Still, it was a very long time indeed before Howell raised his eyes from the now-not-registering instruments and said, “Now we’ll see what happens.”
He nodded to Karen, but didn’t smile. His expression was wholly intent instead of impressively emotional. Without any trimmings at all, he threw the breakout switch to find out what might await them in normal space.
The uncomfortable sensations of breakout were singularly mild. The dizziness and the nausea were trivial. The feeling of a spinning fall was almost absent. The vision-screens lighted almost deliberately, taking a good fraction of a second to reach full brightness.
Then the stars of the galaxy surrounded the Marintha on all sides. Their number was incalculable, but it is usual to guess the total number of shining suns in the First Galaxy at one hundred thousand millions. Such a figure has no meaning to anybody. But if one counted all the strong bright stars nearby, and the vastly greater number of those just a little less bright, and the still more enormous number of those just a little bit fainter, and so on down to the unthinkable quantity of suns which are the minutest glimmerings the eye can detect… if one did that, the number a hundred thousand million would acquire meaning. It would be the number of the stars that could , be seen from the Marintha.
Silence. Stillness, save for infinitesimal cracklings and hissings. Minutes passed. Tens of minutes. The detection instruments read a unanimous zero.
The small-men murmured to each other. Somehow they seemed bewildered, even disappointed. As long minutes went by and Howell did nothing but watch the instruments, the small-men seemed visibly disturbed. The one in the red vest hesitantly asked a question in his own language. Howell did not lift his eyes.
“See if you can make out what he wants, Karen,” he commanded.
He was doing sums in his head, because the computer could not handle guesses, He attempted, to feel the incomputable total of speeds and durations and courses such as the Marintha had followed. It was actually an attempt to find the total of a series of random motions. The result would be a guess which was more or less plausible. He arrived at it.
Karen made gestures to the small-man, and he gesticulated back. She produced a writing-pad. They drew pictures and made motions, and each of them spoke, from time to time, with the unreasonable feeling that that should help in understanding.
Howell said, “I think we have to take the chance.”
Karen spoke with some doubt.
“You asked what the small-man wants. I think he wants to know why you didn’t destroy the ship that was following us. He’s disturbed because it got away.”
“I’ll be happy enough if we’ve got away,” said Howell. “The happiest ending I can see as possible is a chance to save ourselves and the worlds we know from murder-raids by sinking the Marintha in the deepest ocean to be found. I don’t want to have to look for one! If we can get back to the small people’s ships, we’ve the best chance to make our suicide—it may come to that—of some use to the galaxy. I think we should try for it.”
He beckoned to the small-man in the red vest. He made it clear that he wanted a direction in which to drive, for a return to the world they’d started from. The small-men’s globe-ships must feel concern for the test-crew of their own race who’d lifted off in the Marintha to try out a cobbled repair, and hadn’t come back. Ketch would be indignant over the space-yacht’s vanishing. He’d envisioned himself in the highly dramatic role of a leader of fighting small-men in a superlatively armed globe-ship. He might anticipate something even more glamorous, since he’d said splendidly that Karen would rather be the wife of a fighting man than anything else. And Breen would be deeply anxious about his daughter Karen.
In the Marintha’s control room, the small-man with the red vest looked at the stars on the screen. He put his finger decisively on a particular spot. He even marked off the steady, yellow glow of a Sol-type sun as the centre of the solar system they wished to drive for. Howell was dubious that it was the right one. Nevertheless he lined up the Marintha for it with infinite care.
“Overdrive coming,” he said curtly.
He threw the switch. The vision-screens faded. There were other evidences that the yacht had gone into overdrive. It was slow overdrive. It was overdrive so much minimized that it was almost something else. But not quite.
The Marintha stayed in overdrive on this course and at this speed for very nearly nine hours. There could be no exact computation of the time required. Howell had a feeling about the speed. The little man in the red vest had something more than a feeling about the proper course. Perhaps he’d ideas about the distance, too, but they couldn’t be communicated. In any case, the Marintha drove at the minimum rate possible in overdrive for what seemed much longer than the chronometers said. Then Howell broke out. He expected the little man to give him another bearing from this breakout point.
But he didn’t need it. When the screens lighted, with an extreme of deliberation, there was a yellow sun to starboard. There was a cloud-world, with no markings of any sort from the vapour-layers that covered it from pole to pole. There was a gas-giant planet with reddish striations almost at its equator. And there was a green world with ice-caps and seas and continents.
And the Marintha’s all-wave receiver picked up whinings that were all too familiar. There were slug-ships in this solar system. They were here by scores and hundreds. The breakout detector flickered and wavered as more slug-ships arrived from nowhere and began to use their solar-system drives as the only practical way to move about within the limits of a sun’s planetary system.
This was, of course, the slug-fleet Howell had deduced must exist because patrolling slug-ships travelled in pairs. Of the pair first encountered, one had stayed out of the way of possible harm while its companion investigated and tried to destroy the Marintha. When that ship went to ground and Howell blew it up with a blaster-bolt down the throat of its lightning cannon, the survivor of the pair had bleated and hooted dismally, and then disappeared. Howell reasoned then that it had gone for help. Now it was back with a fleet of fighting ships that nothing could withstand. And as more and more of the ugly ships broke out and began to organize themselves, Howell was bitterly sure that this was the end of everything.
Then he heard the small-men. They made a tumult of triumph and rejoicing. They grinned at him, beaming. From doubt and disappointment, they’d changed instantly to hilarious anticipation. They believed that up to this moment he had seemed to flee so that no companion slug-ship would report that a new and ultra-deadly enemy was in action against its race. Because of that forebearance, they believed, he’d now assembled the now-present fleet to become the victims of his remarkable abilities. They grinned in ecstatic triumph as they waited for him to annihilate the slug-ship fleet.
And more and ever more slug-ships broke out of overdrive and drove to take their places in battle-formation.
Then a bleating, hooting outcry came from the all-wave receiver. A slug-ship was broadcasting something in the chlorine-breathers’ substitute for language. A sun-bright blue-white flame appeared from nowhere and flashed past the Marintha. It seemed to miss the yacht by inches. More of the monstrous lightning-bolts shot out—