Space Gypsies Read Free

that Karen would make the trip with her father. Now he wished urgently that he hadn’t, for Karen’s sake alone.
    There was a long silence from space. Ketch turned the last bolts. It took time. Then there came an entirely new kind of sound from the far-away but approaching slug-ship. The beam-locator verified its source. It came from the slug-ship—and it was human speech.
    It was words, unintelligible but unmistakable. The voice was a clear soprano. It could be a child or a woman or a young girl. It spoke briskly and came to a plain stop, and then there was silence again.
    Howell sat up straight in the pilot’s chair. Breen said with satisfaction, “Now, that’s something like it! They don’t use the same language we do, but I’ll accept whoever said that as kissing kin to Karen and me!”
    “It was human,” agreed Howell. “No doubt of it! Karen—”
    “What?”
    “Say something into this microphone,” Howell commanded. “Your voice sounds like that one. It should be as reassuring to them as that was to us. Go ahead!”
    Karen was relieved. There were still some people who spoke languages other than the one now considered the galactic tongue. As time went on, it could be expected that dialects would develop on different worlds,and perhaps some day interpreters might be needed. But humans who used any human language would have the beginning of communication if only because they used the same sort of signals: words.
    Howell stared at the electron telescope screen as if he expected Karen’s words to make a visible change in the slug-ship’s appearance. She said carefully:
    “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gymble in the wabe—”
    There was a brilliant flash of light from the forepart of the approaching slug-shaped ship. A blue-white flame, bright as a sun, streaked toward the Marintha . It travelled at incredible speed. No material object could be accelerated to such a velocity so quickly. It moved like a lightning-flash toward the Marintha .
    By pure, bewildered instinct, Howell threw over the overdrive switch. Relays crashed and contacts arced and there was the beginning of those excessively unpleasant sensations which either entering or breaking out of overdrive invariably produced.
    But the flame-missile hit. It hit obliquely, but it hit. And there were spitting sparks and jettings of burned-out insulation smoke in the engine room. The Marintha teetered on the very borderline between escape into overdrive and collapse back to normal space. The sensations of the four in the yacht were intolerable-dizziness and nausea and spinning fall… They seemed to last for hours. But, obviously, they didn’t.
    The vision-screens went dark. Instantly all instruments read zero. The Marintha was in overdrive, racing for nowhere at multiples of the speed of light. Nothing could touch her. She was utterly out of communication with the universe of stars and suns and galaxies. She had no contact with anything outside herself. And when she broke out of overdrive again, she should be almost infinitely far away from the place where an impossible, alien spacecraft had fired an incredible weapon at her from thousands of miles away—and had made a partial hit with it.
    Howell called, “Ketch! Any damage?”
    Ketch said bitterly, “The devil, yes! Shorts! Blasts! Fusings! And enough insulation burned to make it tricky to move around in here! We’re damaged, all right, but I don’t know how badly. And I won’t dare try to find out before we’re near something solid!”
    Breen said querulously, “They fooled us! Tricked us!”
    “Y-yes,” said Karen. “but at least we got away! And they can’t follow us in overdrive!”
    Howell said in a peculiarly dry voice, “Probably not.”
    He went to the engine room. Ketch was in the act of getting past wires and bus-bars whose insulation-coatings were : scorched and shrivelled. Incredible currents had flowed for the fraction of a second. If they’d flowed