“I think,” said Howell slowly, “that we can cut down the size of our bet. I’ll try.”
He frowned thoughtfully to himself until the meal was ended. Then Breen scraped the dishes into the garbage-disposal unit. The counter-valence field came on in that small and commonplace bit of equipment. The garbage was disposed of as the valence-bonds of carbon compounds ceased to exist. When such waste matter touched the metal in which a particular frequency and wave-form oscillated, all the compounds of carbon fell apart. But the garbage unit did not broadcast what would have been a killer-field, because air reflected it; air was opaque to it. The garbage-disposal frequency could leave its source only when there was no air around it.
Meanwhile, nothing happened. There could be no feeling of safety because there was probably at fleet of fighting ships following the space-yacht wherever it went, to ferociously destroy it. There could be no feeling of danger because so long as the overdrive-field stayed in being, nothing could happen to the Marintha. But the doubt was nerve-racking.
So Howell retired to the engine room and busied himself with the manufacture of a gadget. It was a timing-device and a link to the overdrive-switch, with a shunt to the all-angle cameras which photographed all the firmament about the Marintha whenever she broke out of overdrive for the log-tape record of her journeyings. When completed and installed, Howell should be able to break the Marintha out to normal space with its myriads of suns and star-clusters. Even before breakout was complete, the gadget would be operating to reverse the process. Because when the Marintha did break out, for perhaps a millisecond—the thousandth part of a second—nothing would happen. But the slug-ships, if present, would break out as soon thereafter as their detectors could record her action. That would account for two milliseconds. Then their weapons would have to locate and range the Marintha, and fire on it. That would be four seconds from the time the Marintha broke out. So the gadget would cut on the overdrive again three thousandths of a second after breakout. And just before that three-millisecond interval was over, the cameras would operate. In sum, the yacht would be in normal space for three one-thousandths of a second, during which time slug-ships should begin to appear around it, but there would not be time for their detectors to pick the Marintha out as a target, to swing their weapons to bear, and to fire. There shouldn’t be time! And the yacht should be back in overdrive with a millisecond or even two to spare, and it should have detailed pictures of all of space about it.
As a matter of course, Howell set all instruments on recording. Then he threw the switch.
There was pure anguish for each of the four persons aboard. The giddiness was horrible and the nausea appalling and the feeling of fall intense. It was doubled by the instant repetition of each symptom. And then the four in the ship had a memory of the vision-screens brightly lighted, and all the alarm-bells of the little ship ringing furiously—and then the screens were dead again and the alarm-bells bewilderedly ceased to clang. And that was all.
But Howell examined the records. They were not pleasing.
The automatic pictures of the Marintha’s surroundings, taken whenever she broke out, this time had been delayed until slug-ships could appear. And they did.
There were not less than six of the revoltingly shaped alien spacecraft within a five-mile radius of the Marintha. There were thirty-six within a ten-mile radius, and more than a hundred within a fifteen-mile sphere, and there were others on beyond. They were uncountable. But the Marintha was back in overdrive before any of them could fire on her.
Howell said sardonically, “I’d say that this is that! We’re followed, all right! We’ve just one chance left—that we can travel faster than they can with the fuel-ingots we’ve loaded into the drive. But that’s hardly anything either to bank on or hope for.”
He shrugged.
Ketch was visibly angered by a development so markedly unlike the drama-tape kind of happening he’d decided he preferred and which he therefore demanded that destiny supply. He went stamping away, muttering. He’d think furiously and then come to frustration because he couldn’t even imagine a miraculous coincidence—such as sometimes happens in drama-tape stories—which could restore him to his chosen dramatic role.
Breen’s forehead corrugated. He said plaintively, “This is bad, Karen! I’d no idea you’d be endangered when I let you come with me!”
“All our intentions have been of the very best kind,” said Howell bitterly, “but that’s not even a comforting thought, now. We’re in the devil of a fix!”
Karen said evenly, “What sort of fix are the small-men in?”
“Why—they’re—” Howell looked sharply at her. “What are you driving at, Karen?”
“They’d no more weapons than we have,” said Karen. “Nothing to count, anyhow. But they didn’t even look alarmed when they left us. They expected to get away. They expected us to get away too, I think. How?”
“You tell me,” said Howell.
“I can’t!” protested Karen. “How could I? But if we knew what the small-men expected to do, whether running away or whatever, it might be something we could do, too. For that matter—”
She stopped. Howell said with a certain grimness, “Maybe that’s an idea! You’re about to say that the one thing they should want more, than any other would be a weapon to use against the slug-ships. If they got excited about something they learned from us, that’s what it ought to be. What they did get excited about was the garbage-disposal unit. So you’re about to ask if that could be a weapon. You’re about to point out that they made a unit of their own most likely, besides the one I built. You’re going to say that one of them went out to space this morning and came back with news they all celebrated. Which could be that the weapon they wanted had been tried out.”
Karen said uncomfortably, “I wasn’t exactly—”
“You were thinking along that line,” said Howell. He went on, his expression very queer, “And there’s the fact that what excited them was the garbage unit breaking down plastic from the slug-ship wreck. They didn’t try leaves and earth and such. They went over to the wreck and came back with scraps of plastic. They looked on the garbage device as something that disintegrated the plastic the slug-ships have to be built of, because their atmosphere’s partly chlorine and all their metal objects have to be protected against it.”
“I hadn’t thought—”
“You were going to,” said Howell, with finality. “You were going to! And you’d have been right!”
He turned on his heel. He went into the ship’s stores. He came out with a welding-torch and a coil of heavy cable. He went to the garbage unit and made very sure that it was turned off—that it wasn’t producing the oscillations that broke down carbon compounds—including the plastic the slug-creatures used for all their constructions. He began to weld the end of the cable to the bottom plate of the garbage unit. As he worked, he talked disjointedly, with the air of someone obstinately making a case for something he found it difficult to believe.
“Item,” he said dourly. “There’s a garbage-disposal frequency that can’t broadcast simply because air reflects it and is opaque to it. So it does no harm inside the ship. But if it were outside the yacht, with no air to keep it captive—then it would broadcast, all right! And when it struck plastic, that plastic would fall away to powder. Because—” unconsciously, his tone rose in pitch, “because it’s the wave-form and not the power that does the trick! It should work the devil of a long way!”