Space Gypsies (10 page)

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
Marintha
s folk were enclosed. The goggled, 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.

Howell seemed to be the one who had lost his head. He crawled a little distance apart to where he could fire between still-standing trees at the slug-ship. Nothing, of course, could pave been more futile than to fire at a ship with a mere sporting weapon. But he was firing at the muzzles of the twin, squirming weapons on the ship. He aimed at the round openings out of which the flaming bolts emerged. The point was that the bolts were not missiles but energy-weapons—ball-lightning. Anything which broke a blaster-bolt pattern would detonate it. They had been burst by little boughs as well as by tree trunks. It might be possible to burst one even by the tiny bolt of a hunting rifle. In fact, it was bound to be possible.

One of Howell’s rifle-bolts did detonate a lightning-bolt ball of thousands of times its volume. It was then barely out of the tube which ejected it. He fired again and again and again, wholly absorbed and with his rifle braced for the utmost of steadiness.

Then a second bolt from Howell’s rifle hit a blast-ball. It happened to hit it just right. It went into the yawning mouth of the left-hand tube that spat destruction. It struck a giant lightning-ball just formed and not yet flung out. It hit far, far back in the generator of lightning-bolts. It hit inside the slug-ship.

The fireball burst in the tube which should have guided it; it burst inside the source of power for the lightnings. It was like a muzzle-burst in an old-fashioned chemical-explosive cannon.

And it blew the ship apart.

There was a horrible, racking explosion. The slug-ship’s plating ripped and tore. Flames from short-circuits melted and shorted its power units. All its stored power let go, with flamings brighter than the sunshine. Yellow vapour puffed skyward in a gigantic smoke-ring. Masses of plastic-covered metal went flying across the jungle.

For a space there was silence save for the cracklings of burning jungle. Then Ketch’s rifle rasped again. Something thrashed crazily beyond the devastated space.

“Got him!” said Ketch. “What the devil happened?”

Then he choked. There was the strangling reek of chlorine in the air. Some tendril of yellowish gas had floated near him for an instant. It went away, diluting itself with the normal atmosphere of this particular world.

“It’s been arranged,” said Howell, not quite steadily, “for us to go on living for a while. I don’t know how long. Watch out for any of the beasts that may still be alive. I’ve something to listen to. Karen?”

She followed him with a curiously docile air. They went in the yacht and Howell carefully disconnected the device that would have destroyed the log-tape by which the
Marintha
’s route from Earth to here might have been deduced. Turning off the destructor was an expression of unexpected hope. Karen watched him, her expression strange.

He put his arms around her.

“I was—scared!” he said shakenly. “You could have been killed, Karen! You could have been killed!”

She kissed him.

“But I wasn’t. Neither were you. So—maybe we’ll live happily ever after, after all!”

Then the all-wave receiver gave out a bleating, mooing noise. It was dismal. It was purely animal. And yet somehow it was inquiring. Howell tensed. It came again.

“That’s the other slug-ship,” he said coldly, “the consort of the one out there.” He waved a hand in the direction of the recent battle. “It could start blasting us from space, and we couldn’t do a thing. But I suspect it has orders—and now they won’t believe we’re unarmed. I think it will go home and say somebody killed its partner. And all its friends will come boiling out to resent our unmannerly behaviour. But it’s calling to make sure that its partner truly doesn’t answer its calls.”

The mooing sound came once more. It was insistent. The noise was somehow abhorrent. It had no human quality at all. It was the inarticulate cry of an animal. It was bestial. Yet the creatures who used such sounds for communication built spaceships and ship-weapons of extreme effectiveness in space. Luckily, they weren’t equally deadly aground.

“No-o-o,” said Howell. “I don’t think it’ll come to see what’s happened to its friend. The humans around here must have put up some good fights if slug-ships travel only in pairs with one hanging back to carry home news of what happened to the other.”

There was a call from outside. Breen, beaming, spoke zestfully as he climbed into the yacht with Ketch close behind him.

“That was quite an adventure, Howell! I’ve watched such things on tape, but I never expected a share in one!”

He obviously didn’t really recognize how close he’d come to being killed. Ketch said nothing. His expression was strange. There had been opinions stated among psychologists back home that the conditioned habits and viewpoints of modern civilized men didn’t mean that primitive behaviour-patterns were destroyed. They were only repressed to different degrees in different people. Howell reflected fleetingly that Ketch had had other but equally primitive impulses during the shooting. Now he wasn’t exuberant, like Breen. He looked watchful. Satisfied. Given experience, he might come to look competent. But insofar as he became adapted to action of the kind just past, he’d become less content with life on a civilized planet.

“It was an adventure, all right,” said Howell, “but it isn’t over yet. How many of the beasts did you see?”

Ketch still said nothing. He turned his eyes to Breen. Breen said, “Six—seven. No—eight of them altogether. And we killed them all!” he said exultantly. “I didn’t know I was as good a shot as that!”

