Space Gypsies Read Online Free PDF

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.
    Such feverish attempts to find reason for even the most unlikely hopes kept Howell busy.