Space Gypsies Read Free Page B

civilization implacably hostile to men—which seemed the case—and if that race were technically farther advanced than the human race—which looked intolerably likely—there was a very, very bad situation to be faced. The survival of the Marintha became starkly necessary, not because its people did not want to die—but because they had to get home with the news.
    A suspicion hit Howell with all the suddenness and the shock effect of a blow. The rubble-heaps that once had been cities were found on more than four hundred planets spread across two thousand light-years of space. Those cities had been destroyed with a thoroughness that seemed to rule out their destruction by enemies. They hadn’t been looted. They’d simply been smashed. There’d been no conqueror-occupation of the worlds they’d ruled, The wrecked cities looked convincingly as if their own inhabitants had gone deliberately about shattering them and destroying themselves to make the race and all its achievements as nearly as possible as if it had never been.
    Howell now wondered with exceeding grimness if that interpretation might not be a mistake. Maybe—possibly—conceivably the race that travelled in slug-ships and broadcast a recorded human voice to deceive a human ship—maybe that race had destroyed the lost race of humanity. Maybe some few individuals had survived to father the humanity of Earth and today. Modern men hadn’t yet built back to the civilization of the rubble-heap cities. If the slug-ship civilization had destroyed the ancient cities thousands of years ago, in the time since then, the slug-ship race might have advanced so far beyond humankind that it would be simply a matter of finding the human race again before destroying it. And the Marintha in its every item of design and equipment would reveal that it was the human race the slug-ship had tested with a human voice-recording. So the Marintha could cause Earth-humanity to be searched for and found—and destroyed.
    There was the rasping sound of an electric arc—a short-circuit. The sound of a blow somewhere. Something broke in the galley. Then there was dizziness and nausea and the feeling of a second spiral fall. The vision-screens lighted. The air smelled of ozone and vaporized metal. The Marintha had broken out of overdrive by a breakdown of her overdrive-field generator. It might or might not be possible to make a repair.
    Howell found himself hoping desperately that the slug-ship couldn’t trail the unarmed Marintha in overdrive. Human technology wasn’t up to doing it. Not yet. But in theory it could be done. Howell hoped very fiercely that the beings in the slug-ship couldn’t do it.

CHAPTER TWO
    Later, Ketch said dubiously that the overdrive-field generator might be tried again, but he promised nothing. Howell was just finishing an improvised device he couldn’t have imagined a few hours earlier. It was a setup which would destroy the yacht’s log-tape if a button was pressed or if the Marintha lost her air to space. It was not a contrivance to defend the yacht; that was out of the question. It was a device to defend Earth. If the yacht was wrecked and fell into the hands of the slug-ship creatures, with the log-tape destroyed they wouldn’t be able to find out where it came from by means of the tape. He hoped that all star-charts would share in the destruction. He’d tried to arrange that, too. The whole idea was pure defeatism, and he wasn’t pleased with it, but it was the best he could do. The slug-creatures could still learn that the human race existed, by the way the yacht was designed. It would be a definite stimulus to a search for that race. But there was simply no way to hinder that.
    Howell’s expression was grimness itself as Ketch explained that he’d made a strictly jury rig of the almost shattered overdrive unit, and that it might just possibly work once or twice or even three times more before it blew out past any hope of cobbling.
    “All