Then, quite suddenly, it seemed that the horizon dropped down. From an apparently hollow bowl below, the world they were leaving became a visible, enormous ball. The sky overhead was dark by then and the sun was a blazing disk of flame. There were many, many stars.
Howell said soberly, “The nearest slug-ships are only a few thousand miles away. It would be entertaining to know if they’ve figured out that I dodged the first ones that started for us by going so slowly that they passed us without knowing it. They may try the same trick on us! I wonder…”
He glanced at the outside air-pressure dial. It said zero. He looked up at Karen and said, “You can tell them overdrive’s coming.”
Karen went to the control room door. She called. Howell threw the switch. It was a highly hazardous operation. The Marintha’s overdrive now made use of the full capacity of a capacitor she was not designed to use. Her circuits were not rated to carry the load. She could blow. And if she did, with a man-packed fuel-chamber, that fuel would blow also and there would be a momentary flare of hell-fire where the space-yacht had been. Then there’d be no more Marintha and the slug-ship fleet would have had a long journey in overdrive for nothing.
But the drive didn’t blow. And this time those aboard felt a monstrous vertigo and an intolerable nausea, and for a heartbeat they had the panicky sensation of falling headlong while in a spinning spiral. Because this time the Marintha went into full-power overdrive—higher power than she’d ever used before.
But in it everything seemed perfectly normal. The yacht felt as solid as if encased in rock. She was locked away from all the ordinary cosmos by a force-field stressing space to change all its properties, including the velocity of light. But the experience of those inside the yacht was of absolute firmness, absolute safety, and absolute tranquillity.
It was very much of an anticlimax.
It was ridiculous! At the beginning of these events the Marintha had been bound upon a voyage of private exploration. A fuel-ingot needed to be changed, and she came out of overdrive to make that change. And she was challenged and attacked. She limped away from the danger spot and her drive-system wrecked itself. She got to ground and was followed by a ship of a chlorine-breathing race, intent upon murder. She destroyed that ship and its crew and encountered a second race of human beings. The yacht was repaired, and became lost in emptiness, found its way back, then they were inexplicably deserted by cheering, waving fellow-humans, and—
Now the yacht drove with seeming placidity in an unsubstantial no-place. Nothing had been accomplished. Nothing significant had happened. The only apparent difference between now and the moment before the beginning of things was that now they knew what would happen if the Marintha broke out to normal space again. Now they knew that this time she’d be attacked by ball-lightning bolts from dozens or scores or perhaps hundreds of misshapen ships whose occupants were monsters of murderous intent. Gaining that information was all that had been achieved. It was anticlimactic indeed.
But it is the nature of anticlimaxes to seem very natural, once they’ve happened. An hour after leaving the booby trap planet, Breen roused himself to prepare a meal, exactly as he’d have done had none of the recent events taken place. Ketch glowered at a cabin wall, in not-unprecedented moroseness. Howell watched the instruments. They should show nothing, and that was what they did show. But he remained pessimistic enough to think that if the slug-ships could trail in overdrive, they should be able to attack. Still, after an hour he had his doubts.
He began to pace up and down the tiny control room. Karen watched him. Maybe the yacht couldn’t be attacked in overdrive. The fact would solve nothing, if it were a fact. Nothing, seemingly, would solve anything. The tricks by which the yacht had escaped destruction on two out of four seemingly certain occasions were now known to the slug-creatures. It would not be wise to use them again. There were no more tricks remaining to be tried. There was no use in thinking about tricks, or anything else.
So presently Howell said irritably, “I can’t help wondering why those small-folk deserted us as they did! They gave us everything they could, including a capacitor we couldn’t have found or—most likely—installed. Then they dumped your father and Ketch back on us and waved their hands happily and left us to be smashed by the slug-ships!”
“It could be a mistake,” Karen said. “You destroyed a slug-ship on the ground. Maybe they just came to believe you could destroy them anywhere and any time you pleased.”
“They’d no evidence for it,”, protested Howell. “The only thing they saw in this ship that they seemed to think was worth having was a garbage-disposal unit!”
Karen didn’t answer. She was with Howell. She had a private and quite irrational conviction that when greater emergencies arose, Howell would meet them. To be sure, an emergency existed now. For the moment the Marintha’s overdrive field protected her, while incidentally it carried her onward to nowhere at very many times the speed of light.
Breen called them to dinner. They dined. Everything they saw, heard, felt or experienced seemed completely commonplace and secure. Everything was superlatively the way things should be in a space-yacht journeying in overdrive in a galaxy which was absolutely safe for them to travel in. The four in the yacht could know that they were in danger, but there was no sign of it. They could reason that they must be doomed, but there was no tangible evidence for the belief. They should have felt despair, but there was nothing to remind them of it. So long as her overdrive-field surrounded her, apparently nothing could happen to the Marintha, or anybody aboard her. True, the yacht drove blindly toward the completely unknown and they dared not cut overdrive to look at it, but they seemed perfectly safe so long as they didn’t.
It was a state of things, however, that human beings are not designed to endure.
“I think,” said Howell, restlessly, “that we’re going to have to find out if we’re followed. It would be insane to run away if we’re not.”
Ketch said with annoyance, “We could be running away from nothing. The small-folk took to space with the slug-fleet on the way. They weren’t worried about it!”
“I’d like to know why not,” admitted Howell. “Come to think of it, they acted as if they knew they were perfectly safe and believed we were, too.”
“I have to admit,” Breen observed heavily, “that they acted in the friendliest fashion possible. They even seemed grateful—I might say absurdly grateful—for the device you showed them how to make, Howell.”
Howell grimaced.
“A thing to dispose of garbage! Yes. They liked that!”
Ketch said in his new tone of authority and decision:
“Maybe their ships can outrun the beasts’ ships. And maybe they know that since we had our overdrive changed by their workmen, we can outrun them too.”
Howell nodded, but without conviction.
“That’s one guess.”
“So we could be running away with nothing running after us,” said Ketch angrily. “I don’t say that’s true, but it could be!”
“The question,” said Howell, “is how much to bet on it. Apparently the least bet we can make is of our lives.”
Ketch fumed. It was an irritating possibility. If the Marintha broke out of overdrive, she might be destroyed instantly. On the other hand, if she drove on until all the fuel-ingots in the fuel-chamber were exhausted, she might find then that she wasn’t pursued; that she hadn’t been pursued because she’d left the slug-fleet behind long ago. And then she might not have fuel with which to return to Earth.