Ketch spoke for the first time. “You weren’t. All of us hit the one that was trying to open the exit-port. It practically disintegrated. I got two more and one after their ship blew up. I think Karen got one…”

“We’ll have to make sure,” said Howell. “I came in to find out—”

The dismal bellowing came from the all-wave receiver yet again. Now, oddly, Howell suddenly realized how it could convey information or ask for it. The mooing was not a single note. It was a chord. It was a dissonant mingling of frequencies. Instead of a tone modulated and changed to vowels and consonants in succession, it was a noise like a dozen instruments sounded together, with some ceasing and others entering the cacophony. The result was an outcry a human ear might eventually learn to analyze and understand. But men would never be able to duplicate it.

“I came inside,” said Howell, “to find out what you just heard. I think that’s the other slug-ship, gone to bring friends to murder us—but thoroughly this time.”

Ketch said briskly, “I’ll go hunt the remaining beasts, if there are any.” As Howell opened his mouth to speak, Ketch added, “I’ve done plenty of big game hunting, but never before of anything that could shoot back at me. I’m the best one for the job, though!”

He swung out the port and dropped to the ground. Howell said quickly, “Stay here with Karen, Breen. And keep listening. If the things wore space-suits today, as they did, there must be a limit to how long they can go on what to them is air. But one of them might try to get into the
Marintha
and smash things before it dies. They don’t know how badly we’re smashed already. Watch!”

He swung down to the ground behind Ketch. There was a faint sting of chlorine in the air. There was the smell of ozone. There was smoke and the reek of smouldering green stuff. The composite stench was not pleasant. Also there was the smell of scorched flesh,which was revolting.

Ketch was moving toward the blasted-clear space beyond the six craters first-formed about the yacht. He carried his rifle ready for instant use. But in the hunting of dangerous game there is a necessary precaution at least as important as alertness and a ready weapon. Anyone of the remaining slug-ship creatures would be a castaway now, on a planet whose air it could not breathe. It would be, the most dangerous of all possible hunted things, because it could not possibly hope to live longer than its air supply allowed. If one of those creatures survived, it would not flee. It could gain nothing by flight. So it would try to kill members of the monstrous oxygen-breathing animals who had destroyed its ship. It could have no other purpose.

So Howell followed Ketch, making of himself the needed extra precaution no hunter of dangerous game should go without. That precaution was another man with a rifle, ready to use it if the first man needed help.

Ketch needed it. There was nearly no wind, and coiling masses of steam and smoke and smells rose twistily toward the sky. Ketch advanced carefully toward the burned area. The slug-creatures had scattered to be outside it, and from the unscorched outer edge had directed the aim of the ball-lightning weapons by their fire. Ketch went on. His eyes swept back and forth, keenly. There could be no question of his alertness or his caution.

Then there was a stirring among tree branches twenty feet above the ground. Ketch turned his eyes upward. He searched for something that seemed to be shaking a foliage-masked-tree limb overhead. It was in all respects what a hunter should do.

But Howell shot as fast as his rifle would fire. A stream of blaster-bolts—glowing as brightly as ancient tracer-bullets—poured into the jungle at the base of the tree whose upper parts Ketch stared at so alertly.

On the ground a hand-weapon exploded and something jerked violently.

There’d been a slug-creature aground and it had found one of the surprisingly few vines that grew in this jungle. It had tugged on that to call Ketch’s attention aloft. He’d raised his eyes for long seconds, certainly, he’d have stared at that one spot. Which would have made him a perfect target for the slug-creature.

But Howell had seen the lesser stirring at ground-level. He’d flung bolts at it, and he’d killed one of the two slug-creatures possibly still alive.

Ketch raged. It seemed almost as if he’d have preferred to be killed than to have Howell save his life, as Howell had certainly done.

“Why the devil did you do that?” he demanded furiously. “That was my shot!”

“This is no sporting excursion,” Howell told him. “It’s business! And a nasty business, at that! There are only four of us, and none of us can be spared.”

“But that was my shot!” repeated Ketch angrily. “And you took it!”

Howell shrugged. He had too much on his mind to engage in argument now. He said, “There could be another beast around. It’s yours. If you see it aiming at me, I won’t mind a bit if you kill it. We probably ought to check the slug-ship, though. They thought we were all dead, so they shouldn’t have put on spacesuits except for a landing party. But it might be standard for them to have all hands suit up when any kind of action is in prospect. Against another ship, it’d make sense.”

He turned away to the slug-ship. He moved in its direction, using his eyes with a desperate intentness. Ketch followed, still resentful. Howell made a mental note to try to think of some way to placate him. He’d been touchy because he didn’t see their situation as Howell did. His whole life had assumed his safety under any and all conditions. His hunting had been of animals that couldn’t fight back. Now that a dangerous opponent had appeared, he still had the viewpoint of a hunter for sport, and even their present situation hadn’t made him into a practical man in a very bad spot.

They approached the shattered slug-ship, weapons ready. There was silence except for the cracklings and snappings of the dying-out fire. There was the smell of chlorine.

The slug-ship was eighty feet long—twenty more than the
Marintha
. The smell of chlorine grew stronger as they drew near. It was made of white metal—beautifully white metal, like steel that has never been in contact with oxygen. And every particle of it was coated with transparent plastic. Where the plates were ripped by the internal explosion, they were half an inch thick, and already the totally reflecting broken surface was dulling where the air touched it.