THREE

The key word was prohibited… Under that heading the Space Regulations had in fact devoted a full page of rather fine print to the Prohibited Planet of Karres. Most of it, however, was conjecture. Nikkeldepain seemed unable to make up its mind whether the witches had developed an alarmingly high level of secret technology or whether there was something downright supernatural about them. But it made it very clear it did not want ordinary citizens to have anything to do with Karres. There was grave danger of spiritual contamination. Hence such contacts could not be regarded as being in the best interests of the Republic and were strictly forbidden.

Various authorities in the Empire held similar opinions. The Regulations included a number of quotes from such sources:

“… their women gifted with an evil allure … Hiding under the cloak of the so-called klatha magic-“

Klatha? The word seemed familiar. Frowning, the captain dug up a number of memory scraps. Klatha was a metaphysical concept, a cosmic energy, something not quite of this universe. Some people supposedly could tune in on it, use it for various purposes.

He grunted. Possibly that gave a name to what the witches were doing. But it didn’t explain anything.

No mention was made of the Sheewash Drive. It might be a recent development, at least for individual spaceships. In fact, the behavior of Councilor Onswud and the others suggested that reports they’d received of the Venture’s unorthodox behavior under hot pursuit was the first they had heard of a superdrive possessed by Karres.

Naturally they’d been itching to get their hands on it. And naturally, the captain told himself, the Empire, having heard the same reports, wanted the Sheewash Drive just as badly! The Venture had become a marked ship… and he’d better find out just where she was at present. The viewscreens, mass detectors, and comunicators had been switched on while he was going over the Regulations. The communicators had produced only an uninterrupted, quiet humming, a clear indication there were no civilized worlds within a day’s travel - Occasional ships might be passing at much closer range; but, interstellar travel must be very light or the communicators would have picked up at least a few garbled fragments of ship messages. The screens had no immediately useful information to add. An odd-shaped cloud of purple luminance lay dead ahead, at an indicated distance of just under nine light-years. It would have been a definite landmark if the captain had ever heard of it before; but he hadn’t. Stars filled the screens in all directions, crowded pinpoints of hard brilliance and hazy clusters. Here and there swam dark pools of cosmic dust. On the right was a familiar spectacle but one which offered no clues-the gleaming cascades of ice-fire of the Milky Way. One would have had approximately the same view from many widely scattered points of the galaxy. In this forest of light, all routes looked equal to the eye. But there was, of course, a standard way of getting a location fix. The captain dug his official chart of navigational beacon indicators out of the desk and dialed the communicators up to space beacon frequencies Identifying three or four of the strongest signals obtainable here should give him their position.

Within a minute a signal beeped in. Very faint, but it had the general configuration of an Imperial beacon. Its weakness implied they were far outside the Empire’s borders. The captain pushed a transcription button on the beacon attachment, pulled out the symbol card it produced, and slid it into the chart to be matched and identified.

The chart immediately rejected the symbol as unrecognizable. He hesitated, transcribed the signal again, fed the new card to the chart. It, too, was rejected. The symbols on the two cards were identical, so the transcription equipment seemed to be in working order. For some reason this beacon signal simply was not recorded in his chart.

He frowned, eased the detector knobs back and forth, picked up a new signal. Again an Imperial pattern.

Again the chart rejected the symbol.

A minute later it rejected a third one. This had been the weakest symbol of the three, barely transcribable, and evidently it was the last one within the Venture’s present communicator range…

The captain leaned back in the chair, reflecting. Of course the navigational beacon charts made available by Nikkeldepain to its commercial vessels didn’t cover the entire Empire. Business houses dealt with the central Imperium and some of the western and northern provinces. It was a practical limitation. Extending shipping runs with any ordinary cargo beyond that vast area simply couldn’t be profitable enough to be taken into consideration. Goth hadn’t worked the Sheewash Drive much more than two minutes before it knocked her out. But that apparently had been enough to take them clear outside the range covered by the official beacon charts!

He grunted incredulously, shook his head, got out of the chair. Back in a locked section of the storage was a chest filled with old ship papers, dating back to the period before the Venture’s pirate-hunting days when she’d been a long-range exploration ship and brand-new. He’d got into the section one day, rummaged around curiously in the chest. There were thick stacks of star maps covering all sorts of unlikely areas in there, along with old-style beacon charts. And maybe…

It was a good hunch. The chart mechanisms weren’t the kind with which he was familiar but they were operable. The third one he tried at random gave a positive response to the three beacon signals he’d picked up. When he located the corresponding star maps they told him within a lightday where the ship had to be at present.

In spite of everything else that had happened, he simply didn’t believe it at first. It was impossible! He went through the checking procedure again. And then there was no more doubt.

