Space Gypsies (13 page)

“We?” asked Howell politely.

“I’ll need you,” said Ketch, “But if I have to I can make out! But I think you’ll join me! When Karen hears—”

“You have my blessings,” said Howell with irony. “But right now our first impossible task is to keep the slug-creatures from coming back here and learning that there are two human races, not one, and that they’ve made contact. Because if they find that out, they’ll make an all-out attack on the race that’s not used to fighting them and won’t be prepared: Our race! You’ve my blessing on what you want to do, but first things come first!”

He turned aside and drearily helped display the yacht and its equipment to the raptly admiring small-folk, He gathered the impression that they were astonished at so large a spacecraft built for the use of so few. The globe-ships were crowded with tiny men and women and children. Howell morosely realized that they were crowded because at their infrequent gatherings, they couldn’t build new ships fast enough. They did everything practically by hand, and what machinery they used was itself handmade. Their civilization laboured under the tremendous pressure of constant danger, constant need to move on, to avoid slug-ships, and it need never to stay aground longer than could be helped. Under such a handicap, they’d reach the point of diminishing returns. The small-race of human beings was headed for extinction.

Then a question arose in Howell’s mind. How did they survive at all? Their weapons were pitiful against the slug-ships’. They must have either more sensitive detection devices than their enemies, so they’d always have adequate warning to flee, or else they’d found some way to avoid detection by the slug-ships under some circumstances they could bring about. One or the other they must have.

With all hope for personal escape abandoned, Howell considered the most important thing in the galaxy just now, the prevention of the slug-creatures from examining the
Marintha
, intact or wrecked, crippled or in perfect shape.

There were noises outside, a small-sized tumult. Howell could imagine nothing positive or good as an explanation. In his present frame of mind, he could anticipate only disasters. So before he went to the entrance-port he snatched up one of Ketch’s weapons.

When he reached the port, there was a cheerful soprano babbling outside. Small folk jumped out of the port, eeling past him. They ran toward a certain spot in the jungle. There were thrashings and movements there. Howell thought instantly of a possible still-surviving slug-ship creature. But the noise didn’t match such an event.

Then, abruptly, there appeared what should have been a heartening though perhaps bewildering sight. A straggling, heaving group of small-men were making their way toward the
Marintha
with something heavy and burdensome in their midst. They were bringing it to the space-yacht. They had cut down saplings to make poles to hang it from, and they’d ripped fabric strips from somewhere—probably inside the slug-ship’s wreck—to hang it by. They came into view with an entirely unidentifiable object which by its swaying and evident weight caused much staggering and hilarity.

They brought it to the
Marintha
’s port with a vast amount of chattering and orders given by everybody to everybody else. They got the object up into the yacht. There the gray-whiskered small-man took firm command. Somebody—several somebodies—came out of the engine room with parts of the yacht’s disassembled capacitor. They carried their loads outside, dumping the swollen and punctured plates on the ground. The whiskered small-man judgmentally estimated the space left by the removal of the original capacitor. He turned and briskly began to chip the irregular block of solid plastic his companions had brought. His lips worked, pursing and unpursing, in a fashion peculiar to skilled workmen who have absorbed the knowledge of their trade so they need not take particular thought once they have identified their problem. There are never but so many such men, and all of them do things with their mouths as they work. This one pursed his lips and made small noises to himself.

Howell picked up the sheared-away bits of plastic and dropped them into the garbage-disposal device. As they touched its bottom, they naturally disintegrated. Without fuss, they became an utterly impalpable powder which immediately flowed out of a refuse-vent to the ground, because the space-yacht was in atmosphere.

All activity stopped instantly. Small-men stared, There was an abrupt and violent babble of voices. There was excitement of unprecedented intensity. Small folk came from all over the
Marintha
, asking questions. Others crowded in from outside, and a hubbub of voices and a flurry of gesticulations followed.

Then silence fell once more. Small-men, crowded together, looked from Howell to the garbage-disposal unit and back again. Some peered over the shoulders of nearer ones. Some had climbed up on the yacht’s built-in furnishings to be able to see. There were gestures, asking Howell to do the same thing once more.

