined by the slug-beasts! You three have to go off in the globe-ships! Karen! Call the small-folk. It doesn’t matter what you say. Just talk urgently so they’ll come to find out what we want before they lift off!”

Karen disappeared into the yacht. Howell clenched and unclenched his hands. Ketch had daydreamed of heroism in the drama-tape mode, complete with dramatic gestures and posturings.

Breen had apparently taken everything that had happened on this planet in a completely matter-of-fact fashion, equally unsurprised and un-alarmed. Only Howell had seen the successive situations realistically, and only he had come to the conclusion that he must dive the Marintha to the depths of the sea until its hull was crushed by the pressure. From an abstract viewpoint, his decision might have seemed highly noble and heroic. But he didn’t feel that way. He was irritated. He didn’t feel even faintly satisfied with the idea of dying. And he couldn’t insist that the others join him in something he didn’t like himself.

Karen came back. She looked pale.

“They don’t answer, But—there are lots of whining sounds…”

Howell started up to try to call himself. But then Ketch uttered an angry cry, “Look there! They’re lifting off!”

And it was true. Above the jungle, a globe-ship rose. It cleared the giant trees that had hidden it. It hung motionless for a space, and then the second globe-ship came clear of the feathery, leafy branches that had concealed it and appeared also against the sky. The two ships swung forward, barely a hundred feet above ground-level. They floated over the intervening jungle and came to a stop above the Marintha.

The four of the Marintha’s company stared upward, incredulous. Ports in the two globe-ships opened. Small figures appeared and waved. Howell shouted furiously. Ketch bellowed.

The small-men, waving cordially, disappeared again. The two globe-ships went swiftly, serenely, confidently up into the sky. They dwindled. They became dots. Specks. They vanished.

“They took my ideas,” said Ketch darkly, “and now they’ll try to carry them out! But they won’t make it!”

He referred, of course, to his grandiose notions of space-battles in ships yet to be built, with armaments yet to be designed, which he would lead with splendid gestures.

Breen said querulously, “They brought all my botanical specimens. But—”

Karen said, “He thinks—” and she meant Howell, unmistakably, “he thinks he should sink the Marintha. Leaving us marooned—for those creatures to find! And—he intends to go down to the sea-bottom in the Marintha!”

Howell said with surpassing bitterness, “That was when I thought the small-folk would take you aboard. Not now! Now it would be murder, since they’ve gone. Get inside!”

Breen lifted his botanical specimens up into the port. Ketch, it appeared, had made something of a collection of the handmade weapons of the small-men. He got them aboard the yacht. Once within the small spaceship, the peevish, whining sound of slug-ship solar-system drives was loud and insistent from the all-wave receiver. There were many, many slug-ships in the fleet come to avenge the destruction of a scout-ship.

Howell went into the engine room. He changed the settings of the overdrive generator. He adjusted them to produce again the highest possible overdrive speed of which the Marintha was capable. He went back to the control room.

“Ketch! ” he called.

Ketch came indignantly.

“We’ve got one ingot in the fuel-chamber,” said Howell. “There’s room for more. Fill it up. And hurry!”

“But it’s not safe!” protested Ketch. “Do you want to take a chance on blowing up the ship?”

“Yes,” said Howell. “I do. Hurry up with it.”

He set the Marintha’s detectors to maximum gain. Tiny specks appeared on the radar-screen. The slug-fleet was an incredible thing. Howell had no idea how many of the small-humans there were, nor how many ships they could gather together in their furtive, desperate assemblies on worlds they could only hope the slug-ships would not find before they’d gone away. But this fleet must outnumber them many times over. It could have no purpose other than the hunting-down and extermination of the small-man race. It was a horde. Such a fleet could turn the whole surface of a planet into flame. It could sterilize a world, destroying all life upon it. If it came upon a human-occupied planet…

Karen came to the control room and stood beside Howell.

“If anything happens to you now,” she said evenly, “it happens to me too!”

“And the other way about,” growled Howell.

She nodded. He searched her features. Then much of the grimness left his own. He smiled very faintly.

“I haven’t acted very—romantically,” he said wryly. “Not since it turned out that we—feel as we do. Want to know why?”

