A suspicion hit Howell with all the suddenness and the shock effect of a blow. The rubble-heaps that once had been cities were found on more than four hundred planets spread across two thousand light-years of space. Those cities had been destroyed with a thoroughness that seemed to rule out their destruction by enemies. They hadn’t been looted. They’d simply been smashed. There’d been no conqueror-occupation of the worlds they’d ruled, The wrecked cities looked convincingly as if their own inhabitants had gone deliberately about shattering them and destroying themselves to make the race and all its achievements as nearly as possible as if it had never been.
Howell now wondered with exceeding grimness if that interpretation might not be a mistake. Maybe—possibly—conceivably the race that travelled in slug-ships and broadcast a recorded human voice to deceive a human ship—maybe that race had destroyed the lost race of humanity. Maybe some few individuals had survived to father the humanity of Earth and today. Modern men hadn’t yet built back to the civilization of the rubble-heap cities. If the slug-ship civilization had destroyed the ancient cities thousands of years ago, in the time since then, the slug-ship race might have advanced so far beyond humankind that it would be simply a matter of finding the human race again before destroying it. And the Marintha in its every item of design and equipment would reveal that it was the human race the slug-ship had tested with a human voice-recording. So the Marintha could cause Earth-humanity to be searched for and found—and destroyed.
There was the rasping sound of an electric arc—a short-circuit. The sound of a blow somewhere. Something broke in the galley. Then there was dizziness and nausea and the feeling of a second spiral fall. The vision-screens lighted. The air smelled of ozone and vaporized metal. The Marintha had broken out of overdrive by a breakdown of her overdrive-field generator. It might or might not be possible to make a repair.
Howell found himself hoping desperately that the slug-ship couldn’t trail the unarmed Marintha in overdrive. Human technology wasn’t up to doing it. Not yet. But in theory it could be done. Howell hoped very fiercely that the beings in the slug-ship couldn’t do it.
CHAPTER TWO
Later, Ketch said dubiously that the overdrive-field generator might be tried again, but he promised nothing. Howell was just finishing an improvised device he couldn’t have imagined a few hours earlier. It was a setup which would destroy the yacht’s log-tape if a button was pressed or if the Marintha lost her air to space. It was not a contrivance to defend the yacht; that was out of the question. It was a device to defend Earth. If the yacht was wrecked and fell into the hands of the slug-ship creatures, with the log-tape destroyed they wouldn’t be able to find out where it came from by means of the tape. He hoped that all star-charts would share in the destruction. He’d tried to arrange that, too. The whole idea was pure defeatism, and he wasn’t pleased with it, but it was the best he could do. The slug-creatures could still learn that the human race existed, by the way the yacht was designed. It would be a definite stimulus to a search for that race. But there was simply no way to hinder that.
Howell’s expression was grimness itself as Ketch explained that he’d made a strictly jury rig of the almost shattered overdrive unit, and that it might just possibly work once or twice or even three times more before it blew out past any hope of cobbling.
“All right,” said Howell. “We’ll try it. I’ve picked out a sun that’s G-type, like Earth, and ought to have planets. It’s not the nearest, but we’ll go close to at least one other in getting to it, and it’s our best bet.”
From the habitual complacent confidence of a very few hours back, Howell had become the most confirmed of pessimists. Now he was guessing that the Marintha might be trailed, even in overdrive. He planned now on that assumption.
“I don’t guarantee anything,” repeated Ketch. “If we can get to ground somewhere, maybe I can improve on this. But this is the best I can do just now.”
“I didn’t ask for a guarantee,” said Howell irritably. “What good would a guarantee be if we’re stuck out here? Let’s try the thing!”
He returned to the control room. He swung the yacht about. He flipped on the small round screen which served the purpose of a compass for course-setting on a planetary sea. This small instrument was incredibly accurate, and it had been adjusted to unbelievable precision. It indicated the line of travel the Marintha would be following when it was driving blindly in the blackness of overdrive. It was also comparable to the sights of a rifle, except that the yacht would be the bullet on its way.
He centered the sun he’d chosen in the very middle of the screen. Then he displaced it the fraction of a hair, because he couldn’t know the proper motion to make allowance for. He set the overdrive timer for the best guess he could make for distance.
“Ready for overdrive?”
Karen’s father protested: “Wait a second! I dropped my dessert-dish when we broke out without warning. I’m still cleaning up the mess.”
“Do it in overdrive,” commanded Howell. “Ketch?”
“Go ahead,” said Ketch dourly. “But don’t blame me—”
Howell threw the switch. There was vertigo. There was nausea. There was an appalling sensation of tumbling fall. Then everything was as it had been for most of the time the Marintha had been away from Earth and all the time she’d been driving at many times light-speed in overdrive. There was a complete black-out of the cosmos. There was a feeling of absolute solidity. Instruments read zero. The Marintha was again, if precariously, in overdrive.
“I’m almost surprised,” said Ketch. “But still—”
He didn’t look surprised. Nor did Breen. Breen grumbled. The elaborate dessert he had almost completely decorated had fallen from his hands some time earlier and it was still only partly cleaned up. Now he finished that job, and wiped the floor with a towel and dumped the dessert, the plastic dish, and the towel together into the garbage-disposal unit. He pressed the activating button. The assorted organic substances of the refuse shivered and collapsed. The garbage unit had the rather remarkable ability to suppress all carbon valence-bonds in objects in its special high-frequency field. Consequently any organic substance put into it collapsed into impalpable powder when the unit was turned on. The powder-particles were of colloidal, barely molecular size, and the powder itself flowed like a liquid. And it was perfectly safe because its anti-valence frequency and wave-form was totally reflected by air. Nothing could happen outside the unit, but refuse from the ship thrown into it became something easy to dispose of. It was peculiar that humans hadn’t found any other use for it.
Howell was restless and uneasy. There was very much to be thought about, with very little information to go on. The soprano voice which had spoken definite if unintelligible words could have been, of course, a taped voice. But where had it been taped? Not in the part of the galaxy known to the humans of Earth and all its colonies! If a slug-ship carried a recording that to use as a trap for victims to be murdered, it was like a weapon in that it wouldn’t be carried unless in anticipation of something to use it on. But it would only work on humans! So there must either be humans here, or else creatures with human voices and throats and tongues and lips to form vowel-and-consonant sounds that would seem normal to the human ear. But the presence of humans seemed much more likely.