Space Gypsies

by Murray Leinster

  The Marintha floated on toward the meeting place with the green world. Clouds could be seen to move across its sunward hemisphere. As the Marintha approached, Howell hooked up an extremely high-precision directional receiver and tried to pick up other signals such as any civilized planet must let escape to space. There were no spark-signals. There were no amplitude-modulated signals. No frequency-modulated sounds. There was static from thunderstorms. There was nothing else—except the endlessly repeated broadcast call and minute-long spoken message.

  “It can’t be a beacon,” said Howell harassedly, when the world he’d chosen was a huge round target shutting off much of the firmament. “It hasn’t range enough. It can’t be anything but a call for help! But what are the odds against our making contact with a civilized race by coming upon one of its space craft in distress?”

  “What are the odds,” Ketch asked, “against the four of us being alive and coming to a landing here, with our overdrive damaged where it was when there wasn’t a star-disk to be seen?”

  “That’s drama-tape coincidence,” said Howell impatiently. “Such things happen, as we know. But it’s only on the tapes that coincidences happen in succession for the benefit of the actors playing hero.” Then he said, “I’ll make one orbit as nearly over that peninsula as I can make it. We’ll try to see what’s down there. We’ll probably see nothing. If we’re not shot at, I’ll land on the second time around. This is the only liveable planet we can reach. We might as well land at the only place where there are signs of civilization. The beam-message is certainly that!”

  They were very near, now. The green world filled half the sky before the Marintha. It seemed to grow visibly as they looked. The yacht would go on past the sunset line, and be swung around behind it by the planet’s gravitational field, and deep into its shadow. Then, to eyes watching from the peninsula, it would seem to come out of the sunrise and pass overhead. But the sky should be bright enough to make it difficult to follow. Those above, in the yacht, might have a quarter of a minute or a little more in which to examine the beam-signal site and to take photographs.

  Darkness fell. The night-side of the green world was utterly black. Howell moved quickly. Radar told him the yacht’s distance from solidity, There was a magnetic field. There were no moons. Radar again, to check the height. Howell used the yacht’s solar-system drive to correct the altitude. They were far into the planet’s shadow then, with the planet itself a monstrous darkness that seemed to grope blindly for the Marintha.

  They came out abruptly into sunshine, with dawn plucking mountains and islands and continents out of blackness below them. Two hundred miles high. The Marintha went hurtling onward, cameras making overlapping pictures of all that could be photographed at so low an orbital height.

  Howell said at last, “Orbit’s an hour ten minutes. That peninsula should be coming over the horizon any time now.”

  He listened with desperate attention to the all-wave receiver, still cut down considerably lest it call attention to itself by re-radiation. He heard no menacing whine of a slug-ship solar-system drive.

  The peninsula appeared ahead, foreshortened almost past identification. Cameras recorded it as the yacht swept on. No signals came up. No blaster-bolts; Nothing, except once the soprano voice reiterating the message beamed out continuously to space. Its volume was tremendous.—so near, but they passed through the beam in seconds.

  They saw the circular space, half a mile in diameter, that the electron telescope had pointed out. It still looked distinctly different from the,rest of the vegetation about it. From two hundred miles they couldn’t tell just what the difference was, save that its colour was not that of its surroundings.

  The Marintha went by. No sign of life. No hummings, no whines, no cracklings save of storms somewhere unseen. The yacht hurtled onward. Before it reached the sunset line again, Karen and her father and Ketch were examining the pictures the cameras had made, magnifying them to try to see what existed at the spot from which the beam-signal originated.

  Karen spotted it. A round, silvery object, the size of a pinhead even with the picture enlarged. It was in the centre of a half-mile circle of brownish appearance. It was not a slug-ship. It was not a ship made by the humanity of Earth. It appeared to be a globe of metal. Ketch made the one guess which seemed plausibly to explain what they saw.

  “It’s defoliation,” he said. “It’s a wreck. They burned away or destroyed the foliage for a quarter of a mile all around, so a rescue ship could find it without trouble. Maybe we should have called down to say we’re coming.”