“It might make me feel better,” admitted Karen.

“Because I figured the Marintha had to be destroyed,” he told her. “Which meant I’d have to go with it. And if I’d acted—romantically, I wasn’t sure I could.”

“That’s silly!”said Karen.

He stood up. He reached for her. She did not retreat. Minutes later Ketch called from the engine room. The fuel-chamber was filled to a dangerous degree. A glancing lightning-bolt had hit the Marintha once. It did damage, but no more than damage. If such a bolt hit the yacht now, there would be literally nothing left of it at all—which was still preferable to a less complete destruction.

Howell kissed Karen again and sat down at the instrument board. He said, “Lifting off!” and threw a switch. The Marintha lurched and lifted toward the sky. The horizon retreated while nearby objects—trees, the dead space about the booby trap, the shores on the peninsula, the sea itself and presently another continent showing at the edge of what was then visible—all things flowed toward and underneath the space-yacht.

Then, quite suddenly, it seemed that the horizon dropped down. From an apparently hollow bowl below, the world they were leaving became a visible, enormous ball. The sky overhead was dark by then and the sun was a blazing disk of flame. There were many, many stars.

Howell said soberly, “The nearest slug-ships are only a few thousand miles away. It would be entertaining to know if they’ve figured out that I dodged the first ones that started for us by going so slowly that they passed us without knowing it. They may try the same trick on us! I wonder…”

He glanced at the outside air-pressure dial. It said zero. He looked up at Karen and said, “You can tell them overdrive’s coming.”

Karen went to the control room door. She called. Howell threw the switch. It was a highly hazardous operation. The Marintha’s overdrive now made use of the full capacity of a capacitor she was not designed to use. Her circuits were not rated to carry the load. She could blow. And if she did, with a man-packed fuel-chamber, that fuel would blow also and there would be a momentary flare of hell-fire where the space-yacht had been. Then there’d be no more Marintha and the slug-ship fleet would have had a long journey in overdrive for nothing.

But the drive didn’t blow. And this time those aboard felt a monstrous vertigo and an intolerable nausea, and for a heartbeat they had the panicky sensation of falling headlong while in a spinning spiral. Because this time the Marintha went into full-power overdrive—higher power than she’d ever used before.

But in it everything seemed perfectly normal. The yacht felt as solid as if encased in rock. She was locked away from all the ordinary cosmos by a force-field stressing space to change all its properties, including the velocity of light. But the experience of those inside the yacht was of absolute firmness, absolute safety, and absolute tranquillity.

It was very much of an anticlimax.

It was ridiculous! At the beginning of these events the Marintha had been bound upon a voyage of private exploration. A fuel-ingot needed to be changed, and she came out of overdrive to make that change. And she was challenged and attacked. She limped away from the danger spot and her drive-system wrecked itself. She got to ground and was followed by a ship of a chlorine-breathing race, intent upon murder. She destroyed that ship and its crew and encountered a second race of human beings. The yacht was repaired, and became lost in emptiness, found its way back, then they were inexplicably deserted by cheering, waving fellow-humans, and—

Now the yacht drove with seeming placidity in an unsubstantial no-place. Nothing had been accomplished. Nothing significant had happened. The only apparent difference between now and the moment before the beginning of things was that now they knew what would happen if the Marintha broke out to normal space again. Now they knew that this time she’d be attacked by ball-lightning bolts from dozens or scores or perhaps hundreds of misshapen ships whose occupants were monsters of murderous intent. Gaining that information was all that had been achieved. It was anticlimactic indeed.

But it is the nature of anticlimaxes to seem very natural, once they’ve happened. An hour after leaving the booby trap planet, Breen roused himself to prepare a meal, exactly as he’d have done had none of the recent events taken place. Ketch glowered at a cabin wall, in not-unprecedented moroseness. Howell watched the instruments. They should show nothing, and that was what they did show. But he remained pessimistic enough to think that if the slug-ships could trail in overdrive, they should be able to attack. Still, after an hour he had his doubts.

