Howell ground his teeth. He wasn’t a hunter. He hadn’t thought from that standpoint. But it added very considerably to the things he had to be disturbed about.
“I wish you’d said that earlier,” he said. “We could have fooled them on it. But I did pick up the second nearest, not the first solar system. Still—”
He went over the yacht’s detector systems. One picked up the crackling static which was the short wave broadcast of the sun. Another picked up whisperings that came from the gas-giant world, and peculiar trilling noises from the cloud-planet. All were familiar. But as the time to cut acceleration drew near, Howell became more and more nerve-racked. He had the Marintha aimed and building up velocity to make ninety per cent of her journey to the green world in free fall. She’d float for three days with no drive operating. Then there’d be a quarter hour of manoeuvering—maybe even less—and then the yacht should be safely aground. And if no slug-ship appeared in time to pick up the present solar-system drive whining, and if it went away before the landing operation—why then they could see what could be done in the way of repairs. Which probably wouldn’t be much.
Presently the acceleration ended. The Marintha floated on on stored-up momentum. But Howell was only partly relieved. He had Karen on his mind, and he felt that he would need to fight in her defence, and he had nothing to fight with. He could see no chance of improvement in the yacht’s situation. The capacitor of the overdrive system seemed hopelessly gone, and without it or a substitute he couldn’t get the Marintha back to the civilization they knew, even without an inimical alien race to hinder him. He was bitterly sure that the slug-ships had detected the yacht in overdrive and trailed it, and if, improbably, he was able to head back for home, they’d trail the yacht and if they shot down the Marintha or simply followed it back to Earth—the tall and glittering cities of resurgent mankind would presently be blasted to rubble-heaps again.
Breen puttered in the galley. He was a civilized man. He’d made a hobby of cookery and a career of botany, neither of which was an adventurous pursuit. He’d never been in physical danger in his life before, and he couldn’t quite realize the situation now. He seemed to think that there was some sort of emergency existing, but that it would be taken care of by somebody whose duty it was. Probably Howell.
Karen worried because she saw that Howell did. She was able to be frightened because something might happen to him. Not even civilization can condition a girl not to worry about some man. But it was true that she worried about the state of things that had been developing satisfactorily between herself and Howell. She was only vaguely uneasy about everything else.
And Ketch reacted according to his type of civilized humanity. He’d hunted big game for sport. Until now he’d had no more serious matter to consider. But now he began to think of this as a sport, with the others and himself as hunted game. He responded with something like elation. It was better sport than he’d ever known before. But of course he couldn’t imagine that he or they could actually be killed.
Howell came upon him examining his sporting rifles and preparing them for use on something other than four- or six-legged game.
Howell said abruptly, “When we land, we’ve got to check our overdrive system first thing. Everything depends on our getting it to work.”
“We’ll see about it,” promised Ketch. Then he said interestedly, “What do you think that slug-ship heaved at us?”
“It was an over-sized blaster,” said Howell. “It fired a ball-lightning bolt. It moved too fast to be a material object, and it would be slowed up by air just like a bolt from a blast-rifle. There’s simply no limit in space to how fast or how far it can go.”
Ketch whistled, and then nodded.
“We could build that,” he said thoughtfully. “The creatures after us may not be so far advanced!”
“They’ve got overdrives that work,” said Howell. “And maybe other things we don’t know about yet. Anyhow, our first job after landing is to try to tinker the overdrive.”
Ketch grinned.
“Do that,” he said,“and you’ll head for home, eh? I’m thinking it would be sport to hunt those creatures.” Then he said suddenly, “Or are you thinking all we can hope for is a safe landing on a habitable planet? That if we find one with a rubble-heap city on it we’ll be extra lucky because there’ll be food-plants for us, by courtesy of our ancestors? Is that your idea?”
“We’ll need a lot of luck to get even that,” said Howell dourly. “But we’ve had some. We could be out in between-the-stars with a completely smashed overdrive. We’re not. Or that blaster-bolt could have hit us a fiftieth of a second before it did. And it didn’t. So we’re here.”
Surprisingly, Ketch grinned more widely.
“Ah! Look on the bright side!” he said approvingly. “But what might seem to you the bright side mightn’t appeal to me.”
Howell frowned.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve done a lot of hunting,” said Ketch, “but I never had to depend on killing meat for food. It ought to be exciting. I might like it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Howell.
“You wouldn’t,” said Ketch amiably. “I’m just saying that it would be sporting to try to kill some of these creatures that tried to kill us. Like a drama-tape story in reality. Do you watch drama-tapes?”
“No.”
“There’s some good hunting stuff on some of them,” said Ketch. He regarded Howell amusedly. It was singularly like the air of a younger man treating an older man with kindly tolerance because the older man thinks foolish things he’s learned instead of the wise things one invents.
Howell shrugged his shoulders and went back into the control room. And almost immediately he heard the whine of a ship’s solar-system drive. It was what he’d heard at the beginning of the encounter with the slug-ships with which this present situation had begun. It wouldn’t be a human ship. It was a slug-shaped craft, past question, and if Ketch were right, it would be heading for the green world which was the only planet in this system of any possible use to humans. Presently he heard another and fainter whine. That would be the consort of the scout-ship, hanging in the background in case the first ship ran into trouble.
Grimly, Howell cut off all his detection devices. They might reveal the position of the Marintha. They might also fail to give warning if she was discovered, but in that case there was nothing they could do, so it wouldn’t matter.
Pessimism filled him. The vision-screens wouldn’t either broadcast or resonate, so they could be left on. It occurred to him that by cutting down the sensitivity of the all-wave receiver he might make that non-resonant. He did so. Then he could see the universe around him, and he could hear communications between the two slug-ships. He found himself hoping absurdly that when they heard no drive and their detectors found nothing—the Marintha might well be out of their range—they’d simply go away to hunt in a more probable place. But he didn’t believe it. Anyhow, to change the Marintha’s destination from the green world to one—of the other planets would be a blatant advertisement of the yacht’s existence and course.
He tried to think of other matters than purely pessimistic envisionings of disaster. There was the inferred existence of enemies the slug-ships hunted. A recorded human voice from the slug-ship suggested that those enemies were human beings, separated from Earth-humans by light-centuries and by forty thousand years of isolation. If slug-ship scouts travelled in pairs, for one to be sure to escape contact with enemy craft and bring a stronger force to avenge the other—why perhaps the whining he’d heard here wasn’t a slug-ship at all, but a ship of the slug-ship creatures’ antagonists in a war that went on hereabouts in space.