The whiskered man had two helpers, and Howell had not known that such intense and concentrated attention could be paid by anybody to anything. They watched him tensely as he worked. He could leave nothing unexplained. He could pass over nothing as self-evident. It was the wave-form of the oscillations in the disintegration-chamber metal which did the work, of course. But the high-frequency current used should have radiated like a broadcast instead of remaining confined to the metal until some organic compound came in contact with it. It was difficult to explain that the air in the ship reflected back what should have been high-frequency, radio-spectrum radiation. The standard illustration was that if an electric lamp were submerged in quicksilver, no light could escape. It would all be reflected back to the light-source. No garbage-disposal unit, surrounded by air, could have any of its radiation escape. Which was why plastic objects inside the ship were unaffected.
Time passed, and the sunlight on the jungle outside the yacht gave way to darkness. There was very probably a spectacular sunset, but Howell did not see it. He laboured at the assembly of a garbage-disposal unit. It was tricky, but the development of apparatus to produce the needed wave-form, which he expected to be most difficult to explain, went through, swimmingly. The whiskered small-man took it in stride. He watched eagerly as Howell soldered this and that, and he urgently insisted on restating, in diagrams and pictures, every item of information to be sure that he had it right—which was praiseworthy, but took up time.
Karen raised the question of dinner. Howell shook his head. He found it ironic and farcical and typical of this whole affair that though there was a friendly civilized race anxious and willing to help the Marintha, there was substantially nothing that it could do. That at once there was most desperate need for the Marintha to get home-which appeared to be impossible—and there was most imperative reason that she shouldn’t attempt it, lest she be trailed. The yacht should get off this world before a slug-ship fighting-fleet arrived, but it would be wiser to dump it into the deepest depths of the sea. And with such problems demanding impossible solutions—he was making a gadget to dispose of garbage!
Karen brought him sandwiches. He nodded and offered them to the three small-men who alone remained in the Marintha after darkness fell. They refused, and waited so yearningly for him to complete his task that he merely took a bite now and then and continued his labour.
Later Karen came again. She said, “Aren’t you going to try to get some sleep?”
“I’ve got no particular use for sleep,” said Howell dourly. “What good would it do me?”
“You should sleep! ” protested Karen.
He did not answer. She said hesitatingly that Ketch was designing weapons. Howell carefully soldered a tiny contact.
She said, “He’s—asked me to learn the language as fast as I possibly can.”
“No harm,” said Howell, “nor any particular good, the way things look now. I suspect he wants you to learn especially military terminology. Which will be about as useful as what I’m doing.”
“I wish—” she stopped and said helplessly, “I wish something—”
He lifted his eyes to her.
“I’m working,” he said grimly, “for you. I can’t do anything that’s really hopeful so I’m doing things that are practically hopeless, in the hope that I may be mistaken about how hopeless they are.”
She went away, looking unhappily behind her. He continued his work. A long time after what was probably midnight, he finished the task. He connected the capacitor from the booby trap. He turned on the current. He gave the completed device to the whiskered small-man, He was very tired then. There is nothing as fatiguing as frustration.
“It’s all yours,” he said wearily. “Do you want to try it?”
He watched as the whiskery small-man picked up a scrap of plastic. He trembled. He dropped the plastic in the new garbage-disposal unit. It seemed to melt very quietly and very quickly except that it did not become a liquid, but a powder. Impalpable powder. It flowed back and forth as the container was tilted. The whiskered man’s two helpers almost solemnly repeated the test. Their eyes shone. They said nothing, as if speech were impossible. But nobody could have been more excited.
The whiskered small-man reached up and patted Howell on the shoulder. He urged him away.
He and his two helpers threw themselves into the work of adapting the plastic-surrounded capacitor from the wrecked slug-ship to the wrecked overdrive unit of the Marintha. They worked feverishly. It was a very delicate job. If it didn’t work at all there’d be little harm, considering everything, and if it did work it wouldn’t do much good. But it would certainly require very precise knowledge of slug-culture equipment if it was to work at all.
Howell watched for a certain length of time. They did seem to know what they were doing. But the Marintha would still be unarmed even if the overdrive field was again available, and there was no time to create weapons, and there was no way to evade pursuit even if they could flee. The small-men had some device—
Howell was worn out by pessimism and a grim despair. On the morrow he’d try to arrange for Karen to have asylum among the small-folk, If possible he’d transfer some technical books with her, and she could translate them later. If Breen and Ketch could be accepted, of course they’d try to pass on Earth science too, And if he could explain to the small people, and if they had room for him also, they might follow him to where he’d send the Marintha to dive down until her hull-plates buckled from the pressure, And they might pick him up from the water—if it was worth while. And after that—
He flung himself on a couch and was instantly asleep.
He woke with an appalling sensation of giddiness and nausea and of a twisting; spiral fall. He was bewildered. It couldn’t be! Then he heard agitated babblings, and suddenly he knew it was so. He was on his feet even before the nausea ended. He bolted for the control room. He rushed into it to find the vision-screens blank. The Marintha was not only in space, but in overdrive. And half a dozen of the small-men, in the control room, struggled to get the face-plate off the instrument—board to get at the relays behind it. While Howell slept, the capacitor from the slug-ship had been installed. While he slept, the yacht had been lifted off for a matter-of-fact, wholly confident check on the improvised repair. But the Marintha was now in overdrive, headed in an unknown direction at an unknown multiple of the speed of light—and the small-men were struggling to get behind the instrument-board to fix whatever was wrong that was preventing the Marintha from breaking out of overdrive.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was one of those things that nobody could possibly have predicted. There was no use in debating whose fault it might be, or in dividing up the blame. It had happened, and Howell could tell a part of it by his own now-vanished symptoms such as everybody experiences when going into or out of overdrive. But it was a shock to have gone dismally to sleep, having no actual belief that the Marintha could ever be put into overdrive again, and being resolved anyhow to sink her in the deepest sea, and then to wake and find her lifted off the booby trap planet, in overdrive, and now unable to get out again.