Space Gypsies by Murray Leinster Read Free Book Online Page A

destroying foliage to make a guide and destination for rescuers might have killed the trees. They wouldn’t have bothered with underbrush. They surely would not have troubled with the equivalent of grass. But something, somehow, had killed every trace of vegetation in a circle half a mile across. The trees were left to decay and ultimately to fall, but although the vegetation had been killed, the fertility of the soil was unaffected. The creeping stuff grew back into the area where creeping stuff had died.
    It was definitely not right. It felt wrong. All of Howell’s suspicions, which he hadn’t been able to name even to himself, now returned with doubled intensity. He ceased to speak because his mind was filled with observing and suspecting and listening, and trying frantically to understand. He moved—not into the dead space, but along its edges. There was something in a tree, caught in a junction of branches. It had been an animal perhaps the size of a catamount. It was long dead. It had been armoured, like the armadillos of Earth and the small carnivores of Briesis. It had been aloft in the tree and it had been killed and it had fallen and been caught in the tree’s branches. A hunter would have taken it for a trophy most likely, if he’d shot it. But Howell told himself absorbedly that a dead thing found in a place where everything else was dead could have died in the same disaster and from the same cause. His suspicions deepened.
    He continued to move along the edge of the dead space. There was a discoloured, dried-up, rotten soft-tissue plant, with a dead flower half a yard across. It had been killed. Death had been indiscriminate, striking everything with life in it. Flowers, trees, ground-cover, animals—all had been victims.
    Then Howell saw the metal globe that had seemed the size of a pinhead on a much-magnified picture taken from space. It was a globe, it was metal, it was not a natural object. It had been designed. It had been made. It had been put here. It was perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with the peculiar look of metal which has been plastic-coated to utilize its strength while preserving it from rust and acid conditions. It looked like a spaceship. There seemed to be vents and photo units outside. From within it or from somewhere nearby the moving beam of the distress call must be projected.
    But everything around it was dead.
    Still utterly absorbed, Howell continued to be oblivious to the people in the Marintha and of his obligation to keep them informed of what he found.
    He reached a place where he could see the metal globe almost completely. And now, even if it had occurred to him to speak, he would have been speechless.
    A rotted tree had fallen and a pointed, broken limb had struck the still-distant metal globe. It had punctured it. It had ripped away one part of one sheet of absurdly thin plating.
    The globe wasn’t a spaceship; it was only a paper-thin shell of metal. It was a dummy, with external details to make it seem designed for a voyage in space, but with no contents to make such a voyage possible. It was scenery, placed on a jungle-clad peninsula of an unnamed and uninhabited world.
    And then Howell saw something else—which made the blood pound in his temples. Red rage surged though him. Now he understood, suddenly and completely.
    He saw bones. They were partly covered by scraps of cloth. They were well within the area where everything was dead. They were human bones. But they were quite small ones. There were three complete human skeletons, halfway between the edge of the brown spot and the dummy metal globe.
    And by their size, Howell guessed them to be the skeletons of three human children, perhaps twelve years old.
    He made inarticulate noises in his throat as he went back to the Marintha . When he arrived where Karen and Breen and Ketch watched anxiously from the exit-port, he was still unable to speak coherently. It was long minutes, with Karen looking frightenedly at him,