The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Giants Return, by Robert Abernathy

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Title: The Giants Return

Author: Robert Abernathy

Release Date: November 27, 2020 [EBook #63899]

Language: English

Credits:

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ***

THE GIANTS RETURN

By ROBERT ABERNATHY

Earth set itself grimly to meet them with

corrosive fire, determined to blast them

back to the stars. But they erred in thinking

the Old Ones were too big to be clever.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Planet Stories Fall 1949.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

In the last hours the star ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes, and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star's radial velocity changed relative to the Quest III, as for forty hours the ship had decelerated.

They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy's glittering backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the Quest III drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless luminary unaccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.

But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the Quest III's crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might lie at the long journey's end. For the Quest III was coming home; the sun ahead was the Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives' beginning.

Knof Llud, the Quest III's captain, came slowly down the narrow stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber, a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At the voyage's beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was little more than a hollow shell.

Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, "We've sighted Earth."

A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on, "It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has identified it—no more."

But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung each other's hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.

Knof Llud smiled wryly. The rest of the little speech he had been about to make didn't matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.

He turned to go, and was halted by the sight of his wife, standing at his elbow. His wry smile took on warmth; he asked, "How do you feel, Lesra?"

She drew an uncertain breath and released it in a faint sigh. "I don't know. It's good that Earth's still there." She was thinking, he judged shrewdly, of Knof Jr. and Delza, who save from pictures could not remember sunlit skies or grassy fields or woods in summer....

He said, with a touch of tolerant amusement, "What did you think might have happened to Earth? After all, it's only been nine hundred years."

"That's just it," said Lesra shakily. "Nine hundred years have gone by—there—and nothing will be the same. It won't be the same world we left, the world we knew and fitted in...."

The captain put an arm round her with comforting pressure. "Don't worry. Things may have changed—but we'll manage." But his face had hardened against registering the gnawing of that same doubtful fear within him. He let his arm fall. "I'd better get up to the bridge. There's a new course to be set now—for Earth."

He left her and began to climb the stairway again. Someone switched off the lights, and a charmed whisper ran through the big room as the people saw each other's faces by the pale golden light of Earth's own Sun, mirrored and multiplied by the screens. In that light Lesra's eyes gleamed with unshed tears.

Captain Llud found Navigator Gwar Den looking as smug as the cat that ate the canary. Gwar Den was finding that the actual observed positions of the planets thus far located agreed quite closely with his extrapolations from long unused charts of the Solar System. He had already set up on the calculator a course that would carry them to Earth.

Llud nodded curt approval, remarking, "Probably we'll be intercepted before we get that far."

Den was jolted out of his happy abstraction. "Uh, Captain," he said hesitantly. "What kind of a reception do you suppose we'll get?"

Llud shook his head slowly. "Who knows? We don't know whether any of the other Quests returned successful, or if they returned at all. And we don't know what changes have taken place on Earth. It's possible—not likely, though—that something has happened to break civilization's continuity to the point where our expedition has been forgotten altogether."

He turned away grim-lipped and left the bridge. From his private office-cabin, he sent a message to Chief Astronomer Zost Relyul to notify him as soon as Earth's surface features became clear; then he sat idle, alone with his thoughts.

The ship's automatic mechanisms had scant need of tending; Knof Llud found himself wishing that he could find some back-breaking task for everyone on board, himself included, to fill up the hours that remained.

There was an extensive and well-chosen film library in the cabin, but he couldn't persuade himself to kill time that way. He could go down and watch the screens, or to the family apartment where he might find Lesra and the children—but somehow he didn't want to do that either.

He felt empty, drained—like his ship. As the Quest III's fuel stores and the hope of success in man's mightiest venture had dwindled, so the strength had gone out of him. Now the last fuel compartment was almost empty and Captain Knof Llud felt tired and old.

Perhaps, he thought, he was feeling the weight of his nine hundred Earth years—though physically he was only forty now, ten years older than when the voyage had begun. That was the foreshortening along the time axis of a space ship approaching the speed of light. Weeks and months had passed for the Quest III in interstellar flight while years and decades had raced by on the home world.

