Space Gypsies

by Murray Leinster

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

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

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

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

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

  “About to kill us. Yes,” he admitted.

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

  She went pale and looked at him appealingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Howell went on, doubting his own words:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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 t
o 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.