There came a mooing, bleating, howling sound from the all-wave receiver. It was beast-like, animal; it formed no words. It sounded like a monster bellowing defiance.
“That’s a challenge,” said Ketch brightly.
“We don’t answer it,” said Howell curtly.
The unthinkably dismal sound came again. Karen’s features showed fear. But she looked quickly at Howell, and her uneasiness disappeared.
There came words from the unseen ship overhead. They were spoken in a clear soprano voice. There were consonants and vowels. It seemed to Howell that he recognized some of the sounds that the booby trap bait-beam had repeated so often. They would be words that happened to occur both in the planetary broadcast and this other mocking, derisive challenge.
This was mockery and it was derision. Howell ground his teeth. He was convinced now that the slug-ship overhead was the same that had challenged the space-yacht in the first place ,with a beastly sound like these last. It had trailed the Marintha in its overdrive escape from the encounter. It had followed the overdrive change-of-course to this system. Its breakout point, here, happened to be farther from the green planet than the Marintha’s, so it had arrived there on solar-system drive much later. But now it was overhead and the Marintha was grounded below, and a ship cannot go into overdrive in atmosphere. It will vaporize itself. So the slug-ship aloft could mock the Marintha. And it did.
“I think,” said Howell detachedly, “that things depend now on whether or not they saw or see the dummies I set out.”
Breen and Ketch now seemed to feel the high excitement of men participating in the high adventure of a drama-tape. Howell couldn’t believe that they were desperate like himself, but he needed to keep them in this frame of mind since it was the best he could hope for. When action began they might panic and flee, or they might react as most men have always done when they found their backs against a wall.
More bestial sounds. The soprano voice again.
Breen said, “Too bad the diggers at the rubble-heap city went away! They’d have fought with us.”
“They’re humans,” said Ketch. He listened to the sounds from emptiness. “No doubt about it. Not like whoever’s making that racket.”
This was admirable, sophisticated, tape-dramatic reaction to imminent danger awaiting the moment of its arrival. Howell needed to confirm them in their roles of calm and confident combatants-to-be. He said, “How do you know they’re human?”
“He found—”
“I found something,” said Breen. “An anthropologist could make deductions from it. I make the obvious one—that one of the diggers’ children lost it.”
He drew a small and draggled object from his pocket. It was a stick and a bit of paper or something of the sort. It was coloured. It was very small.
It was a pinwheel, a child’s toy, made out of unimportant materials on a miniature scale. A child would run with it and be charmed by its spinning, or hold it gleefully in a wind to see it turn from the wind’s pressure. But it was no more than three or four inches across.
Howell almost paid attention. But he couldn’t keep his eyes from the screens that showed the sky. There was a ship up there which mocked the Marintha. It just barely might see the dummies, and if so it might just barely think the Marintha empty of its crew—that all its occupants had gone to be killed by the booby trap.
There was a spark in mid-sky. It was a lurid, furious, deadly blue-white speck of incandescence. It grew. It was coming down. To the Marintha. Exactly where it would strike would depend, of course, on the thinking of the creatures in the slug-ship. But in matters of technology they thought like men. They had to! So the one remote chance Howell had seized upon was a guess at further similarity of thinking processes. If the human race in this part of the galaxy built spaceships in the form of globes, the Marintha’s hull-design would make the skipper of the slug-ship want to examine something so strange and new. In that case he wouldn’t want to destroy it if he could help it. He might smash a part of it as a precaution. But he might—
The ravening, flaming missile came down. In air, it did not move with the limitless velocity of the bolt that had been fired in between-the-stars. It grew, and sped ferociously for the yacht. Its brilliance was intolerable. Only at the last instant could Howell he sure that it would be a miss.
There was a furious flash of light. There was the shock of an explosion transmitted to the space-yacht by the ground on which it rested. Then there was steam and smoke and hurtling masses of soil and shattered jungle trees. Some of them hit the Marintha. Then there was a twenty-foot crater in the ground, some four feet deep and only yards from the Marintha’s hull.
Howell said quickly, “Good! It looks like we’ve fooled them!”
Breen had jerked to tenseness. Ketch had paled a little.
“Now they’ll miss again,” said Howell. “On purpose. Here it comes!”
There was a second infinitely lurid spark darting down from the center of the sky. It exactly repeated the velocity and the fury of the first. It struck closer to the Marintha. There was a second impact and monstrous spouting of steam and flying masses of dirt and shattered limbs and tree trunks. There were “heavy blows on the Marintha’s outer plating. She tilted all askew.
“If we acted normally now,” said Howell, “we’d jump out the ports and run. And they’d see us and blast us. The next bolt won’t be so close.”
Ketch and Breen looked at him, and he assumed the devil-may-care manner of a tape-drama actor in a moment of high suspense, just before splendid and melodramatic action. The pose built up the illusion that this was something in a staged adventure which could not but end happily after stirring deeds of derring-do. Ketch straightened up. Breen composed his features.
“Right!” Breen said enthusiastically. “And we’ll lie in ambush—”
A third giant blaster-bolt landed a little farther off. A fourth and a fifth. They looked very much indeed like bombardment intended to destroy the Marintha and certain to do so if it were continued. Had Howell been less hopeless of any other stratagem, he’d have had the others well away and not gambling their lives on his guess at what the slug-ship skipper would do. But the stakes were too high to be bet except for great and high results.
There were six smoking craters blasted out of the jungle before the sparks ceased to form in the sky. Howell said matter-of-factly, after five minutes had passed without another detonation, “It looks like we put it over! They’ll ground, presently, and come to take a look at what they think their booby trap won for them.” Then, deliberately, he said, “What’s that about the holes you found dug in the rubble-heap?”