He began to pace up and down the tiny control room. Karen watched him. Maybe the yacht couldn’t be attacked in overdrive. The fact would solve nothing, if it were a fact. Nothing, seemingly, would solve anything. The tricks by which the yacht had escaped destruction on two out of four seemingly certain occasions were now known to the slug-creatures. It would not be wise to use them again. There were no more tricks remaining to be tried. There was no use in thinking about tricks, or anything else.

So presently Howell said irritably, “I can’t help wondering why those small-folk deserted us as they did! They gave us everything they could, including a capacitor we couldn’t have found or—most likely—installed. Then they dumped your father and Ketch back on us and waved their hands happily and left us to be smashed by the slug-ships!”

“It could be a mistake,” Karen said. “You destroyed a slug-ship on the ground. Maybe they just came to believe you could destroy them anywhere and any time you pleased.”

“They’d no evidence for it,”, protested Howell. “The only thing they saw in this ship that they seemed to think was worth having was a garbage-disposal unit!”

Karen didn’t answer. She was with Howell. She had a private and quite irrational conviction that when greater emergencies arose, Howell would meet them. To be sure, an emergency existed now. For the moment the Marintha’s overdrive field protected her, while incidentally it carried her onward to nowhere at very many times the speed of light.

Breen called them to dinner. They dined. Everything they saw, heard, felt or experienced seemed completely commonplace and secure. Everything was superlatively the way things should be in a space-yacht journeying in overdrive in a galaxy which was absolutely safe for them to travel in. The four in the yacht could know that they were in danger, but there was no sign of it. They could reason that they must be doomed, but there was no tangible evidence for the belief. They should have felt despair, but there was nothing to remind them of it. So long as her overdrive-field surrounded her, apparently nothing could happen to the Marintha, or anybody aboard her. True, the yacht drove blindly toward the completely unknown and they dared not cut overdrive to look at it, but they seemed perfectly safe so long as they didn’t.

It was a state of things, however, that human beings are not designed to endure.

“I think,” said Howell, restlessly, “that we’re going to have to find out if we’re followed. It would be insane to run away if we’re not.”

Ketch said with annoyance, “We could be running away from nothing. The small-folk took to space with the slug-fleet on the way. They weren’t worried about it!”

“I’d like to know why not,” admitted Howell. “Come to think of it, they acted as if they knew they were perfectly safe and believed we were, too.”

“I have to admit,” Breen observed heavily, “that they acted in the friendliest fashion possible. They even seemed grateful—I might say absurdly grateful—for the device you showed them how to make, Howell.”

Howell grimaced.

“A thing to dispose of garbage! Yes. They liked that!”

Ketch said in his new tone of authority and decision:

“Maybe their ships can outrun the beasts’ ships. And maybe they know that since we had our overdrive changed by their workmen, we can outrun them too.”

Howell nodded, but without conviction.

“That’s one guess.”

“So we could be running away with nothing running after us,” said Ketch angrily. “I don’t say that’s true, but it could be!”

“The question,” said Howell, “is how much to bet on it. Apparently the least bet we can make is of our lives.”

Ketch fumed. It was an irritating possibility. If the Marintha broke out of overdrive, she might be destroyed instantly. On the other hand, if she drove on until all the fuel-ingots in the fuel-chamber were exhausted, she might find then that she wasn’t pursued; that she hadn’t been pursued because she’d left the slug-fleet behind long ago. And then she might not have fuel with which to return to Earth.

“I think,” said Howell slowly, “that we can cut down the size of our bet. I’ll try.”

He frowned thoughtfully to himself until the meal was ended. Then Breen scraped the dishes into the garbage-disposal unit. The counter-valence field came on in that small and commonplace bit of equipment. The garbage was disposed of as the valence-bonds of carbon compounds ceased to exist. When such waste matter touched the metal in which a particular frequency and wave-form oscillated, all the compounds of carbon fell apart. But the garbage unit did not broadcast what would have been a killer-field, because air reflected it; air was opaque to it. The garbage-disposal frequency could leave its source only when there was no air around it.

Meanwhile, nothing happened. There could be no feeling of safety because there was probably at fleet of fighting ships following the space-yacht wherever it went, to ferociously destroy it. There could be no feeling of danger because so long as the overdrive-field stayed in being, nothing could happen to the Marintha. But the doubt was nerve-racking.