  “No!” said Howell. “The slug-ship heard Karen’s voice and thought we were—these people. If they hear our voices, not using their language, they may think we’re a slug-ship. I’ll land an unthreatening distance away. Not in the defoliated area. If I did, they might start shooting.”

  He listened again for the whine of a slug-ship’s drive. He heard nothing disturbing, except that he heard nothing. The Marintha dived into darkness and drove on into oblivion. Again Howell used the solar-system drive to bring the yacht into the exact line at the exact height for the action he planned.

  Presently they came once more to the sunrise, and Howell used the drive with grim precision to lose height. When the strangely foreshortened peninsula appeared ahead for the second time, he brought his velocity down to tolerable atmospheric speed by further use of the space-drive. There was the roaring of split atmosphere about them. The speed checked and checked. The circle of brown colour appeared. Howell dived the yacht for it.

  The Marintha was only thousands of feet above the surface, now. She came down and down. Ten thousand feet. Eight. Six. Four. At two thousand feet he levelled off, dived again, and the small craft skimmed across treetops, leaving a wake of wildly thrashing foliage behind it. Then she slowed. She stopped only tens of yards high. Then she settled deliberately, straight down. There was an enormous cracking and crackling of tree trunks and branches asher weight bent and tilted and then broke them.

  She touched ground. Howell said crisply, “Call to them, Karen. By space-phone. We have to take the chance. Keep your voice going.”

  Karen obediently picked up the transmitter. She said clearly, “We are friends. We are people from Earth. We heard your call and we will try to help you, though we need help ourselves.” Then, seeing Howell about to leave, “Wait!”she said anxiously to him, “you’re not going outside!”

  “I am,” said Howell curtly. “If we delay, we may seem to be preparing to do them some dirt. And only one of us should go, for the same reason. But I’ll take a rifle.”

  He slung a talkie over his shoulder. He took the sporting rifle Ketch handed him, He went to the exit-port. There he said peremptorily, “Talk, Karen!”

  To Ketch and Breen he said in a low tone, “We’re in a very tight fix. I’ll try to keep you posted by talkie, but if there’s trouble, about all you can do is lift off and find somewhere else aground here where you can try to keep from being found. Don’t try to help me.”

  He opened the port and jumped to the ground. All about him was jungle, though not unduly filled with underbrush. He headed through it for the sere brown area in which a globular metal object had been photographed from space.

  The jungle was thick but by no means impassable. He forced his way through it. Almost immediately he began to speak into the talkie. His voice was not soprano, but it wasn’t likely that it would sound like a creature from a slug-ship. He spoke deliberately to be overheard. Those back in the Marintha heard every sound.

  “This is a pretty thick jungle,” they heard him say. “A few vines, not many, and very few thorns. The smells aren’t unpleasant. Some are even attractive.”

  He went on. He wished to be heard moving openly toward the defoliated area. A man or any other creature intending mischief would either move silently or else with the equivalent of roarings intended to intimidate those who heard him. Coming openly, and talking, he’d be less likely to seem menacing.
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br />   “… Things are singing in the trees. I can’t spare the time to try to see them. I need to keep moving and advertising myself as not sneaking up…”

  Karen tried to obey his orders to keep her voice going out on a communicator-frequency not too far removed from the signal-beam. But she was afraid, for him. Her throat clicked shut. She could not speak. She listened as he continued to advance and to talk. Presently—

  “Things are opening out ahead,” he reported. “No sign of anybody coming to meet me or take a pot shot. I’m nearly at the place where the foliage ends. Still plenty of tree trunks, though.”

  His voice stopped.

  CHAPTER THREE

  There was excellent reason. He had come to a place where bare and interlacing tree trunks made filigree patterns against the sky. All foliage abruptly ceased to be. The trees seemed to thin out, but it was illusory because in the absence of leaves he could see for a long way between them. They hadn’t merely been stripped of leaves though. They were dead. They’d been killed. Their trunks looked dull and lifeless by comparison with the jungle-stuff still alive. There was no trace of anything with life in it ahead. Even the underbrush—there must be some underbrush where there are trees of varied species—even the underbrush appeared only as sticks. The ground was covered with rotted leaves. To right and left, the trees raised bare branches as if making frozen, futile gestures to the sky.

