Space Gypsies by Murray Leinster Page A

to examine something so strange and new. In that case he wouldn’t want to destroy it if he could help it. He might smash a part of it as a precaution. But he might—
    The ravening, flaming missile came down. In air, it did not move with the limitless velocity of the bolt that had been fired in between-the-stars. It grew, and sped ferociously for the yacht. Its brilliance was intolerable. Only at the last instant could Howell he sure that it would be a miss.
    There was a furious flash of light. There was the shock of an explosion transmitted to the space-yacht by the ground on which it rested. Then there was steam and smoke and hurtling masses of soil and shattered jungle trees. Some of them hit the Marintha . Then there was a twenty-foot crater in the ground, some four feet deep and only yards from the Marintha ’s hull.
    Howell said quickly, “Good! It looks like we’ve fooled them!”
    Breen had jerked to tenseness. Ketch had paled a little.
    “Now they’ll miss again,” said Howell. “On purpose. Here it comes!”
    There was a second infinitely lurid spark darting down from the center of the sky. It exactly repeated the velocity and the fury of the first. It struck closer to the Marintha . There was a second impact and monstrous spouting of steam and flying masses of dirt and shattered limbs and tree trunks. There were “heavy blows on the Marintha ’s outer plating. She tilted all askew.
    “If we acted normally now,” said Howell, “we’d jump out the ports and run. And they’d see us and blast us. The next bolt won’t be so close.”
    Ketch and Breen looked at him, and he assumed the devil-may-care manner of a tape-drama actor in a moment of high suspense, just before splendid and melodramatic action. The pose built up the illusion that this was something in a staged adventure which could not but end happily after stirring deeds of derring-do. Ketch straightened up. Breen composed his features.
    “Right!” Breen said enthusiastically. “And we’ll lie in ambush—”
    A third giant blaster-bolt landed a little farther off. A fourth and a fifth. They looked very much indeed like bombardment intended to destroy the Marintha and certain to do so if it were continued. Had Howell been less hopeless of any other stratagem, he’d have had the others well away and not gambling their lives on his guess at what the slug-ship skipper would do. But the stakes were too high to be bet except for great and high results.
    There were six smoking craters blasted out of the jungle before the sparks ceased to form in the sky. Howell said matter-of-factly, after five minutes had passed without another detonation, “It looks like we put it over! They’ll ground, presently, and come to take a look at what they think their booby trap won for them.” Then, deliberately, he said, “What’s that about the holes you found dug in the rubble-heap?”
    Breen stared at him. Then he rose to the occasion and said with fine casualness, “The rubble was excavated in four places that we found. The excavations go down deep in the rubble. All arrived at different depths at traces of corroded metal. Not all of them were iron. Apparently whoever dug them out had metal-detectors and could find out where to dig. And we found where a ship or ships had rested aground and later lifted off again. All this was no more than a day or two before we arrived. And we found that pinwheel. What does it mean?”
    “It means we’ve some work ahead of us,” said Howell briskly, “after we’ve done what’s immediately necessary. They ought to be coming in sight shortly.”
    He watched the screens in the control room. There was silence. Then the whine of a ship-drive, solar-system type. The slug-ship was coming in for a landing.
    Howell said detachedly, “Children on a space voyage aren’t unusual, but children on a ship that mines metal out of rubble-heap cities—that’s something else! When there are booby traps set for them, that means they