So Howell retired to the engine room and busied himself with the manufacture of a gadget. It was a timing-device and a link to the overdrive-switch, with a shunt to the all-angle cameras which photographed all the firmament about the Marintha whenever she broke out of overdrive for the log-tape record of her journeyings. When completed and installed, Howell should be able to break the Marintha out to normal space with its myriads of suns and star-clusters. Even before breakout was complete, the gadget would be operating to reverse the process. Because when the Marintha did break out, for perhaps a millisecond—the thousandth part of a second—nothing would happen. But the slug-ships, if present, would break out as soon thereafter as their detectors could record her action. That would account for two milliseconds. Then their weapons would have to locate and range the Marintha, and fire on it. That would be four seconds from the time the Marintha broke out. So the gadget would cut on the overdrive again three thousandths of a second after breakout. And just before that three-millisecond interval was over, the cameras would operate. In sum, the yacht would be in normal space for three one-thousandths of a second, during which time slug-ships should begin to appear around it, but there would not be time for their detectors to pick the Marintha out as a target, to swing their weapons to bear, and to fire. There shouldn’t be time! And the yacht should be back in overdrive with a millisecond or even two to spare, and it should have detailed pictures of all of space about it.

As a matter of course, Howell set all instruments on recording. Then he threw the switch.

There was pure anguish for each of the four persons aboard. The giddiness was horrible and the nausea appalling and the feeling of fall intense. It was doubled by the instant repetition of each symptom. And then the four in the ship had a memory of the vision-screens brightly lighted, and all the alarm-bells of the little ship ringing furiously—and then the screens were dead again and the alarm-bells bewilderedly ceased to clang. And that was all.

But Howell examined the records. They were not pleasing.

The automatic pictures of the Marintha’s surroundings, taken whenever she broke out, this time had been delayed until slug-ships could appear. And they did.

There were not less than six of the revoltingly shaped alien spacecraft within a five-mile radius of the Marintha. There were thirty-six within a ten-mile radius, and more than a hundred within a fifteen-mile sphere, and there were others on beyond. They were uncountable. But the Marintha was back in overdrive before any of them could fire on her.

Howell said sardonically, “I’d say that this is that! We’re followed, all right! We’ve just one chance left—that we can travel faster than they can with the fuel-ingots we’ve loaded into the drive. But that’s hardly anything either to bank on or hope for.”

He shrugged.

Ketch was visibly angered by a development so markedly unlike the drama-tape kind of happening he’d decided he preferred and which he therefore demanded that destiny supply. He went stamping away, muttering. He’d think furiously and then come to frustration because he couldn’t even imagine a miraculous coincidence—such as sometimes happens in drama-tape stories—which could restore him to his chosen dramatic role.

Breen’s forehead corrugated. He said plaintively, “This is bad, Karen! I’d no idea you’d be endangered when I let you come with me!”

“All our intentions have been of the very best kind,” said Howell bitterly, “but that’s not even a comforting thought, now. We’re in the devil of a fix!”

Karen said evenly, “What sort of fix are the small-men in?”

“Why—they’re—” Howell looked sharply at her. “What are you driving at, Karen?”

“They’d no more weapons than we have,” said Karen. “Nothing to count, anyhow. But they didn’t even look alarmed when they left us. They expected to get away. They expected us to get away too, I think. How?”

“You tell me,” said Howell.

“I can’t!” protested Karen. “How could I? But if we knew what the small-men expected to do, whether running away or whatever, it might be something we could do, too. For that matter—”

She stopped. Howell said with a certain grimness, “Maybe that’s an idea! You’re about to say that the one thing they should want more, than any other would be a weapon to use against the slug-ships. If they got excited about something they learned from us, that’s what it ought to be. What they did get excited about was the garbage-disposal unit. So you’re about to ask if that could be a weapon. You’re about to point out that they made a unit of their own most likely, besides the one I built. You’re going to say that one of them went out to space this morning and came back with news they all celebrated. Which could be that the weapon they wanted had been tried out.”

