Space Gypsies by Murray Leinster

receiver. It was beast-like, animal; it formed no words. It sounded like a monster bellowing defiance.
    “That’s a challenge,” said Ketch brightly.
    “We don’t answer it,” said Howell curtly.
    The unthinkably dismal sound came again. Karen’s features showed fear. But she looked quickly at Howell, and her uneasiness disappeared.
    There came words from the unseen ship overhead. They were spoken in a clear soprano voice. There were consonants and vowels. It seemed to Howell that he recognized some of the sounds that the booby trap bait-beam had repeated so often. They would be words that happened to occur both in the planetary broadcast and this other mocking, derisive challenge.
    This was mockery and it was derision. Howell ground his teeth. He was convinced now that the slug-ship overhead was the same that had challenged the space-yacht in the first place ,with a beastly sound like these last. It had trailed the Marintha in its overdrive escape from the encounter. It had followed the overdrive change-of-course to this system. Its breakout point, here, happened to be farther from the green planet than the Marintha ’s, so it had arrived there on solar-system drive much later. But now it was overhead and the Marintha was grounded below, and a ship cannot go into overdrive in atmosphere. It will vaporize itself. So the slug-ship aloft could mock the Marintha . And it did.
    “I think,” said Howell detachedly, “that things depend now on whether or not they saw or see the dummies I set out.”
    Breen and Ketch now seemed to feel the high excitement of men participating in the high adventure of a drama-tape. Howell couldn’t believe that they were desperate like himself, but he needed to keep them in this frame of mind since it was the best he could hope for. When action began they might panic and flee, or they might react as most men have always done when they found their backs against a wall.
    More bestial sounds. The soprano voice again.
    Breen said, “Too bad the diggers at the rubble-heap city went away! They’d have fought with us.”
    “They’re humans,” said Ketch. He listened to the sounds from emptiness. “No doubt about it. Not like whoever’s making that racket.”
    This was admirable, sophisticated, tape-dramatic reaction to imminent danger awaiting the moment of its arrival. Howell needed to confirm them in their roles of calm and confident combatants-to-be. He said, “How do you know they’re human?”
    “He found—”
    “I found something,” said Breen. “An anthropologist could make deductions from it. I make the obvious one—that one of the diggers’ children lost it.”
    He drew a small and draggled object from his pocket. It was a stick and a bit of paper or something of the sort. It was coloured. It was very small.
    It was a pinwheel, a child’s toy, made out of unimportant materials on a miniature scale. A child would run with it and be charmed by its spinning, or hold it gleefully in a wind to see it turn from the wind’s pressure. But it was no more than three or four inches across.
    Howell almost paid attention. But he couldn’t keep his eyes from the screens that showed the sky. There was a ship up there which mocked the Marintha . It just barely might see the dummies, and if so it might just barely think the Marintha empty of its crew—that all its occupants had gone to be killed by the booby trap.
    There was a spark in mid-sky. It was a lurid, furious, deadly blue-white speck of incandescence. It grew. It was coming down. To the Marintha . Exactly where it would strike would depend, of course, on the thinking of the creatures in the slug-ship. But in matters of technology they thought like men. They had to! So the one remote chance Howell had seized upon was a guess at further similarity of thinking processes. If the human race in this part of the galaxy built spaceships in the form of globes, the Marintha ’s hull-design would make the skipper of the slug-ship want