Space Gypsies

by Murray Leinster

  This was admirable, sophisticated, tape-dramatic reaction to imminent danger awaiting the moment of its arrival. Howell needed to confirm them in their roles of calm and confident combatants-to-be. He said, “How do you know they’re human?”

  “He found—”

  “I found something,” said Breen. “An anthropologist could make deductions from it. I make the obvious one—that one of the diggers’ children lost it.”

  He drew a small and draggled object from his pocket. It was a stick and a bit of paper or something of the sort. It was coloured. It was very small.

  It was a pinwheel, a child’s toy, made out of unimportant materials on a miniature scale. A child would run with it and be charmed by its spinning, or hold it gleefully in a wind to see it turn from the wind’s pressure. But it was no more than three or four inches across.

  Howell almost paid attention. But he couldn’t keep his eyes from the screens that showed the sky. There was a ship up there which mocked the Marintha. It just barely might see the dummies, and if so it might just barely think the Marintha empty of its crew—that all its occupants had gone to be killed by the booby trap.

  There was a spark in mid-sky. It was a lurid, furious, deadly blue-white speck of incandescence. It grew. It was coming down. To the Marintha. Exactly where it would strike would depend, of course, on the thinking of the creatures in the slug-ship. But in matters of technology they thought like men. They had to! So the one remote chance Howell had seized upon was a guess at further similarity of thinking processes. If the human race in this part of the galaxy built spaceships in the form of globes, the Marintha’s hull-design would make the skipper of the slug-ship want to examine something so strange and new. In that case he wouldn’t want to destroy it if he could help it. He might smash a part of it as a precaution. But he might—

  The ravening, flaming missile came down. In air, it did not move with the limitless velocity of the bolt that had been fired in between-the-stars. It grew, and sped ferociously for the yacht. Its brilliance was intolerable. Only at the last instant could Howell he sure that it would be a miss.

  There was a furious flash of light. There was the shock of an explosion transmitted to the space-yacht by the ground on which it rested. Then there was steam and smoke and hurtling masses of soil and shattered jungle trees. Some of them hit the Marintha. Then there was a twenty-foot crater in the ground, some four feet deep and only yards from the Marintha’s hull.

  Howell said quickly, “Good! It looks like we’ve fooled them!”

  Breen had jerked to tenseness. Ketch had paled a little.

  “Now they’ll miss again,” said Howell. “On purpose. Here it comes!”

  There was a second infinitely lurid spark darting down from the center of the sky. It exactly repeated the velocity and the fury of the first. It struck closer to the Marintha. There was a second impact and monstrous spouting of steam and flying masses of dirt and shattered limbs and tree trunks. There were “heavy blows on the Marintha’s outer plating. She tilted all askew.

  “If we acted normally now,” said Howell, “we’d jump out the ports and run. And they’d see us and blast us. The next bolt won’t be so close.”

  Ketch and Breen looked at him, and he assumed the devil-may-care manner of a tape-drama actor in a moment of high suspense, just before splendid and melodramatic action. The pose built up the illusion that this was something in a staged adventure which could not but end happily after stirring deeds of derring-do. Ketch straightened up. Breen composed his features.

  “Right!” Breen said enthusiastically. “And we’ll lie in ambush—”

  A third giant blaster-bolt landed a little farther off. A fourth and a fifth. They looked very much indeed like bombardment intended to destroy the Marintha and certain to do so if it were continued. Had Howell been less hopeless of any other stratagem, he’d have had the others well away and not gambling their lives on his guess at what the slug-ship skipper would do. But the stakes were too high to be bet except for great and high results.

  There were six smoking craters blasted out of the jungle before the sparks ceased to form in the sky. Howell said matter-of-factly, after five minutes had passed without another detonation, “It looks like we put it over! They’ll ground, presently, and come to take a look at what they think their booby trap won for them.” Then, deliberately, he said, “What’s that about the holes you found dug in the rubble-heap?”

  Breen stared at him. Then he rose to the occasion and said with fine casualness, “The rubble was excavated in four places that we found. The excavations go down deep in the rubble. All arrived at different depths at traces of corroded metal. Not all of them were iron. Apparently whoever dug them out had metal-detectors and could find out where to dig. And we found where a ship or ships had rested aground and later lifted off again. All this was no more than a day or two before we arrived. And we found that pinwheel. What does it mean?”

  “It means we’ve some work ahead of us,” said Howell briskly, “after we’ve done what’s immediately necessary. They ought to be coming in sight shortly.”

  He watched the screens in the control room. There was silence. Then the whine of a ship-drive, solar-system type. The slug-ship was coming in for a landing.

