“Hold on!” protested Howell, “What’s the matter? If you want garbage-disposal, I’ll give it to you! I’ll make one for you! But let Whiskers, here, do his stuff. Clear the way! Clear the way!”
Ketch and Breen came shouldering their way through the crowding, rejoicing small-men. Ketch demanded, “What’s going on here? What’s going on?”
“They saw a garbage unit work,” said Howell wryly, “and they went out of their minds.” Then he said impatiently, “See if you can draw pictures of people going out of their minds and find out what all the fuss is about.”
He moved forward, spreading out his arms and shooing the fascinated small humans out of the space-yacht. Before the last were gone he saw some of them running toward the wreck of the slug-ship. He returned to the whiskered man in purple, who pursed his lips and gazed raptly at the garbage device. He made small sounds to himself. But this time the sounds he made were not comfortable, meditative ones. They were plaintive. They were almost querulous. He could make nothing of the garbage-disposer and he wanted most desperately to do so.
“Look,” said Howell vexedly, “if it means that much to you, I’ll make you one and show you how to make others. But what is this?”
The whiskered man made gestures. It was perfectly clear that he and some of his companions had gone to the slug-ship’s wreck and carved some item of equipment out of the solid plastic which was most of the slug-ship’s hull. The plastic had to be massive, for strength, and it was reinforced with metal imbedded in it. Howell hadn’t recognized the object until he saw the whiskered man estimating its size in comparison with the space the capacitor had been pulled out from. The whiskered man’s gestures were assurance that he proposed to make it replace the capacitor just dumped on the ground outside. But Howell didn’t believe it: the small-men had spaceships, but their technology was still primitive when they had to make even their weapons by hand.
“Go ahead and try it,” said Howell skeptically. “By all means try it! If it takes us away from here until we can lose our trailers—if we can lose them—that’ll be perfect. But if it only blows up the Marintha I won’t complain!”
The small-man, of course, did not understand. But Howell had spoken to him, and he spoke back. Somehow his tone conveyed desperate entreaty because of the dignity with which he expressed it. What he wanted Howell to do was of the utmost possible urgency.
Breen said puzzledly, “I’ve given them part of the seeds from our emergency-kit, and Ketch has been drawing things that can be used for weapons. What more can they want?”
“Apparently,” said Howell sardonically, “they want something to handle garbage with! I can’t make him out as wanting anything else.”
He made a pantomime of removing the garbage-disposer and presenting it to the whiskered small-man. That undersized person looked horrified. He wanted something else. It was Karen who interpreted.
“He doesn’t want to take this one,” she said convincedly. “This one is too much to take from us. But if we’ll show him how to make one—”
“It’s a slightly tricky job,” said Howell, “but tell him I’ll try. It’s not more hopeless than the job he’s undertaken—to power our overdrive by a slug-ship capacitor! If he can do that…”
Three small people came bashfully into the yacht. Howell had chased them out minutes before. Now they were back again. They carried chopped-off bits of the plastic of the slug-ship. With signs and gestures they asked ingratiatingly if they might drop these bits of plastic into the garbage-disposal device.
“Go ahead!” said Howell impatiently. “Have your fun!”
And they did. And it was fun. They were incredibly pleased and hopeful.
But Howell was in no enviable frame of mind. The fact was, of course, that his thoughts could never stray far from the hopeless state of affairs that lay before Karen. The contact with the small race hadn’t improved her situation. Now it was obvious that even if the Marintha should somehow be repaired—but he was unable to believe it could happen—it should not return to the worlds of Earth-humanity without absolute assurance that it wasn’t trailed by slug-ships. And Howell was convinced now that such trailing was standard practise for the chlorine-breathers, though the small-men must have some way to evade it.
He saw no conceivable hope for Karen, other than a lifetime of furtive hiding among the small people, plus the knowledge that if she were ever found, their own race would be sought for and discovered and massacred as its forbears had been so many thousands of years before.
So there could be no good fortune for any of them. But not all of them shared Howell’s pessimism. Ketch was developing a new psychology since the fight with the slug-creatures. It was based, ultimately, on tape-dramas he had watched. He’d experienced combat, as in those excellently staged dramatic tales. He hadn’t been hurt, and he’d liked it. He’d acquired a dramatic hatred of the slug-creatures because such a hatred fitted into daydreams of an armed spacecraft with himself as skipper and admiring small-men as his subordinates, roving space to destroy slug-ships in a frenzy appropriate to a drama-tape but to nothing else.
The yearning of the small-men for garbage-disposal units, too, Was irritating because seemingly so senseless. But they couldn’t seem to think of anything else, now. With other reasons for angry frustration, Howell developed a savage mood.
More of the small-folk came into the yacht, persistently, apologetically and even bashfully, to drop some morsel of plastic into the garbage unit and watch it become powder. Howell went angrily to search in the ship’s stores for small parts to make a spare disposal unit for a globe-ship, meaningless as the idea seemed to be.
Ketch followed him. He spoke with an air of fine authority: “Howell, you’re making a very bad mistake. You’ve acted as leader on this expedition up to now, but you’re showing fewer and fewer qualifications for making decisions on which the lives of the rest of us depend. We’ve got to design some weapons!”
“Well?” said Howell.
He picked out the small parts he’d need. It occurred to him that the small, useless capacitor from the booby trap could be used in the thing he’d foolishly promised to make.
“If that whiskered small-man cobbled the Marintha to drive again, we’ll need designs for weapons to defend ourselves with. But we can do more. I can recruit some of those small characters to come along with us and use the weapons.”
Howell turned his head to look at Ketch.
“We’ve got to learn their language,” said Ketch decisively. “We’ve got to build weapons. We’ve got to join the globe-ships when they gather at their next rendezvous. We’ve got to have a record of slug-ships destroyed and proof that we can lead the small-men with our new weapons to something more than a stalemate against the beasts who hunt them now!”
“It’s at least not yet certain,” Howell told him, “that the Marintha can be repaired, Besides that, there’s Karen. If you did turn the yacht—my yacht, by the way—into a fighting ship, do you think you should make Karen enforcedly part of the crew?”
“Karen,” said Ketch in the same authoritative tone, “is a woman. And a woman glories in being the wife of a fighting man.”
“That’s the way it is on drama-tapes,” snapped Howell. “You’re a fool! This is reality!”
He pushed Ketch out of the way and went back to the engine room. He had the parts he needed, and paper on which to sketch.
The whiskered small-man was at work on the clumsy, plastic-encased object from the slug-ship wreck. When Howell put down the assortment of small parts, he looked up. His eyes shone. He abandoned what he’d been doing. He looked desperately at each and everyone of the objects that would go to make up the garbage-disposal unit, and so fierce was his desire to understand them that Howell changed his original intention. He diagrammed the inward workings of everyone. It wasn’t too difficult, after a vocabulary of picturings had been made from one component taken apart.