It had been guessed that when the race of the rubble-heap cities destroyed itself, there were some isolated survivors on non-colonized worlds. Some were on Earth, it was supposed, and modern humankind was descended from them. If they hadn’t been numerous enough to sustain a technological culture, they’d have gone back to savagery as tools they couldn’t replace wore out.
But Howell now guessed that there might somewhere else have been other groups of survivors. Some might have died out, and some might have increased and built up a civilization—which might have been found by the slug-ships and might now be fighting the previously unsuspected murderers of their remoter ancestors. If the Marintha could join forces with them… But they’d naturally be suspicious of traps.
There were other things to be debated. One slug-ship had essayed to deal with the Marintha. Another remained far away, yet well within communicator-range. That made unpleasant sense. There was no way to put messages, as such, into overdrive. The only way to carry news faster than light was in a ship. So one could guess that the ship that had fired on the Marintha was a scout-ship, hunting for whatever it had believed the space-yacht to be. The farther-away ship was on hand to flee with a report of anything the first ship could not handle. That implied warfare. It implied that the fighting was not entirely one-sided, nor yet a knock-down-drag-out affair with fleets of fighting ships seeking each other out. There might be war fleets of space, but there were scout-ships, too, travelling in pairs so one could always get back to tell what had happened to the other.
All this was logical deduction from recent events. But there were many, many other bits of information to be extracted from what had happened. And there were matters of immediate concern, too. Howell looked at his watch and took his seat at the control-board.
“Thirty seconds to breakout,” he said curtly. A little later he said, “Twenty.” Still later, “Ten.” Then he counted down, “Five, four, three, two, one—”
Hell broke loose in the engine room. The enormous surge of power from the overdrive-field, seeking its normal storage-space when the field was broken, went free. The choke that should have controlled it burned out. The surge of power went shatteringly into the capacitor. Its plates couldn’t adjust in time. They swelled. They made arcs of flame. There was dense smoke and the smell of electric sparks and a deafening roaring sound.
And then there was sudden silence.
Howell went to see the damage. There was no point in speech. He saw catastrophe undiluted. The Marintha’s overdrive appeared to be shot, ruined, wrecked, and blown out, and she was a considerable number of light-centuries from Earth. If her normal-space drive could run that long, it would take a thousand years to get back home. Which meant that she wouldn’t.
Howell’s lips tensed. He turned around. The vision-screens were bright with a thousand million stars. But there was one break in the space-yacht’s favour. The breakdown had come at the instant of breakout, and because of it. And Howell had done a good job of astrogation. There was a yellow sun nearby, a G-type, Sol-type sun with a disk a full half-degree in diameter. It was of that family of suns which most often have habitable planets in the third or fourth orbit out from them. It was the sun Howell had aimed for, but the point of breakout was extraordinary good luck.
“Anyhow we’ll probably get to ground,” he said evenly. “We’ve that much good luck—if that’s what it is.”
He searched for planets. There was a world. The electron telescope enlarged it. It was featureless, pure white. It was a cloud world. Sunlight would never penetrate to its surface. There was another world. It was a gas-giant, with striations almost about its equator. A third world. It had ice-caps and green foliage and the curious dark muddy areas which are always seas.
He made painstaking observations. He used the yacht’s computer. He swung the Marintha, and steadied it, and then threw on the normal-space drive-switch. There was a whining sound. It rose in pitch, and rose and rose. At its highest, Howell leaned back.
“We drive at full acceleration for so long,” he said evenly, “and then we coast. If they can trail us by our drive, they’ll have to start trailing while we’re driving. And we may start coasting before then.”
Karen said incredulously, “You don’t think they could trail us from where they shot at us, do you?”
“N-no,” said Howell, not altogether truthfully. “But in theory it’s possible, and they might be a long way ahead of us in technology. I’m looking on the dark side of things, so I can feel good when they don’t happen.”
Actually, his pessimism had increased since it had occurred to him how utterly improbable it was that a slug-ship had challenged within minutes after the yacht broke out to change fuel-ingots. It couldn’t have happened by accident. Ships don’t break out in between-the-stars except for such reasons as the Marintha had. There’s nothing to be done in it or with it. It’s simply thousands of thousands of millions of miles in which nothing ever happens. But something had happened. So the Marintha must have been detected in overdrive and trailed in overdrive and challenged and attacked as soon as she broke out.
Karen said, distress in her voice, “But if they’re that fat ahead of us—we can’t hope to—to get back home! Can we?”
“We’re not sure they’re ahead of us,” said Howell, again not quite truthfully. Then he said least truthfully of alclass="underline" “Anyhow, there are the humans with voices like yours. The slug-ship panicked when your voice reached it. Maybe the owners of human voices like yours are so far ahead of the characters who shot at us that they started to run away as soon as they let off one whack in our general direction.”
Karen looked dubious. Her father said blandly:
“Remember, Karen, civilization is a matter of natural development. On all planets nature invents the equivalent of trees and brushwood and even grass. In the same way savage humans invent clubs, then spears, then bows and arrows. When civilization comes, men invent chemical explosives, then laser weapons, and then blast-weapons in that order. The thing that hit us was a blast-weapon. So the creatures of the slug-shaped ships can’t be too far ahead of us!”
Karen shook her head. Her father took her arm and led her off to the galley, there to discuss a possible substitute for the dessert that had dropped from his hand and was now impalpable wetted dust in the garbage-disposal.
Ketch said unpleasantly, “You’re wrong about the slug-ship panicking when it sighted us! When I go hunting, I’m not panicked by the sight of game! I’m hunting! So were they!”
Howell nodded.
“Don’t you think that’s occurred to me?”
“If I’m right,” said Ketch, with an authoritative air, “they’ll turn up here. They won’t need to trail us! If the voice they used to trick us means they’re hunting men, they’ll know where to look for us!”
Howell looked up sharply. Ketch said, “Hunting deer, you know they’ll head for water. Hunting humans in space, you’d know they’d either high-tail it for home, or else head for the nearest Sol-type solar system to find an Earth-type world to land and bide on.”