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.
Space Gypsies Page 12
