He was silent and moody while the others talked. Karen looked distressed. Breen was absurdly elated—but he blandly waited for the situation to be resolved favourably. Ketch argued plausibly for various implausible courses of action, all of them more or less dramatically appealing but with nothing else to recommend them.
Eventually Breen got out the pictures made from space and examined them under high magnification. Presently he chortled. He’d found where there ought to be a rubble-heap that thousands of years before had been a city. It was within a reasonable distance of the Marintha where she lay aground.
Howell couldn’t take their insensitivity to the appalling state of things. He went to his cabin to escape it, and to try to sleep. What he planned couldn’t be done in darkness. He had to wait for day. He noticed that Karen seemed particularly distressed when he left the others, but he didn’t dwell on it now, though most of his thinking was directly or indirectly concerned with Karen.
In the morning he was up the first of them all. He took a blast-rifle and went quietly out of the ship. It could have been extremely unwise, but he couldn’t abandon completely the confidence of humans in their own safety. He knew there was danger, but he could not quite believe in danger from anything but the slug-ship now floating confidently—perhaps gloatingly—out to attempt again the murder of the humans in the Marintha. So he went out without leaving word of his purpose. Besides the rifle, he carried two lengths of rope and two of the rope-hooks used for lashing objects fast in ships’ storage holds.
He made his way through the jungle he’d traversed the day It seemed less thick than he remembered it. But jungle tend to seem thinner when one has some familiarity with it.
He came out presently exactly where he’d first glimpsed the dead area the day before. Again he moved around the edge of the killed space, not yet venturing inside it. In a little while he could see the metal globe. And then he moved back and forth, with his eyes raised above ground-level, examining the trees in relation to each other.
He took some time to make his selection. Then he threw a doubled rope with a lashing-hook at its farther end. At the third try he caught the hook on the tree. He tested it. Then he swung himself up on the rope. He was thirty feet above-ground in a very few minutes. He braced himself and flung the rope again. He caught it on a second tree. He tested it, and the limb broke. He hooked on to another. Very shortly he was in the second tree and tossing the lashing-hook into the branches of a third. Again he had trouble making the hook lodge properly, but it could be released by tugging on one side of the doubled cable.
It was very hard work and very slow progress, but he moved into the dead area. The purpose behind approaching the trap by way of treetops was simply, of course, that the globe was the bait of a booby trap. Somewhere in the now-dead space, there was a trigger or a trip-wire. More probably, there were several. Anybody going to the seeming spaceship would normally go on foot. It would be absurd to mount triggers or trip wires in treetops. So Howell moved toward the dummy globe by swinging laboriously from a succession of tree limbs on doubled slender ropes. He chose his aerial route three and four trees ahead.
Ultimately he arrived where trees had been felled to make room for the fake spacecraft, where the booby trap centered.
He searched this space very painstakingly before he swung down to it. For minutes he moved with infinite caution, making quite sure that he would not touch anything—not even a wire as thin as a spiderweb—by any accident.
He found the booby trap unit itself. Very carefully and very painstakingly, he jammed the relay which would take a tiny dollop of power from the trigger or the trip, and send a monstrous surge of current through the killer-field generating unit. He smashed that unit. Then he worked for some time getting a part of its power-assembly separated from the rest. He was more or less puzzled by the plastic coating, not only of the unit as a whole, but of each part of it separately. It was a hard, transparent substance. Cables were coated with it; where they were joined, the joint had the glassy coating. In the whole device, including the connections; there wasn’t the fraction of a square millimetre of bare metal exposed.
He tried to make deductions from the fact as he went, staggering a little from his burden, back to the edge of the formerly deadly space. He passed the small and pathetic skeletons. He went to the edge of the brown space. He put down the capacity-storage unit from the killer-field device. He went back. Unhappily, he gathered up the skeletons. They were small. They were fragile. They seemed definitely to be those of twelve-year-old children. Doggedly—perhaps he was ashamed of his sentimentality—he placed them neatly and respectfully under a cover of green stuff. He recovered the alien capacitor and went back to the Marintha with it.
The others of the Marintha’s company had his own generations-old, automatic confidence in their safety under all circumstances not specifically pointed out as dangerous. Karen was the only one left in the ship. She greeted him with a little indrawn breath of relief.
“We didn’t know where you’d gone!” she told him. “My father and Ketch went to see the rubble-heap the photograph says isn’t far away.”
Howell frowned. He’d taken appalling chances himself. He was just back from taking them. But it seemed to him that Karen shouldn’t have been left by herself. There wouldn’t be dangerous animals if there was a shattered city on this planet, of course, but it was still far from certain that nothing else inimical existed here.
“I’ve had a queer feeling,” said Karen uncertainly, “that there was something watching the yacht just now. Hiding—and peering at me.”
Howell, struggling, got the object he’d brought back up upon the exit-port sill.
“It’s not likely,” he said. He got up into the port and picked up the burden again. “Why not close the port?”
“My father and Ketch are out.”
“They’ll bang on the hull if necessary,” he told her. He put down his load in the engine room. “I brought this back to see how far ahead of us the slug-ship creatures may be. I rather hope it’s a long way.”
He cracked the hard plastic coating on the bus-bars of the package he’d brought back. He made contacts. He set up circuits. He hooked in instruments.
“I’m going to do some tests,” he explained, “to see how this compares with our ruined capacitor. It functioned like a capacitor in the circuit I took it from. If they’re way ahead of us, they’ll have designed more power-storage capacity in this than we had in our capacitor of several times the size. If so, we may repair our overdrive around it. If not, we don’t. We’ll be better off if we can, but the rest of humanity will be better off if the slug-creatures aren’t too far advanced.”
“You think they’ll—attack Earth some day?”
“Eventually,” admitted Howell, “they’re bound to, with crazy confident amateurs riding around the galaxy without the least precaution. Like us! Just a minute—”
He had his instruments ready. He threw a switch. He read and rearranged the instruments. He threw the switch yet again. He tried still another instrumental setup.
“Not good enough!” he said grimly. “Very good, but not the kind of goodness that would be of use to us.” Then he said, “But we don’t want to kill people. It’s powerful enough for that!”