Bemusedly Llud got to his feet and stood surveying a cabinet with built-in voice recorder and pigeonholes for records. There were about three dozen film spools there—his personal memoirs of the great expedition, a segment of his life and of history. He might add that to the ship's official log and its collections of scientific data, as a report to whatever powers might be on Earth now—if such powers were still interested.

Llud selected a spool from among the earliest. It was one he had made shortly after leaving Procyon, end of the first leg of the trip. He slid it onto the reproducer.

His own voice came from the speaker, fresher, more vibrant and confident than he knew it was now.

"One light-day out from Procyon, the thirty-third day by ship's time since leaving Earth.

"Our visit to Procyon drew a blank. There is only one huge planet, twice the size of Jupiter, and like Jupiter utterly unfit to support a colony.

"Our hopes were dashed—and I think all of us, even remembering the Centaurus Expedition's failure, hoped more than we cared to admit. If Procyon had possessed a habitable planet, we could have returned after an absence of not much over twenty years Earth time.

"It is cheering to note that the crew seems only more resolute. We go on to Capella; its spectrum, so like our own Sun's, beckons. If success comes there, a century will have passed before we can return to Earth; friends, relatives, all the generation that launched the Quest ships will be long since dead. Nevertheless we go on. Our generation's dream, humanity's dream, lives in us and in the ship forever...."

Presently Knof Llud switched off that younger voice of his and leaned back, an ironic smile touching his lips. That fervent idealism seemed remote and foreign to him now. The fanfares of departure must still have been ringing in his ears.

He rose, slipped the record back in its niche and picked out another, later, one.

"One week since we passed close enough to Aldebaran to ascertain that that system, too, is devoid of planets.

"We face the unpleasant realization that what was feared is probably true—that worlds such as the Sun's are a rare accident, and that we may complete our search without finding even one new Earth.

"It makes no difference, of course; we cannot betray the plan.... This may be man's last chance of escaping his pitiful limitation to one world in all the Universe. Certainly the building of this ship and its two sisters, the immense expenditure of time and labor and energy stores that went into them, left Earth's economy drained and exhausted. Only once in a long age does mankind rise to such a selfless and transcendent effort—the effort of Egypt that built the pyramids, or the war efforts of the nations in the last great conflicts of the twentieth century.

"Looked at historically, such super-human outbursts of energy are the result of a population's outgrowing its room and resources, and therefore signalize the beginning of the end. Population can be limited, but the price is a deadly frustration, because growth alone is life.... In our day the end of man's room for growth on the Earth was in sight—so we launched the Quests. Perhaps our effort will prove as futile as pyramid-building, less practical than orgies of slaughter to reduce pressure.... In any case, it would be impossible to transport very many people to other stars; but Earth could at least go into its decline with the knowledge that its race went onward and upward, expanding limitlessly into the Universe....

"Hopeless, unless we find planets!"

Knof Llud shook his head sorrowfully and took off the spool. That was from the time when he had grown philosophical after the first disappointments.

He frowned thoughtfully, choosing one more spool that was only four years old. The recorded voice sounded weary, yet alive with a strange longing....

"We are in the heart of Pleiades; a hundred stars show brilliant on the screens, each star encircled by a misty halo like lights glowing through fog, for we are traversing a vast diffuse nebula.

"According to plan, the Quest III has reached its furthest point from Earth. Now we turn back along a curve that will take us past many more stars and stellar systems—but hope is small that any of those will prove a home for man, as have none of the thousands of stars examined already.

"But what are a few thousand stars in a galaxy of billions? We have only, as it were, visited a handful of the outlying villages of the Universe, while the lights of its great cities still blaze far ahead along the Milky Way.

"On flimsy excuses I have had Zost Relyul make observations of the globular cluster Omega Centauri. There are a hundred thousand stars there in a volume of space where one finds a few dozen in the Sun's neighborhood; there if anywhere must circle the planets we seek! But Omega Centauri is twenty thousand light years away....