  There was a clump of some local species, hundreds of slender saplings merging together thirty feet above the ground. They joined there, and other saplings rose from their junction-places and grew another thirty feet and joined again. It was like a three-story forest. It covered acres—and half of it was dead and half of it was living. The dead part was in the leafless area which from aloft formed an almost perfect circle. The living part was outside it. Howell saw dead ground-cover—creeping stuff with no upright stalks, but only runners and roots going down into the soil. In the brown circle it had been killed. Yet fresh runners already grew inward from the edge.

  There was no sound before him. If wind stirred the jungle-tops, Howell did not hear it. There was the silence of death in this leafless portion of the jungle. Behind him things chattered and squeaked and made various mostly high-pitched noises. Ahead—nothing!

  It didn’t feel right. It didn’t look right. Men destroying foliage to make a guide and destination for rescuers might have killed the trees. They wouldn’t have bothered with underbrush. They surely would not have troubled with the equivalent of grass. But something, somehow, had killed every trace of vegetation in a circle half a mile across. The trees were left to decay and ultimately to fall, but although the vegetation had been killed, the fertility of the soil was unaffected. The creeping stuff grew back into the area where creeping stuff had died.

  It was definitely not right. It felt wrong. All of Howell’s suspicions, which he hadn’t been able to name even to himself, now returned with doubled intensity. He ceased to speak because his mind was filled with observing and suspecting and listening, and trying frantically to understand. He moved—not into the dead space, but along its edges. There was something in a tree, caught in a junction of branches. It had been an animal perhaps the size of a catamount. It was long dead. It had been armoured, like the armadillos of Earth and the small carnivores of Briesis. It had been aloft in the tree and it had been killed and it had fallen and been caught in the tree’s branches. A hunter would have taken it for a trophy most likely, if he’d shot it. But Howell told himself absorbedly that a dead thing found in a place where everything else was dead could have died in the same disaster and from the same cause. His suspicions deepened.

  He continued to move along the edge of the dead space. There was a discoloured, dried-up, rotten soft-tissue plant, with a dead flower half a yard across. It had been killed. Death had been indiscriminate, striking everything with life in it. Flowers, trees, ground-cover, animals—all had been victims.

  Then Howell saw the metal globe that had seemed the size of a pinhead on a much-magnified picture taken from space. It was a globe, it was metal, it was not a natural object. It had been designed. It had been made. It had been put here. It was perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with the peculiar look of metal which has been plastic-coated to utilize its strength while preserving it from rust and acid conditions. It looked like a spaceship. There seemed to be vents and photo units outside. From within it or from somewhere nearby the moving beam of the distress call must be projected.

  But everything around it was dead.

  Still utterly absorbed, Howell continued to be oblivious to the people in the Marintha and of his obligation to keep them informed of what he found.

  He reached a place where he could see the metal globe almost completely. And now, even if it had occurred to him to speak, he would have been speechless.

  A rotted tree had fallen and a pointed, broken limb had struck the still-distant metal globe. It had punctured it. It had ripped away one part of one sheet of absurdly thin plating.

  The globe wasn’t a spaceship; it was only a paper-thin shell of metal. It was a dummy, with external details to make it seem designed for a voyage in space, but with no contents to make such a voyage possible. It was scenery, placed on a jungle-clad peninsula of an unnamed and uninhabited world.

  And then Howell saw something else—which made the blood pound in his temples. Red rage surged though him. Now he understood, suddenly and completely.

  He saw bones. They were partly covered by scraps of cloth. They were well within the area where everything was dead. They were human bones. But they were quite small ones. There were three complete human skeletons, halfway between the edge of the brown spot and the dummy metal globe.

  And by their size, Howell guessed them to be the skeletons of three human children, perhaps twelve years old.

  He made inarticulate noises in his throat as he went back to the Marintha. When he arrived where Karen and Breen and Ketch watched anxiously from the exit-port, he was still unable to speak coherently. It was long minutes, with Karen looking frightenedly at him, before he was able to give an understandable account of what he’d seen.