Karen said uncomfortably, “I wasn’t exactly—”

“You were thinking along that line,” said Howell. He went on, his expression very queer, “And there’s the fact that what excited them was the garbage unit breaking down plastic from the slug-ship wreck. They didn’t try leaves and earth and such. They went over to the wreck and came back with scraps of plastic. They looked on the garbage device as something that disintegrated the plastic the slug-ships have to be built of, because their atmosphere’s partly chlorine and all their metal objects have to be protected against it.”

“I hadn’t thought—”

“You were going to,” said Howell, with finality. “You were going to! And you’d have been right!”

He turned on his heel. He went into the ship’s stores. He came out with a welding-torch and a coil of heavy cable. He went to the garbage unit and made very sure that it was turned off—that it wasn’t producing the oscillations that broke down carbon compounds—including the plastic the slug-creatures used for all their constructions. He began to weld the end of the cable to the bottom plate of the garbage unit. As he worked, he talked disjointedly, with the air of someone obstinately making a case for something he found it difficult to believe.

“Item,” he said dourly. “There’s a garbage-disposal frequency that can’t broadcast simply because air reflects it and is opaque to it. So it does no harm inside the ship. But if it were outside the yacht, with no air to keep it captive—then it would broadcast, all right! And when it struck plastic, that plastic would fall away to powder. Because—” unconsciously, his tone rose in pitch, “because it’s the wave-form and not the power that does the trick! It should work the devil of a long way!”

He turned off the torch and cut the cable. He re-lighted the torch and began to weld the cable to a steel floor-plate. The bottom-plate of the disposal unit—the plate that garbage dropped on where it immediately fell apart to colloid-sized particles—the bottom-plate of the garbage disposer was linked to the floor-plate by a cable which would carry the high-frequency wave-form from one to the other, with no loss in transit because of the insulating air around it.

“Another item,” he said as dourly as before. “High-frequency current, whatever its wave-form, travels only on the outside surface of a conductor. The Marintha is a conductor. When I turn on the garbage unit, the oscillations will flow to the outside hull-plates. Necessarily! And they can radiate from the whole outer surface of the ship as an antenna!”

He put away the torch. He said with something like curtness, “We’re carbon compounds, mostly, but these waves can’t harm us. We’re in air and insulated by air. The slug-ships won’t be in air. They can be harmed. We will now see how much!”

“I don’t quite follow—” Breen said uncomfortably.

“No need to follow,” said Howell. “Just look!”

He led the way into the control room. He adjusted switches. When the Marintha broke out of overdrive, the garbage-disposal unit would generate its peculiar waves. They wouldn’t stay in the unit because they could pass through the cable to the floor-plates. They wouldn’t stay in the floor-plates because they could move to the outer surface of the space-yacht’s hull.

And they wouldn’t stay there because like other items of the magneto-electric spectrum, they could radiate away into space. And they would.

Or should. But there was only one way to test it. That test would involve the lives of four people now, but ultimately as many lives as there were people to be affected.

“Overdrive coming!” said Howell. He sounded almost savage, which spoiled the effect of what could have been a high dramatic moment, but was a very natural reaction. He threw the switch.

The Marintha broke out of overdrive.

There were stars by thousands and millions and billions. There were gas-clouds light-centuries away, shining by the light of many suns. There were star-clusters and nebulae, and the Milky way itself. There were white and blue-white suns, and yellow ones, and unwinking specks of light of every colour the eyes of men could recognize. And suddenly, in the faint and lucent twilight of starshine—suddenly there was the Marintha.

She came into being apparently from nowhere. At one instant there was nothing. Then there was—the space-yacht, her bright metal plates reflecting the faint, faint glow of a thousand million far-away suns. She appeared and instantly invisible radiating waves spread out from her in all imaginable directions. There was, of course, no sign of their existence, but they were real and they spread at the speed of light.

For the fraction of a second she was alone, and her loneliness was infinite. But then other things appeared. They were shapes. By scores and by hundreds they flickered into being, and each had the form of a slug—such a slimy and unpleasant thing as is found under rotting logs in woodland. The resemblance even extended to horns like eyestalks, save that on these shapes the horns were the deadliest of weapons.

Some of the shapes appeared close to the Marintha. There were some ahead and some behind, and to the right and left, and above and below. The nearest was not a mile from the silver-steel yacht from Earth. The farthest—Howell at the vision-screens could not tell. They seemed to fill all of space so far as the eye could distinguish them.

