Five paces. Ten. Twenty. Karen said, distressed,“If that—has to be done—what becomes of us?”
“That,” said Howell, with foreboding, “is what we’re going to find out now.”
The three seeming children shouted. There were cries in reply. The four from the Marintha came out of the jungle to a place where gigantic trees grew in a forest, widely spaced. Their foliage was dense, so that beneath their out-flung branches there was only twilight. Here there was no underbrush at all. And here, hidden to eyes aloft by the leafage, there were two metal globular ships. They were smaller even than the Marintha. The larger of the two was no more than thirty feet in diameter. And there seemed to be innumerable small folk moving about around them.
Allowing for the difference between globular spacecraft and caravans, and between mongrel dogs and the distinctly not-canine animals that moved assuredly about among the small people—allowing for such things, there lay before them a perfect gypsy encampment.
CHAPTER SIX
Communication, of course, was the immediate problem, and Howell was fiercely impatient with its difficulties. But gestures and smiles expressed welcome, which was an abstraction, and everybody concerned discovered unanticipated artistic gifts. They drew pictures which, with gestures and emotions expressed by tones of voice, were much more informative than would have been suspected.
Brisk male members of the small-man race, of whom some were almost up to Howell’s shoulder, settled down with him to exchange information concerning slug-ships and the art of war. It shortly appeared that the art of war consisted, on the part of the slug-ships, of dirty tricks whenever possible. For example, the booby trap on this world. The Marintha had been observed long before her landing by the booby trap. It had been viewed with skepticism, as a possible dirty trick. Even after its landing and after Howell had been seen marching to the booby trap, the fact that he was oversize for a human being of their experience cast doubt upon his authenticity. It had been suspected that he was a new type of space-suit designed to deceive members of the small-man race.
It was, first, the roundabout way he went to the faked globe-ship in the killed space that had silenced those of the small people who insisted that he be shot. But on the way out of the dead area he’d gathered up the child-size skeletons of long-ago victims of the trap. He’d covered them decently, which no slug-creature could be imagined to do. And the small folk were urgently debating the question of making contact with him and the others—who were also oversized, but different from each other—when the slug-ship came in for its landing. And—then the small people were helpless to aid them. Somebody sketched a series of crude pictures which showed successive events in a battle between six small-men spacecraft-globes—and a single armed slug-ship. The small-men countered the lightning-bolts of the slug-ship by throwing out screens of metal pellets to break up the ball-lightning missiles the slug-ship used. They finally got the slug-ship with a guided missile, but lost one of their own number in the fight. So they’d been unable to try to help that strange ship, the Marintha.
They were apologetic about it, but they had women and children aboard and they weren’t even wholly sure that the Marintha was not herself a booby trap. Now they were sure. And would Howell show them how he’d destroyed the slug-ship?
He did, the more willingly because he’d have done exactly as these small folk had done if it were a question of endangering Karen in a hopeless attempt to aid a dubious stranger.
While he talked to the elders, Ketch demonstrated his hunting-rifle to interested younger small-men. They were vastly admiring. Breen worked at communication with still others. His drawings of leaves and flowers were professionally accurate.
He became the centre of an absorbed group interested in food-stuffs. The eight food-plants spread throughout the galaxy by the men of the rubble-heap cities were known to them, of course. Presently Breen went off with a chattering group to see the highly special crops they’d developed, They could scratch-plant a food crop and go away and come back again to harvest it, or even get some sort of harvest in days, if they dared remain aground. And they had some plants which could be gathered at any period of their growth and provide different but substantial foodstuffs at whatever stage of development they had reached.
And Karen talked, or seemed to, with the women. They surrounded her, with children staring as children do stare at strangers. And they spoke and smiled and gestured, and somehow they seemed to be carrying on quite a satisfactory conversation. Howell heard Karen’s voice from time to time.
But Howell was brooding and unsatisfied when he gathered up the others to go back to the Marintha.
“They were disappointed,” he said sourly, “when they learned that the way this slug-ship was wrecked required that it be aground and using its blast-cannon almost directly at somebody with a blast-rifle. But they’re anxious to give us anything they’ve got. They want to be our friends, but they’ve no spare parts for overdrives and there are some questions I can’t seem to get through to them. For one thing, everything they use is beautifully designed, and it works, but there’s something—”
There was a small crowd of the small-people following them, preceding them, walking zestfully on either side.
“Their weapons are hand-made,” said Ketch. “All of them. They’re chemical weapons, too.”
Karen said, “Their clothes are hand-woven, too, when they’re woven at all. The fabrics are fabulous! The women pride themselves on the cloth they make for their families’ clothing!”
Howell shook his head impatiently.
“That’s part of it, perhaps. But I couldn’t ask what I wanted to.”
“Their food crops,” said Breen, puffing a little,“are astonishing! They showed me plants growing. They use foliage in their ships for air-control, by the way. It’s primitive, but in some ways better than our systems.”
Howell stopped short in his walk, and then went on again.
“That’s the word,” he said gloomily. “Primitive! They’ve got spaceships, but their coils are hand-woven. I asked about their cities; their bases. I couldn’t get the question across. I asked where most of their race lived. They sketched globe-ships. I asked about factories—where their globes were built. They sketched half-moons and crescents at random—meaning planets, no doubt. But I drew the skyline of a city and it didn’t seem to mean anything to them.”
Karen stumbled, and a small-man moved quickly to support her. She smiled at him and said quietly to Howell, “It wouldn’t mean anything. They don’t have cities.”
“No cities?” Howell stared, frowning at her and paying no attention to the brightly-coloured small folk about the Marintha’s people.
“The globe-ships,” said Karen, “are their homes. They have wives and children with them. Like gypsies. They live on these ships, or in them. They make their own technical devices and weave their own cloth, and grow their own food, some of it aboard ship where it purifies the air. But some of it is grown aground when they dare stay on a suitable world for a while.”
Howell blinked. But it was true that there were women and children of the small-man race all about them. They wouldn’t be carried in fighting ships. They wouldn’t he aboard ship at all if there were a world of safety for them to live on while men went out to give battle to the slug-ships.
“But—” Howell shook his head.