He frowned. This was not sightseeing. There was no more cheerful chatter. Every member of the small-man race had suddenly ceased to be interested in anything at all except the device that took the organic refuse of the space-yacht, and by loosening the valence-bonds of the carbon atoms it contained, caused it to fall apart to powder-particles finer than the smoothest of talc or graphite. The powder was like a fourth state of matter, being neither solid nor liquid nor a gas. It was a powder. The tilting of the yacht caused the powder to flow to the lower side of its container. If blown upon, it would swirl away in tendrils like smoke. But it would become solid again only by the adhesion of its ultra-microscopic particles, one by one, to other matter outside.

The gray-whiskered man spoke. It should have been gruffly. But he was astounded. He was incredulous. He was deeply and agitatedly absorbed in what he’d just seen. He made gestures which were only partly dignified. They tended to be imploring. He begged Howell to do it again.

Puzzled, Howell dropped more scraps of plastic into the garbage-disposal unit. They turned to powder. More scraps. They did the same, And more.

There was an incredible tumult. Some of the miniature human faces were aglow with excitement. Their owners shouted shrilly. Some seemed awed, dazed by the remarkable thing they’d seen. There were small-men who pounded each other on the back, howling in apparent glee. There were some who clasped hands in overwhelming emotion. Howell saw a man in rose-pink garments, making his way forcefully through the crowd. He reached a certain small-race woman. He embraced her, pointing to the garbage-disposal unit and practically babbling to her. She wept quietly.

“Hold on!” protested Howell, “What’s the matter? If you want garbage-disposal, I’ll give it to you! I’ll make one for you! But let Whiskers, here, do his stuff. Clear the way! Clear the way!”

Ketch and Breen came shouldering their way through the crowding, rejoicing small-men. Ketch demanded, “What’s going on here? What’s going on?”

“They saw a garbage unit work,” said Howell wryly, “and they went out of their minds.” Then he said impatiently, “See if you can draw pictures of people going out of their minds and find out what all the fuss is about.”

He moved forward, spreading out his arms and shooing the fascinated small humans out of the space-yacht. Before the last were gone he saw some of them running toward the wreck of the slug-ship. He returned to the whiskered man in purple, who pursed his lips and gazed raptly at the garbage device. He made small sounds to himself. But this time the sounds he made were not comfortable, meditative ones. They were plaintive. They were almost querulous. He could make nothing of the garbage-disposer and he wanted most desperately to do so.

“Look,” said Howell vexedly, “if it means that much to you, I’ll make you one and show you how to make others. But what is this?”

The whiskered man made gestures. It was perfectly clear that he and some of his companions had gone to the slug-ship’s wreck and carved some item of equipment out of the solid plastic which was most of the slug-ship’s hull. The plastic had to be massive, for strength, and it was reinforced with metal imbedded in it. Howell hadn’t recognized the object until he saw the whiskered man estimating its size in comparison with the space the capacitor had been pulled out from. The whiskered man’s gestures were assurance that he proposed to make it replace the capacitor just dumped on the ground outside. But Howell didn’t believe it: the small-men had spaceships, but their technology was still primitive when they had to make even their weapons by hand.

“Go ahead and try it,” said Howell skeptically. “By all means try it! If it takes us away from here until we can lose our trailers—if we can lose them—that’ll be perfect. But if it only blows up the
Marintha
I won’t complain!”

The small-man, of course, did not understand. But Howell had spoken to him, and he spoke back. Somehow his tone conveyed desperate entreaty because of the dignity with which he expressed it. What he wanted Howell to do was of the utmost possible urgency.

Breen said puzzledly, “I’ve given them part of the seeds from our emergency-kit, and Ketch has been drawing things that can be used for weapons. What more can they want?”

“Apparently,” said Howell sardonically, “they want something to handle garbage with! I can’t make him out as wanting anything else.”

He made a pantomime of removing the garbage-disposer and presenting it to the whiskered small-man. That undersized person looked horrified. He wanted something else. It was Karen who interpreted.