But they didn’t remain as they appeared. They retained the shape of fighting ships long enough to be seen as such, but no longer. Then, soundlessly, they ceased to be objects of solid, iron-hard plastic. They became mere similitudes of ships formed of the finest imaginable dust. They were thrust instantly out to shapelessness and the properties of dust-clouds by the expanding air they’d contained for their crews to breathe.

More slug-ships broke out of overdrive, to cease to be ships and become dust-swarms as they arrived. And more ships. And more. And more.

Presently no others appeared, and the Marintha was again alone in the vast remoteness of between-the-stars. But there was a new dust-cloud in space. It was not likely that human astronomers would ever observe it, because it was very small. Within the next year, expanding as it would continue to do, it would exist only in a few hundred thousand cubic miles of nothingness. In fifty years, or perhaps a century, it would have dissipated past detection, and the only traces left of a slug-ship fighting fleet would be various objects of metal, no longer protected or held together by the plastic in which they’d been submerged. Perhaps in ten thousand thousand years some would have drifted to where some sun’s gravitational field would draw them to fiery oblivion in its photosphere.

In the Marintha, Howell drew a deep breath, still staring at the screens which showed the few last denser dust-clumpings. They represented the last-comers. Karen stared incredulously at the mistiness which was all that could be seen.

“It appears,” said Howell with some care, “that we finally hit on what the small-folk saw right away in our garbage-disposal unit. They’ve got plans for this trick. Now, as soon as they foregather at the next meeting place, they’ll pass on the trick of destroying garbage—because incidentally it destroys slug-ships!”

Ketch made an inarticulate small sound. His emotions were hopelessly mixed.

Breen said heavily, “They were really very unpleasant creatures, Howell! I think we are well out of this affair. What do you plan to do now?”

“Head home,” said Howell briskly. “We could carry on with our original plans if we wished, of course. If we keep the garbage unit running, we need only to have a slug-ship try to approach us to dispose of it without even knowing it. But I think our ships at home ought to be told about the trick. Robots in orbit about occupied worlds will take care of any slug-ship that might stumble on them. But that’s for precaution. I doubt that the beasts will try to go to space at all, after a few more experiences.”

Breen frowned reflectively. Then he said, “Experiences? But they won’t—”

“They’ll have the experience,” said Howell, “of sending ships to space and having them never come back. They can never find out how it happens. Any slug-ship that gets close enough to—say—a small-folk globe-ship, will disintegrate before its crew can grasp the idea. And even if they knew the whole trick—it wouldn’t work against a metal ship, and they can’t make ships for a chlorine atmosphere without making them of plastic.”

“Hm,” said Breen profoundly. “I see… yes, I see.”

Howell swung the Marintha about. He set a course with infinite care. He said, “Overdrive coming!”

Breen winced and Ketch growled as the acute discomfort of entering overdrive gripped them. Karen caught her breath. Howell stood up from the pilot’s chair.

“And I have a personal reason for wanting to get back to Earth,” he observed. “Karen?”

He led her out of the control room. Her eyes were shining.

“The—small-people will have garbage disposers, too,” she said in wondering relief. “And then they can really defend themselves against the slug-men! I’m glad of that! It seems so terrible for them to be hunted—”

“They’ll do the hunting now,” said Howell gruffly. “The garbage units won’t act in atmosphere, of course, so they can’t attack the chlorine-breathers’ planets as the beasts’ ancestors attacked and destroyed our forefathers’ cities. But the beasts will learn to stay aground!”

He led her the length of the saloon. He opened the door of the ship’s-stores cabinet. He ushered her in.

“The baby small-people are adorable!” said Karen softly. “I’m so glad they’ll be safe!” Then Howell closed the cabinet door and she said, “But what—why—”

“I explained once,” said Howell, “why I didn’t act romantic after we’d—er—admitted a certain interest in each other. I was busy, I said, trying to make you safe. I think you’re safe now. I’m preparing to argue that we should be married as soon as we can get back to Earth. We might as well tell your father we’re going to marry, anyhow. Shall I argue?”

“But—how—?”

“Like this,” said Howell.

He kissed her.