  “The—the globe’s a dummy,” he said, his voice still thick with fury. “It’s bait. It’s a trap for—humans, using the message-beam as a lure. The message must say that there’s a human ship aground and calling for help!”

  “We’ve got to make something to kill them with!” he said fiercely. “The slug-ship things! Because the trap worked! A human ship—of people whose ships must be globes—a human ship came! Its people went toward the globe. Maybe they guessed they were too late because they got no answers to their calls. But they went there. And—and somewhere near the globe one of them touched a trip-wire or a trigger. And then—a killer-field went on—and everything within a quarter of a mile died instantly!”

  His fists were clenched. He was fury and rage incarnate.

  “The others of the ship—they probably risked going after some of the bodies. But they didn’t dare go too far. There were three of them they didn’t dare try to reach. They’re still there. And I’m pretty sure they’re—children.”

  He went and locked himself in the control room. He heard small cracklings. The all-wave receiver, still muted against self-revelation, emitted the noises associated with a solar flare. It was not important, but it reminded him that there was a slug-ship on the way here, confirmed now in its guess at the Marintha’s destination by the drive-sounds made by the solar-system drive during the yacht’s landing.

  The slug-ship wasn’t hurrying. It followed the Marintha leisurely, like hunters after a game animal whose trail is plain and which cannot possibly hope to get away.

  A long time later Howell came out again. Ketch nodded reassuringly to Karen.

  “He’s all right now, and with new ideas of what we’re to do and how we’ll do it.”

  There could have been a touch of sarcasm in Ketch’s tone, but Howell nodded. He said in a carefully controlled voice:

>   “I’ve been thinking. We’ll get out the capacitor and see what can be done with it. Maybe not all the plates are ruined. Maybe if we take out the spoiled ones, we can reassemble something with enough capacity to work. Maybe we can improvise extra plates. If it’s absolutely necessary, there’s some material in the scenery the slug-creatures built for their booby trap.”

  Karen made a wordless sound of protest.

  “I know!” said Howell. “But I think I know how to get to the damned thing and turn it off without tripping it. If it’s necessary I’ll try it. Otherwise not.”

  “But there’s no point in taking extra chances!” Ketch protested. “We should think of something to be done—”

  Howell said nothing. In drama-tapes, the principal characters always found a last-instant solution to their difficulties. Ketch likened their very real predicament to the contrived ones of taped narratives.

  “Breen?” asked Howell.

  “Botanizing,” said Karen. “He said he wouldn’t go far.”

  Howell grimaced. There was so much work to be done, and Breen went poking about looking at plants! But he wouldn’t be of much use in the engine room. Ketch would be better.

  “I’m going to take down the capacitor,” Howell said, without happy anticipation but because it was all that could be done.

  “Hold on!” protested Ketch. “Shouldn’t we move the yacht first? Hide it and ourselves?”

  “The booby trap hasn’t been visited in a long time,” said Howell, “or they’d have repaired the tear in its plating that gives the whole show away. But we may need some material from it. And also, our drive would be spotted when we moved.”

  Ketch shrugged his shoulders almost up to his ears. He said, “Excuse me, Karen. We’ve a problem to solve.”

  Howell couldn’t spare the energy to be annoyed by Ketch’s adoption of the manner of a dramatic actor. He went into the control room, and Ketch followed. They set to work. Ketch seemed to expect either Howell or himself to make some startling discovery which would solve all problems. Such triumphs were not rare—in fiction. But here there was danger, about which they could do nothing for their own safety. There was danger to more than themselves, about which apparently they could do even less. If the Marintha fell into the hands of the slug-ship creatures, even if the four humans now aboard were not discovered, every item of her design and equipment would be proof that there was another human race somewhere in the galaxy. The absence of fighting-ship weapons would be proof, too, that this other race was totally unprepared for battle. And to creatures who would make booby traps for humans, baited with a call for help that they might murder anyone who responded, the prospect of a wholesale massacre would be delightful. They might still have records or traditions of the long-ago extermination of the race of the rubble-heap cities. They might know where to look for them again, guessing that a pitiful numbers of survivors of that butchery might have rebuilt a civilization while forgetting what had destroyed its forerunner.