“He doesn’t want to take this one,” she said convincedly. “This one is too much to take from us. But if we’ll show him how to make one—”

“It’s a slightly tricky job,” said Howell, “but tell him I’ll try. It’s not more hopeless than the job he’s undertaken—to power our overdrive by a slug-ship capacitor! If he can do that…”

Three small people came bashfully into the yacht. Howell had chased them out minutes before. Now they were back again. They carried chopped-off bits of the plastic of the slug-ship. With signs and gestures they asked ingratiatingly if they might drop these bits of plastic into the garbage-disposal device.

“Go ahead!” said Howell impatiently. “Have your fun!”

And they did. And it was fun. They were incredibly pleased and hopeful.

But Howell was in no enviable frame of mind. The fact was, of course, that his thoughts could never stray far from the hopeless state of affairs that lay before Karen. The contact with the small race hadn’t improved her situation. Now it was obvious that even if the
Marintha
should somehow be repaired—but he was unable to believe it could happen—it should not return to the worlds of Earth-humanity without absolute assurance that it wasn’t trailed by slug-ships. And Howell was convinced now that such trailing was standard practise for the chlorine-breathers, though the small-men must have some way to evade it.

He saw no conceivable hope for Karen, other than a lifetime of furtive hiding among the small people, plus the knowledge that if she were ever found, their own race would be sought for and discovered and massacred as its forbears had been so many thousands of years before.

So there could be no good fortune for any of them. But not all of them shared Howell’s pessimism. Ketch was developing a new psychology since the fight with the slug-creatures. It was based, ultimately, on tape-dramas he had watched. He’d experienced combat, as in those excellently staged dramatic tales. He hadn’t been hurt, and he’d liked it. He’d acquired a dramatic hatred of the slug-creatures because such a hatred fitted into daydreams of an armed spacecraft with himself as skipper and admiring small-men as his subordinates, roving space to destroy slug-ships in a frenzy appropriate to a drama-tape but to nothing else.

The yearning of the small-men for garbage-disposal units, too, Was irritating because seemingly so senseless. But they couldn’t seem to think of anything else, now. With other reasons for angry frustration, Howell developed a savage mood.

More of the small-folk came into the yacht, persistently, apologetically and even bashfully, to drop some morsel of plastic into the garbage unit and watch it become powder. Howell went angrily to search in the ship’s stores for small parts to make a spare disposal unit for a globe-ship, meaningless as the idea seemed to be.

Ketch followed him. He spoke with an air of fine authority: “Howell, you’re making a very bad mistake. You’ve acted as leader on this expedition up to now, but you’re showing fewer and fewer qualifications for making decisions on which the lives of the rest of us depend. We’ve got to design some weapons!”

“Well?” said Howell.

He picked out the small parts he’d need. It occurred to him that the small, useless capacitor from the booby trap could be used in the thing he’d foolishly promised to make.

“If that whiskered small-man cobbled the
Marintha
to drive again, we’ll need designs for weapons to defend ourselves with. But we can do more. I can recruit some of those small characters to come along with us and use the weapons.”

Howell turned his head to look at Ketch.

“We’ve got to learn their language,” said Ketch decisively. “We’ve got to build weapons. We’ve got to join the globe-ships when they gather at their next rendezvous. We’ve got to have a record of slug-ships destroyed and proof that we can lead the small-men with our new weapons to something more than a stalemate against the beasts who hunt them now!”

“It’s at least not yet certain,” Howell told him, “that the
Marintha
can be repaired, Besides that, there’s Karen. If you did turn the yacht—my yacht, by the way—into a fighting ship, do you think you should make Karen enforcedly part of the crew?”

“Karen,” said Ketch in the same authoritative tone, “is a woman. And a woman glories in being the wife of a fighting man.”

“That’s the way it is on drama-tapes,” snapped Howell. “You’re a fool! This is reality!”

He pushed Ketch out of the way and went back to the engine room. He had the parts he needed, and paper on which to sketch.