"Even so—by expending its remaining fuel freely, the Quest III could achieve a velocity that would take us there without dying of senility of aging too greatly. It would be a one-way journey—even if enough fuel remained, there would be little point in returning to Earth after more than forty thousand years. By then our civilization certainly, and perhaps the human race itself, would have perished from memory.

"That was why the planners limited our voyage, and those of the other Quests, to less than a thousand years Earth time. Even now, according to the sociodynamic predictions made then, our civilization—if the other expeditions failed also—will have reached a dangerously unstable phase, and before we can get back it may have collapsed completely from overpopulation.

"Why go back, then with the news of our failure? Why not forget about Earth and go on to Omega Centauri? What use is quixotic loyalty to a decree five thousand years old, whose makers are dead and which may be forgotten back there?

"Would the crew be willing? I don't know—some of them still show signs of homesickness, though they know with their minds that everything that was once 'home' has probably been swept away....

"It doesn't matter. Today I gave orders to swing the ship."

Savagely Knof Llud stabbed the button that shut off the speaker. Then he sat for a time with head resting in his hands, staring into nothing.

The memory of that fierce impulse to go on still had power to shake him. A couple of lines of poetry came into his head, as he read them once in translation from the ancient English....

... for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

Llud sighed. He still couldn't say just why he had given the order to turn back. The stars had claimed his heart—but he was still a part of Earth, and not even nine hundred years of space and time had been able to alter that.

He wondered if there would still be a quiet stream and a green shady place beside it where a death-weary man, relieved at last of responsibility, could rest and dream no more.... Those things went on, if men didn't change them. And a pine forest where he and young Knof could go camping, and lie on their backs at night and gaze at the glittering constellations, far away, out of reach.... He wasn't sure he would want to do that, though.

Suddenly a faint cushioned jar went through the great ship; it seemed to falter one moment in flight.

The captain was on his feet instantly, but then his movements became unhurried. Whatever it had been was past, and he had a good idea what it had been—a meteoroid, nothing unusual in the vicinity of the Sun, though in interstellar space and around planetless stars such collisions were rare to the vanishing point. No harm could have been done. The Quest III's collision armor was nonmaterial and for practical purposes invulnerable.

Just as he took his finger off the button that opened the door, the intercommunication phone shrilled imperatively. Knof Llud wheeled, frowning—surely a meteoroid impact wasn't that serious. Coincidence, maybe—it might be Zost Relyul calling as instructed.

He reached the phone at the moment when another, heavier jolt shook the vessel. Llud snatched up the receiver with the speed of a scalded cat.

"Captain?" It was Gwar Den's voice, stammering a little. "Captain, we're being attacked!"

"Sound the alarm. Emergency stations." He had said it automatically, then felt a curious detached relief at the knowledge that after all these years he could still respond quickly and smoothly to a crisis. There was a moment's silence, and he heard the alarm start—three short buzzes and repeat, ringing through all the great length of the interstellar ship. Knowing that Gwar Den was still there, he said, "Now—attacked by what?"

"Ships," said Gwar Den helplessly. "Five of them so far. No, there's a sixth now." Repeated blows quivered the Quest III's framework. The navigator said, obviously striving for calm, "They're light craft, not fifty feet long, but they move fast. The detectors hardly had time to show them before they opened up. Can't get a telescope beam on them long enough to tell much."

"If they're that small," said Knof Llud deliberately, "they can't carry anything heavy enough to hurt us. Hold to course. I'll be right up."

In the open doorway he almost fell over his son. Young Knof's eyes were big; he had heard his father's words.

"Something's happened," he judged with deadly twelve-year-old seriousness and, without wasting time on questions, "Can I go with you, huh, Dad?"

Llud hesitated, said, "All right. Come along and keep out of the way." He headed for the bridge with strides that the boy could not match.

There were people running in the corridors, heading for their posts. Their faces were set, scared, uncomprehending. The Quest III shuddered, again and again, under blows that must have had millions of horsepower behind them; but it plunged on toward Earth, its mighty engines still steadily braking its interstellar velocity.

To a man, the ship's responsible officers were already on the bridge, most of them breathless. To a man they looked appeal at Captain Knof Llud.