  Howell said detachedly, “Children on a space voyage aren’t unusual, but children on a ship that mines metal out of rubble-heap cities—that’s something else! When there are booby traps set for them, that means they aren’t just an exploring party or even an expedition gathering up rubble-heap remains. It’s something all its own.”

  The drive-whine was loud now. Howell pointed to a screen.

  “There’s our friend. Low down. Barely above the trees.”

  The bow vision-screen showed a moving shape. It was not of any design ever built by members of the human race now spreading out from Earth. It was utterly alien. It looked very nearly like a giant slug, even to twin horns at its forward parts, resembling the eye-stalks of those gastropoda. It seemed to be made of metal, but again the metal had been covered with something else. It could be guessed that there was a coating of plastic like that on the plates of the booby trap globe and the lethal units of the trap itself.

  It checked its forward motion. Its drive-whine was loud and rasping. It came forward again. It changed course to circle the grounded space-yacht at a very considerable distance. It passed not far from the booby trap globe and almost over the dead area. The whining was loud indeed.

  “We haven’t shot at them,” said Howell deliberately, “because we’ve nothing to shoot a ship with. But they’re pretty well convinced, now, that we’re dead. If they saw the dummies—and they should have—they ought to be quite sure.”

  Karen interposed to explain the matter of the dummies, over the sound of the slug-ship’s drive. Ketch and Breen had known nothing about them. They’d been at the rubble-heap city when Howell climbed through treetops, and the dummies were made after that. Karen’s voice was quite steady. And this, like Howell’s more histrionic behaviour, reinforced the atmosphere of a drama-tape adventure tale.

  Breen and Ketch could have been simply despairing, but instead they felt—though precariously—anticipation of action of disaster. Howell staged a scene of before-battle discussion. He didn’t believe his plan would succeed, but he couldn’t imagine not trying it. He expected to be killed. Worse, he expected Karen to be killed, too. But for Breen and Ketch and Karen—it was wise to pretend calm confidence.

  The slug-ship apparently did see the dummies. Apparently it did not detect that they were fakes. Now it came directly to the Marintha and its drive-whine rose to a scream coming from the all-wave speaker. It came to a stop only hundreds of yards from the grounded, tilted, space-yacht, barely above treetop level, and the protuberances that looked like the eye-stalks of a slug pointed at the yacht as if at a target. The flexible stalks held weapons. Undoubtedly they were ready to fling the incandescent, giant, ball-lightning bolts at the slightest sign of movement on the
Marintha.

  There was stillness. There was no sign but the high-pitched scream which Howell turned down for comfort’s sake. Then, very gradually, the slug-ship settled to the ground. It vanished behind the trees whose thrust-aside branches and displaced trunks told of their destruction by the landing ship.

  The drive-whine stopped. The slug-ship was aground. Howell led the way to the opposite side of the Marintha. The slug-ship might have outside microphones, so he opened the farther port with care to avoid noise. Then he stopped and went back to make sure that if he didn’t open the log-tape instrument itself, all the records of the ship’s journey to here from Earth would be destroyed. He didn’t believe there was real value in the precaution,but he could do no less than take it.

  The four of them slipped out and to the ground. Howell had briefed them as if giving stage-directions. Ketch and Breen went around the Marintha’s stern, to make use of cover for the ambush Howell planned. Howell and Karen moved cautiously around the bow, If they were sighted, every shred of hope would vanish instantly. Therefore he had told the others to place themselves close to the yacht. The blasted-out craters might expose targets moving toward it. They should be in position well before a landing party from the slug-ship could arrive.

  Howell and Karen ensconced themselves where a fallen tree trunk would be partial protection against any ordinary hand-weapon. Oddly enough, close to the ground they could see farther through the jungle than at normal eye-height. Howell scrunched himself down to take advantage of the fact.

  He and Karen were alone again, but he was necessarily absorbed in this next-to-hopeless attempt to resist a fighting ship with sporting rifles. The attempt was so foolhardy that he couldn’t give it less than every atom of his attention. Yet he realized that even highly improbable success in this particular combat wouldn’t ensure their safety.

  “There’s a consort of this ship listening in, somewhere a long way off,” he told Karen bitterly. “I hope we’ll do something for her to listen to!”

  Then he repeated the advice he’d given Breen and Ketch about the proper time to fire—at the last instant before the slug-ship creatures moved to enter the yacht, so as many as possible could be fired on before they could flee. It did not occur to him, or to Karen, that a girl wasn’t supposed to fight. Against other humans, that convention would apply. But women hunted game on divers worlds. If their targets weren’t human ones, they felt no aversion. So Karen would feel no qualms about shooting at the creatures from the slug-ship. They weren’t specifically human, or even humanoid.

