Read Space Gypsies for Free Online

communicate with them and make friends with them and have Karen at least in no such danger as she was in now.
    But there was the slug-ship! Howell wouldn’t risk a call to the planet ahead. Not until the Marintha was much nearer. Not until he began to pick up the radiation-signals that fill all space near a centre of civilization. The most he would risk—so great was his distrust of all things that might harm Karen—the utmost he’d risk was the energizing of the beam-locator. And it indicated that the beamed broadcast came from the green planet toward which the Marintha floated. More, it pointed to one spot where now-visible continents almost divided a muddy-coloured sea.
    The electron telescope told more and more about the planet as the Marintha floated nearer. It was a good world. There were seas and islands and continents between two ice-caps of which one was larger than the other. There was an area which was probably desert, and there were mountain-ranges which said that there should be rain-forests. But he saw no sign of agriculture. At that, though, foodstuff on this world might grow mainly on trees, and there would be no need for vast clearings and seasonally planted crops.
    But there were no signs of cities. Not one. The beam-direction locator, tuned to pin-point the source of the monotonous, fading-in-and-fading-out broadcast, said that it came from a peninsula jutting out into a world-girdling sea, just where two continents almost came together. There was a small circular area here which looked different from its surroundings. But the most painstaking search showed no sign of civilized development.
    Howell, having yielded to faint and desperate hopes, now felt himself sinking back into complete discouragement.
    “The worst I can imagine,” he told Karen gloomily, “is that either it’s a trick of the slug-ship creatures, or else instead of being help for us, it’s a call for help for someone else. It could be a distress-call from a human ship, in a part of space the slug-ships usually stay away from. Even that could be a break—maybe! It wouldn’t be too good, but we need anything good we can get. But I’m not sure! I’m suspicious of I-don’t-know-what. Yet I can’t bring myself to believe that we shouldn’t give it a good close look.”
    “I think you’re exactly right,” said Karen. She looked at him with a certain anxiety. “My father thinks so too.”
    Breen said comfortably, “Ketch thinks the same. He was telling Karen so.”
    At just this moment Ketch appeared and said amiably, “What was I telling Karen? It was probably a lie.”
    Howell said doggedly, doubting his own wisdom but with thoughts of the slug-ship haunting him, “I’m going to make one orbit low down, swinging over the peninsula the beam-cast comes from. We’ll all use our eyes, and there’ll be the cameras. We’ll be moving too fast to use the electron telescope. If we’re not shot down—we’ll be going fast, and even artillery-sized blasters have a limited velocity in air—if we’re not shot down and there’s no attempt at it, we’ll land on the second orbiting. Right?”
    Ketch said, “There’s nothing else to do, is there?”
    Breen agreed complacently. “You’re the skipper,” he said.
    He beamed, and Howell felt a certain astonished annoyance that any man could be so blithely and blindly confident that everything would come out all right in the end. Howell was acutely aware that he might be making a decision that would doom all of them. But in his best judgment they were already doomed. And neither of the others offered to take charge. They didn’t even object to what he proposed. It threw all the responsibility on his shoulders.
    It was a heavy load. He took observations. He listened with straining ears to the small crackling sounds from the nearby sun. He re-computed: his rendezvous with the green planet while the Marintha floated on, losing momentum ever so gradually to the gravitational field of