"Well?" he snapped. "What are they doing?"

Gwar Den spoke. "There are thirteen of them out there now, sir, and they're all banging away at us."

The captain stared into the black star-strewn depths of a vision screen where occasional blue points of light winked ominously, never twice from the same position.

Knof Jr. flattened himself against the metal wall and watched silently. His young face was less anxious than his elders'; he had confidence in his father.

"If they had anything heavier," surmised the captain, "they'd have unlimbered it by now. They're out to get us. But at this rate, they can't touch us as long as our power lasts—or until they bring up some bigger stuff."

The mild shocks went on—whether from projectiles or energy-charges, would be hard to find out and it didn't matter; whatever was hitting the Quest III's shell was doing it at velocities where the distinction between matter and radiation practically ceases to exist.

But that shell was tough. It was an extension of the gravitic drive field which transmitted the engines' power equally to every atom of the ship; forces impinging on the outside of the field were similarly transmitted and rendered harmless. The effect was as if the vessel and all space inside its field were a single perfectly elastic body. A meteoroid, for example, on striking it rebounded—usually vaporized by the impact—and the ship, in obedience to the law of equal and opposite forces, rebounded too, but since its mass was so much greater, its deflection was negligible.

The people in the Quest III would have felt nothing at all of the vicious onslaught being hurled against them, save that their inertialess drive, at its normal thrust of two hundred gravities, was intentionally operated at one half of one per cent efficiency to provide the illusion of Earthly gravitation.

One of the officers said shakily, "It's as if they've been lying in wait for us. But why on Earth—"

"That," said the captain grimly, "is what we have to find out. Why—on Earth. At least, I suspect the answer's there."

The Quest III bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end—perhaps in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking, always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons—but suddenly on one of the vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn apart.

Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was paying attention to him. The men on the Quest III's bridge looked questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored too direct a hit."

He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the Quest III, except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance and speed—but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than Gwar Den had at first supposed—not large enough to hold even one man. Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting.

"Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy they had explored, but one of the other Quests might have encountered and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to conquer.

It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind it.

Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight hours."

"We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully.

"If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first."

"We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not knowing why we're being attacked."

Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological advantage, too!"

His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have noticed it."

"They're mad and we aren't, yet," said the boy. Then, seeing that he hadn't made himself clear, "In a fight, if a guy gets mad he starts swinging wild and then you nail him."

Smiles splintered the ice of tension. Captain Llud said, "Maybe you've got something there. They seem to be mad, all right. But we're not in a position to throw any punches." He turned back to the others. "As I was going to say—I think we'd better try to parley with the enemy. At least we may find out who he is and why he's determined to smash us."

And now instead of tight-beam detectors the ship was broadcasting on an audio carrier wave that shifted through a wide range of frequencies, repeating on each the same brief recorded message:

"Who are you? What do you want? We are the interstellar expedition Quest III...." And so on, identifying themselves and protesting that they were unarmed and peaceful, that there must be some mistake, and querying again, "Who are you?"

There was no answer. The ship drove on, its fuel trickling away under multiplied demands. Those outside were squandering vastly greater amounts of energy in the effort to batter down its defenses, but converting that energy into harmless gravitic impulses was costing the Quest III too. Once more Knof Llud had the insidious sense of his own nerves and muscles and will weakening along with the power-sinews of his ship.

Zost Relyul approached him apologetically. "If you have time, Captain—I've got some data on Earth now."

Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up inquiringly at Zost Relyul.

"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully. "First of all—there are no lights on the night side. And on the daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces of cities, canals, and the like—but it does not.

"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide—so the vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine moss or even a coarse mold."

"Is that all?" demanded Llud.

"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well—we tried photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is opaque to it."

The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps you can answer some of these riddles before—"

"We know who you are," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a strange accent, "and pleading will do you no good."

Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating tape.

He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be—the sooner, if you continue toward Earth."

Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice—which must be coming from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships—was not very smart; it had already involuntarily told him a couple of things—that it was not as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the Quest III's ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.