  It seemed a horribly long time before there was any evidence on that subject, however. Things made bird-like noises, some among tree branches, some on the ground. Others made animal sounds. A very tiny creature rustled fallen leaves directly before Howell’s firing position.

  Then, looking between jungle-stalks close to the ground, Howell saw movement. Things were coming from the landed ship. It was not possible to see them clearly, but assuredly they were not human. For moments Howell believed that they had enormous eyes, until he saw part of a moving shape more clearly and it was evident that what he saw were goggles. They would imply space-suits. The slug-ship creatures wore spacesuits! In atmosphere!

  It meant that they couldn’t breathe the air that humans found quite satisfactory. Howell drew in his breath sharply. That was good fortune! It meant that any wound which involved the puncture of an alien’s space-suit would be a killing wound. It multiplied the chances of success in this ambush, provided Ketch and Breen maintained their delusion that this was an adventure like a drama-tape play in which all the heroic characters—themselves—were bound to arrive at a happy ending. Now Howell began to hope desperately that Ketch and Breen would have no time to develop qualms and acquire apprehensions, to become frightened. Because if they did—

  They didn’t have time. There was a movement in the jungle. Then—a Thing appeared. It was neither much larger nor much smaller than a man. It wore a space-suit, which was like a mask in that it had all the implications of horror a mask evokes. Howell couldn’t make out what sort of creature the space-suit covered. It was flesh, however, and it carried something which could only be a weapon, and it moved with a writhing, insectile gait. It had limbs, of which one carried its weapon. It had a head which moved to point this way and that, in an insect-like fashion no familiar animal practised.

  There was a second slug-creature behind the first. It crawled or writhed close to the leader. This first pair moved eagerly toward the space-yacht. Three others came behind the first two. Two more came behind them. That seemed to be the entire group. They came squirming and crawling through the jungle-growths. They made no sounds. But men in space-suits make no sounds in air, either. They probably spoke freely enough to each other and to the ship by suit-radio—but they wouldn’t speak, at that. They’d grunt and hoot and moo and bellow. They made their way, squirming, to the Marintha’s entrance-port. The first of them up-ended itself against the yacht’s metal sides. It fumbled to solve the problem of the fastening.

  Howell fired. At the same instant, Breen and Ketch fired also. Then Karen’s light little rifle let go its bolt. The thing up-ended against the yacht’s hull seemed almost to fly to pieces. Horrible greenish-yellow flesh ripped open.

  Howell fired again at another target. He scored a hit, but the things reacted swiftly. Instantly one of them fired back. A blaster-bolt flashed past Howell’s shoulder. He shot again. The rasping crackle of Karen’s rifle sounded in his ears. He knew that Breen and Ketch were shooting ruthlessly into the squirming confusion where the slug-creatures had been bunched. But they didn’t stay bunched. Individuals slithered with astonishing speed into the jungle. Then incandescent blaster-bolts came back, searching for the humans they’d believed murdered beforehand. It took them only instants to change their roles from eager investigators—looters—to targets for four rifles, and then to definitely competent jungle-fighters.

  There was one dead Thing, blown almost apart but still writhing, and another whose suit-helmet was shattered. It made high-pitched screaming noises, squirming blindly. It fired its weapon without aim and without ceasing. But then the others had vanished, and almost immediately the four humans were under fire from places not between them and the slug-ship.

  The reason was instantly apparent. Intolerable brightness flamed. The flexible things at the slug-ship’s forward part, the things that looked like eye-stalks, twisted upon themselves. They pointed. From one of them a blue-white ball of flame rushed out. It struck a jungle tree and the tree exploded where it hit. A lightning-ball of flame darted from the other tube. It also hit a jungle tree, which exploded like the first.

  The slug-ship, obviously, was not abandoning its landing party. It was fighting in defence of its crew-creatures on the ground. In open country it would have been pure, raw, naked destruction. Here, in jungle, a single bolt destroyed only the object it struck, which broke the bolt and released its electric flame. But the bolts came out in unending twin streams.

  The seeming eye-stalks poured them out almost as if they were hoses spouting star-temperature flames. It was basic to their deadliness that anything broke them—and that where they broke there was nothing left but steam or vapour. If one struck a thick and heavy tree trunk, all its energy was released exactly there. If one happened to encounter a sapling, it detonated no less violently. If this steady, intolerable sequence of lightning-bolts continued, it would incinerate all the jungle between twin, blasted-out lanes of smoking, steaming, wildly flaming wreckage to which the ship’s artillery-sized blasters added every instant.

  It was a highly efficient system for handling combat problems aground. It was perfectly designed for the destruction of Howell and Karen and Ketch and Breen. There seemed to be no possible chance that it could fail.

  CHAPTER FIVE

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

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

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

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

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