He hadn’t really hoped the booby trap’s capacitor would substitute for the Marintha’s ruined one. But he couldn’t afford to overlook any chance, however slim. But it was still depressing to have even the most unlikely fail him.
He sat down drearily. His expression was very bitter. Karen said nervously, “You don’t think there can possibly be anybody—watching us?”
“Slug-creatures? No. They’d blast us aground as they tried to blast us in space.”
He stared apathetically at nothing. Pessimism overwhelmed him again. Karen tried something else, to rouse him.
“But we don’t really know… We assume that the slug-people are deadly and murderous. But they might assume that we are deadly and murderous! They might even have reason—”
“The booby trap answers that, Karen,” he said tiredly. “I don’t feel like talking. Do you mind?”
She was silent. Presently she went to the still-open port. She looked out unhappily for a long time. Something moved in the jungle nearby. She ran back to Howell.
“S-something moved!” she panted. “Really!”
He got up and went to the port. He looked out. Nothing stirred, but he did get the feeling that something watched him. After some moments he drew back and found a place where he could look out the port with a blast-rifle handy. Karen looked fearfully from him to the port and back again.
A very considerable time later, Howell stirred. He’d been lost in dread anticipations. But without realizing it he’d studied each envisioned disaster for that weak point which would make it possible for the disaster to happen. The feeling of frustration persisted. He couldn’t really imagine any replacement of the absolutely necessary capacitor, and therefore he couldn’t imagine flight from a part of space in which slug-ships set up elaborate booby traps. The one here hadn’t been set up to kill the company of the Marintha. It had been set up to destroy members of the race of which Howell could know only that it existed and used words, and that the skeletons of seeming twelve-year-old members were wholly human.
This was no clue as to how to communicate with this local race of human beings. There was no way to avoid discovery by a slug-ship actually on the way here now. The only subject left to think about was the obtaining of a high price for the murder of Karen and Breen and Ketch and himself. So he’d been thinking about that.
“I want some clothing,” he said heavily. “I want to make some dummy humans representing us.”
Karen stirred, relieved that he’d come partly out of what was almost pathological depression. She brought garments. Her father’s. Her own. Howell’s own.
Howell said, “We’ll stuff them with crumpled paper.”
He set to work and Karen joined him. It was a curious occupation for people under an effective sentence of death or perpetual imprisonment light-centuries from the worlds they knew. They were, in substance, hiding from creatures they’d never seen, but which would blast them on sight. They knew there was another race than the inimical one. But there was a war in existence of which their predicament was proof, and they would be blasted by any ship of either side because ships of either race might consider the Marintha a stratagem of the enemy. They had no weapons greater than those designed for game hunting. They were practically, game themselves. And Howell dourly fastened garments together and painstakingly stuffed them with crumpled paper to make them look like human beings. Karen, inwardly anxious and uneasy, helped as if it were the most normal of occupations.
“Something’s occurred to me,” said Howell, only a little less heavily than before. But even that slight change of intonation encouraged Karen. “We can’t get away from a slug-ship if there’s one handy—which there is. Especially we can’t get away from two. They’ve got overdrive, and we haven’t. They saw us and shot at us. They may know that we aren’t the enemy they carry artillery-sized blast-weapons to destroy—but they do know we’re not them. And so to them we’re enemies.”
“Yes,” said Karen. She showed him a dummy. “Do you think this is all right?”
“Probably,” said Howell. He went on. “If we’re enemies, they want to kill us. But our ship is peculiar to their eyes. They ought to want to know what we’re all about. We haven’t used a weapon against them, but they’re not sure we’re unarmed. In fact, they probably can’t imagine us as unarmed. So—in this particular solar system, what would they do?”
Karen looked at him. She and Howell had been almost continuously in each other’s society for three months. They were of suitable ages to find each other interesting. Under such circumstances, as normal individuals they’d tend either to dislike each other intensely, or else like each other very much. But in the present situation of the Marintha, they wouldn’t show their feelings. Not if they were Karen and Howell, at any rate.
Still, Karen acted as any girl would act when she wanted desperately to be the most important thing in a man’s life. She tried to be necessary to him, leaving to him the larger and more vital matters such as how they were to survive in this dangerous situation. Howell, in turn, acted as if the most important thing in his life were endangered—and it was: Karen could not but share in the fate of her father and Ketch and Howell. If they were killed, she’d be killed. So Howell devoted all his energy and much the greater part of his thoughts to trying to ensure that Karen might be made safe.
For that he’d performed every action since the first breakout in between-the-stars, when a slug-ship challenged the Marintha. Now he made dummies. But he felt that he had to explain.
“If a slug-ship comes to this solar system,” he said detachedly, “it will know about the booby trap here, or else it would try to land and murder the shipwrecked crew it would believe were calling for help. But suppose it comes here. It would see the Marintha—aground near the booby trap. It would be only reasonable to guess that we followed the message-beam to here—which we did. It should seem probable that some of us were killed by the booby-trap—which we very well could have been. If it could see our apparent corpses in the dead space, the fact that the Marintha remained aground ought to suggest that we all went to the booby trap to answer the supposed globe-ship’s calls for help, and all of us were killed.”
Karen considered.
“That’s the way we’d think,” she admitted. “But they might not think the same way. If they’re really an alien race, and not human at all, couldn’t their minds work quite differently from ours?”
“No,” said Howell flatly. “They might not feel like we do about innumerable things. They might react emotionally in ways we can’t imagine, But the purpose of intelligence or intellect in the human sense is to know and understand and make use of reality. And reality is a logical whole. To understand it, an intelligent race would have to think logically. So any alien race that develops a civilization will have to think very much as we do.”
He worked a few moments longer on the dummy he was stuffing with crumpled paper.
“Anyhow,” he said curtly, “I’m betting that they may decide that their booby trap killed us all off, and that we left a new arid interesting type of spaceship for them to study and speculate about. They ought to be very much interested in new kinds of spaceships! They ought to want to take the Marintha with as little damage as possible. They made a trap for their enemies—and got some of them. Maybe we can set a trap for them.”