Space Gypsies

by Murray Leinster

  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 Marint
ha.

  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.