He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "Are you human?"

The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are not."

The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply. Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully into its field.

"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud woodenly. He named a vision frequency.

"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the Quest I's commander."

Knof Llud stiffened. The Quest I, launched toward Arcturus and the star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the Quest III the most hopeful of the expeditions—and its captain had been a good friend of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to him?"

"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short pause. "The vision connection is ready."

Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly, but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the Quest III, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.

He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"

"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question. Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."

The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a poisonous hatred.

"It is enough for you to know that you must die."

"It is enough for you to know that you must die."

Llud frowned darkly—then an incredible light burst in his brain. He stared at the pictured figure with quite new and indescribable sensations. "You," he said slowly, "are not on Earth, as I was assuming; if you were, there'd be a time lag of quite a few minutes in this conversation. You must be on one of those miniature ships out there—which aren't big enough to hold a man!"

He saw the uncanny hate flare closer to the surface this time.

"You are clever," said the big-headed man spitefully. "Very well, then—in your screen you see some of the differences between me, who am human, and you, who are not any more. The main difference, which you do not see, is that I am three point sixty-two millimeters high, and you are more like two meters."

Knof Llud was speechless. The man who had just said he was an eighth of an inch tall grinned unpleasantly again at his amazement. "Yes," he said. "I am one of the New Humanity, which has replaced your kind on the Earth. You are the last of the old, subhuman race of giants, which will very shortly be extinct."

"It's impossible," whispered Llud. But he had to remember that he had been on the verge of deducing the thing himself.

The little man folded his arms and gazed at him with mocking superiority. "You have the mentality of nine hundred years ago. Your age would have called size reduction impossible, even though they already had most of the biophysical and genetic knowledge needed. They suffered from increasing overpopulation, but they were blind to the obvious answer—so Earth went through the wasteful folly of launching the interstellar ships. We are descended from dull-witted giants like you."

Cautiously, out of sight of the screen, Llud extended a hand and found a pad of memo blanks and a pencil. Without taking his eyes off the magnified, bragging image, he began to write. He thought he had the answer now to this murderous welcome.

"We have found the solution of the problem of growth," the image was saying. "For seven hundred years now, each generation has been smaller than the one before, so that there is constantly more room on the planet, relatively speaking; and the process still goes on. There are six hundred trillion of us on Earth now. In another two generations there will be a quadrillion human beings only two millimeters tall—and no overcrowding.

"But," the little man snarled venomously, "we have no room for you giants!"

Knof Llud sighed. The sagging lines of his face were calculated to reassure the other and his superiors on Earth, to whom the sight-sound conversation was undoubtedly being relayed. Llud said tiredly, "But you don't have any reason for destroying us. Why not let us land on one of the worthless outer planets, and make an attempt to live there? Or, if you will give us a little atomic fuel, we will leave the Solar System again and trouble you no more. In exchange we have a great deal of knowledge, data on the stars of the Taurus Cluster and beyond, to offer...."

As he spoke, he was beckoning Gwar Den to him, handing the navigator the brief order he had scrawled on the pad.

The little man laughed shortly. "As if we could trust you—or wanted your worthless knowledge of stars! No, we will not bargain with giants."

The captain said slowly, for there was still time to be gained in order that the gamble he had decided on might have its chance, "You're very sure that you can smash us. Remember, we control gravitic forces, a science you have evidently lost."

He saw the look of sneering triumph waver a little; then the image snapped, "We destroyed the others. Your screen, whatever it is, is not impenetrable; we have power to break through it."

That was true, of course. The drive-field would collapse when the fuel ran out, desperately soon now.

Llud started to speak again; then he felt the nearly imperceptible lurch that meant the Quest III had applied a terrific acceleration at an angle to its line of flight. Gwar Den had done a quick job.

The impacts of enemy fire ceased; the ship's abrupt swerve had temporarily shaken off its rocket-driven tormentors.

