Space Gypsies
Reviewed date: 2025 Sep 12
Rating: 3
128 pages
This is your basic humanity vs genocidal chlorine-breathing slug monsters for control of the galaxy. It's a lot of fun.
Howell owns a little spaceship, Marintha, and he's hired himself out to take a botanist, Breen, to various worlds to take samples of progenitor food-plants. Howell is doing this mainly because Breen is accompanied by his daughter Karen. Also on board is Marintha's engineer, Ketch.
Marintha has no weapons, because as author Murray Leinster points out, humanity is secure in the knowledge that there are no alien civilizations out there. The only thing mankind has found, on planet after planet, are rubble-heap cities. These smashed cities are all that's left of an ancient civilization of humans that disappeared forty centuries ago. As Leinster points out, nobody thinks to wonder who smashed those cities and what happened to those humans.
Ha. Deep in interstellar space Marintha is attacked by slug-shaped alien spaceships. The slug-ship creatures very much want to kill all humans. Marintha escapes badly damaged; Howell makes a landing on a nearly habitable planet to effect repairs.
There's a lot more. On the planet Howell and the others make contact with another race of humans. These humans, clearly descended (like people on Earth) from the progenitors, have spent generations battling the slug-ship beings. They live in spaceships as gypsies, running from planet to planet. They are small, which is useful for living in the limited space on board their spaceships: adults are the size of a twelve-year-old child. Howell and the others can't communicate with the other humans—there is no time to learn each others' language—but using gestures and sketches they do the best they can.
Howell is frantic to ensure that the slug-ship creatures don't learn about Earth. These creatures destroyed the progenitors' cities, and they have been methodically hunting and exterminating the space gypsies for thousands of years. If they find out there is another civilization of humans, they'll come to an unsuspecting Earth and wipe it clean of life.
The slug-ship beings are chlorine-breathers, and they've developed advanced plastics which they use to coat every bit of metal on their spaceships, because otherwise the corrosive chlorine atmosphere will destroy the metal. It's that plastic construction that proves their downfall.
The space gypsies are overjoyed when they see the molecular disintegrator garbage unit on Marintha. They demand he show them every specification and schematic for every part of the garbage unit. Howell can't figure out why. It's just a garbage unit, it generates a waveform that disintegrates anything carbon-based like food waste.
And plastic. Plastic is carbon-based.
The space gypsies figure it out first, but Howell eventually figures it out. He hooks the garbage unit to Marintha's hull and uses the entire metal surface of the hull to broadcast the destructive waveform. Any slug-ships that come near are hit with the waveform and immediately fall apart as the plastic in their plastic-and-metal hull disintegrates.
All humanity is saved. Humans rule, chlorine-breathing slug-ship creatures drool! The end.