“Every so often,” said Karen matter-of-factly, “all the ships that can do so gather by appointment on some world they think the slug-ships won’t find for a while. Then they smelt metals and grow crops and exchange the things they’ve made, and they build new ships for the new members of their race grown old enough to be on their own. They exchange crew-members, too, so there’ll be somebody on every ship who knows how to do everything that’s needed, and no kind of knowledge will be limited to one ship. And then they move on before the slug-ships can find them.”
“How’d you find all this out?” demanded Howell.
“From the women,” said Karen. “They told me.” Then she added, “Their babies—they’re adorable! So tiny! Like little dolls! They’re lovely!”
The little crowd moved on through the jungle. It was composed of small-folk in bright-coloured garments, with the four humans from Earth looming tall among them. There was much chattering.
Ketch said eagerly, “We can invent some heavy weapons for them. And if we can get one ship armed decently, I’ll take a I dozen or so of them for a crew—” Then he said, “No. There should be two ships. Then we can take on a patrolling pair at once. That’ll curl the creatures hair! Pairs of their ships vanishing without a trace…”
Howell said drily, “I gather, though, that the slug-fleet whose scouts we ran into is only days in overdrive away. Before we could make designs for weapons, and make patterns and castings and devices to machine them, and then wind the coils and mount and calibrate them—”
“We’ve got to think about it,” said Ketch defensively. “There must be some way to do it!”
Howell did not answer. He went on through the jungle, surrounded and preceded and followed by members of the small-human race. Their attitude toward the Earth quartet and their ship the Marintha was a charmed curiosity. They were going sightseeing to the crippled yacht.
Howell brooded. He’d stumbled on a discovery that should have been of infinite importance—a second race of human beings, separated from Earth-based humanity since the destruction of the rubble-heap cities forty thousand years before. And two races of men with separate cultures should have very much to give to each other. But the small-men were battling a danger the larger race so far had escaped—the slug-ships. The small-men had been forced to contrive a way of life never dreamed of by the branch of humanity to which Howell and the others belonged.
And in making contact with them, the Marintha had inevitably made contact with a monstrous, alien, malignant race of beings who’d almost destroyed all humanity eons ago. It was now seeking out the small-men—murdering them, making booby traps for them, hunting them with murder-ships patrolling space in pairs so that if they could offer effective resistance to one slug-ship, the other would instantly go to bring back an irresistible force for their destruction.
The Marintha had undoubtedly been trailed—in overdrive!—from the instant of its first detection, It had out-tricked one of the trailing pair and destroyed it. Now—the other had gone for reinforcements. And the Marintha could not escape. But it had to! Else the chlorine-breathing monsters would learn of the existence of Earth humanity. Which would well mean a second desolation of the human-occupied part of the galaxy, and rusting, shattered, depopulated masses of wreckage to keep company with rubble-heaps on half a thousand worlds.
Which was enough of disaster. But there were the small-folk, too. They were plainly losing the struggle for survival. There must have been a time when they had cities and laboratories and sciences. Otherwise they could never have developed the ships in which they tried doggedly to stay alive. They’d tried to adapt to their danger by scattering, save that they held widely spaced foregatherings and helped each other build new globe-ships to flee in, and forlornly exchanged news and crew members so their remaining technology would not be lost, But such furtive gatherings could not lead to new discoveries, They had to use every resource they possessed merely to survive—and it wasn’t enough, They could only hide and flee, and flee and hide, while their enemies hunted them mercilessly and for sport. They trapped the small-folk as if they were vermin. They killed them as if they were flies. And the small-folk fought gallantly and to the death when they were cornered, and they were as human as Karen or Ketch or Breen or Howell. Howell felt not sympathy for them. He also felt that irrational, emotional of obligation men feel toward their fellows when they are apparently doomed and yet still could be helped.
They found the two small-people they’d passed on the way the globe-ships when they returned. They were in the Marintha’s engine room, and they’d shifted the useless capacitor from the booby trap and examined the Marintha’s overdrive unit. The original, now-disassembled capacitor still lay where Howell and Ketch had taken it apart, because the garbage-disposal device could not disintegrate metals but only organic compounds with a carbon base.
The small-man with gray whiskers wore a somehow professional air. He lectured his fellows on the subject of space-drives and their components. He wore garments of lurid purple, and he pursed his lips and spoke with a fine authority, Some of the folk of the globe-ship were not interested. They dispersed through the yacht, fascinated by what they saw. Karen did the honours of the ship. Ketch took his coterie of weapon-conscious younger small-men to see his sporting-equipment. Breen went to the survival-cabinet and brought out the seeds and cultures required by law to be carried in all spacecraft. He began to sketch instructive details of what the seeds were for, and what they would do.
But the gray-whiskered small-man continued to lecture on the overdrive-generating system of the Marintha. Sometimes somebody argued a point with him. A highly technical argument was evidently beginning.
Howell listened for a time. Then he went back to those with whom he’d tried to communicate earlier. He wanted to make a bargain with them. If they couldn’t repair the Marintha to journey in deep space, would they find for him the deepest abyss of this planet’s ocean, so he could drop the yacht into it where all the resources of the slug-ship culture couldn’t find it? Or if they found it, couldn’t recover it for study?
He didn’t stipulate for the reception of the four Earth-humans in the small-men’s ships, He didn’t even stipulate for a globe-ship to pick him out of the sea after he’d sent the Marintha on its way to oblivion, He was thinking very grimly of Karen, She wouldn’t want to go home if doing so would lead to the arrival of fleets of monsters to repeat the massacre of the rubble-heap cities. She’d rather be marooned here than lead destruction home. In any case she’d share in the doom that followed her to Earth. And yet, she wouldn’t want to live on here.
He tried urgently to get his question into pictures and gestures and grimaces. The Marintha could lift off with the same limited drive by which she’d landed. She could dive into the deepest deep of all the seas, and thereby at least delay the discovery of Earth-humanity by the monsters of the slug-ships. Would the small-folk help him find a suitable place to sink her?
He didn’t get the question understood, The small-folk could not quite grasp the reasoning by which the Marintha had to be destroyed without attempting to fight. The most useful question he was able to ask was, when would the slug-ship fighting fleet arrive? The miniature humans could answer that. The answer was, between the third and fourth sunsets from now.
A group of the visitors went trooping out of the engine room and the yacht. The whiskered authority on space-drives led them. They seemed to head toward the exploded slug-ship.