Almost simultaneously the image on the screen looked startled. The man turned as if listening to some one else. "So you've begun a frantic attempt to dodge. It won't help you—" His jaw dropped and he listened again; this time he was a little longer overcoming his surprise. Knof Llud knew what the second message had been as surely as if he had been there—that the Quest III, far from doubling back, was still heading for Earth, from a slightly different angle, and was even accelerating. The side thrust had already ceased. That expenditure of fuel reduced the chances, but it had to be risked.

The little man faced Knof Llud again and smiled savagely. "Whatever you're trying, we're ready for you!"

"No doubt," thought the captain with some satisfaction. He sat up straighter and gazed at the little man. His discouraged air was gone and the look in his eyes was the distillate of cold, searing scorn. He said, biting off the words with deliberate emphasis, to that one and the others who would be listening, "You pitiful pigmies."

The face in the screen grew darker with rage; it opened its mouth and closed it with a snap.

"You pitiful pigmies," repeated Knof Llud. "You're pigmies not only in physical size, but in everything else. You've thrown away everything that made being human worthwhile, all for the sake of your one pigmy ambition—to multiply your crawling little lives and become more and more at the same time that you become less and less. You've shrunk into vermin. In the end you'll probably shrink away to nothing, and good riddance."

With sudden change of pace he shot out a question: "What's the longest wave length of visible light?"

"2100 angstroms," the answer was mechanical. Then, "You—"

The captain smiled a smile of weary disdain. "I thought so. Six hundred trillion of you, eh? Crawling around down there in the dark, because you see in the far ultraviolet—and the atmosphere stops those frequencies. You can't see the stars! For thousands of years men watched the stars and wanted them and were kept trying by sight of them—but you can't see the stars any more."

The face stared at him with great eyes full of unspeakable hate, and spat a word which had not been in the language when the Quest III was launched. The screen went suddenly blank.

Knof Llud turned away, and his eyes fell on another vision screen. Earth was clear in it, dead ahead, a disk so near that land and sea were distinguishable with the naked eye, and coming rapidly nearer. The sight cost him a moment's nostalgic pain; then he thought of the little men, swarming ant-like over every square foot of habitable land.... Vermin he had called them; vermin they were.

He found himself, for no sensible reason, counting seconds. He had got to seventeen when the screen that showed Earth dissolved into a featureless and blinding glare.

At the same instant a force too tremendous for the senses to register smote the Quest III. The interior of the ship, everything and everyone in it seemed to stretch and distort like rubber as the gravitic field was strained beyond its elastic limit. The lights went out as the drive units claimed the last erg of available energy and shrieked their overloaded protest through the crushing and twisted darkness.

But then the lights went on again and the ship was hurtling free in space. Its people picked themselves up dazedly and tried to understand why they were still alive.

"Gee, Dad," young Knof said admiringly as he dabbed at a blackening eye, "what did you do?"

"I didn't do much," said the captain. "The fireworks were from our little friends. I just took your advice about getting the other fellow mad, and it worked. They just shut their eyes and swung with everything they had."

The boy gazed at the vision screen where the Sun was already a star again. He whistled. "They had plenty."

"I thought the heavy artillery must be ready on Earth in case we kept going that way. It was—enough of it to knock us right out of the System at close to the speed of light. Just how close I don't know yet ... ah." He took a couple of sheets of figures from the hands of Gwar Den, and devoured them rapidly. He nodded with satisfaction to the anxious faces around. "We must have been hit simultaneously by fire from all over one hemisphere—and the forces' resultant, which is now our course, came out as I had hoped.... Our velocity is close enough; the journey will take about fourteen years, ship's time, but most of us can expect to live that long—"

"Where are we going?" demanded Knof Jr., unable to contain his curiosity.

Captain Knof Llud smiled down at his son with a touch of wistfulness. The memory of Earth, dwindling into infinite smallness behind, still hurt him; but young Knof would never know that hurt. And, after fourteen years, the captain would be about ready to leave his dream in younger hands.... He laid an arm about the boy's shoulders and pointed silently to the forward vision screen, to a faint blurred light dead in its center.

"Omega Centauri," he said, and there was a new confidence in his voice.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Giants Return, by Robert Abernathy

THE GIANTS RETURN

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