There were civilized worlds indicated on those maps of which he had never heard. There were other names he did know-names of worlds which had played a role, sometimes grandly, sometimes terribly, in galactic history. The ancient names of world so remote from Nikkeldepain’s present sphere of commercial interest that to him they seemed like dim legend. Goth’s run on the Sheewash Drive had not simply moved them along the Imperial borders be yond the area of the official charts. It had taken them back into the Empire, then all the way through it and out the other side-to Galactic East of the farthest eastern provinces. They were in a territory where, as far as the captain knew, no ship from Nikkeldepain had come cruising in over a century. He stood looking out the viewscreens a while at the unfamiliar crowded stars, his blood racing as excitement continued to grow in him. Here he was, he thought, nearly as far from the stodginess of present-day Nikkeldepain as if he had, in fact, slipped back through the dark centuries to come out among lost worlds of history, his only companion the enigmatic witch-child sleeping off exhaustion in the captain’s cabin…

About him he could almost sense the old ship, returned to the space roads of her youth and seemingly grown aware of it, rise from the miasma of brooding gloom which had settled on her after they left Karres, shaking herself awake, restored to adventurous life-ready and eager for anything. It was like coming home to something that had been lost a long while but never really forgotten.

Something eerie, colorful, full of the promise of the unexpected and unforeseen-and somehow dead right for him!

He sucked in air, turned from the screens to take the unused-star maps and other materials back to the storage. His gaze swung over to the communicators. A small portable lamp stood on the closer of the two, its beam fixed on the worktable below it.

The captain gave the lamp a long, puzzled stare. Then he scowled and started towards it, walking a little edgily, hair bristling, head thrust forwardsomething like a terrier who comes suddenly on a new sort of vermin which may or may not be a dangerous opponent.

There was nothing wrong or alarming about the lamp’s appearance. It was a perfectly ordinary utility device, atomic-powered, with a flexible and extensible neck, adjustable beam, and a base which, on contact, adhered firmly to bulkhead, deck, machine, or desk, and could be effortlessly plucked away again. During the months he’d been traveling about on the Venture he’d found many uses for it. In time it had seemed to develop a helpful and friendly personality of its own, like a small, unobtrusive servant. At the moment its light shone exactly where he’d needed it while he was studying the maps at the worktable. And that was what was wrong! Because he was as certain as he could be that he hadn’t put the lamp on the communicator. When he’d noticed it last, before going to the storage, it was standing at the side of the control desk in its usual place. He hadn’t come near the desk since,

Was Goth playing a prank on him? It didn’t seem quite the sort of thing she’d do… And now he remembered-something like twenty minutes before, he was sitting at the table, trying to make out a half-faded notation inked into the margin of one of the old maps. The thought came to him to get the lamp so he’d have better light. But he’d been too absorbed in what he was doing and the impulse simply faded again.

Then, some time between that moment and this, the better light he’d wanted was produced for him strengthening so gently and gradually that, sitting there at the table, he didn’t even become aware it was happening. He stared a moment longer at the lamp. Then he picked it up, and went down the passage to the captain’s cabin, carrying it with him. Goth lay curled on her side in the big bunk, covers drawn up almost to her ears. She breathed slowly and quietly, forehead furrowed into a frown as if she dreamed about something of which she didn’t entirely approve. Studying her face by the dimmed light of the lamp, the captain became convinced she wasn’t faking sleep. Minor deceptions of that sort weren’t Goth’s way in any case. She was a very direct sort of small person…

He glanced about. Her clothes hung neatly across the back of a chair, her boots were placed beside it. He dimmed the light further and withdrew from the cabin without disturbing her, making a mental note to replace the ruined door after she woke up. Back in the control room he switched off the lamp, set it on the desk, and stood knuckling his chin abstractedly. It hadn’t been a lapse of memory; and if Goth had done it, she hadn’t done it deliberately. Perhaps this klatha force could shift into independent action when a person who normally controlled it was asleep. There might be unpleasant possibilities in that. When Goth came awake he’d ask her what… . The sharp, irregular buzzing which rose suddenly from a bank of control instruments beside him made him jump four inches. His hand shot out, threw the main drive feed to the off position. The buzzing subsided , but a set of telltales continued to flicker bright red…

There was nothing supernatural about this problem, he decided a few minutes later. But it was a problem, and not a small one. What the trouble indicators had registered was a developing pattern of malfunction in the main drive engines. It was no real surprise; when he’d left Nikkeldepain half a year before, it had looked like an even bet whether he could make it back without stopping for major repairs. But the drives had performed faultlessly until now.

They might have picked a more convenient time and place to go haywire. But there was no reason to regard it as a disaster just yet. He found tools, headed to the storage and on down to the engine deck from there, and went to work. Within half an hour he’d confirmed that their predicament wasn’t too serious, if nothing else happened. A minor breakdown at one point in the main engines had shifted stresses, immediately creating a dozen other trouble spots. But it wasn’t a question of the engines going out completely and making it necessary to crawl through space, perhaps for months, on their secondaries before they reached a port. Handled with care, the main drive should be good for another three or four weeks, at least. But the general deterioration clearly had gone beyond the point of repair. The antiquated engines would have to be replaced as soon as possible, and meanwhile he should change the drive settings manually, holding the engines down to half their normal output to reduce strain on them. If somebody came around with hostile intentions, an emergency override on the control desk would still allow occasional spurts at full thrust. From what he’d been told of the side effects of the Sheewash Drive, it wasn’t likely Goth would be able to do much to help in that department…

In a port of civilization, with repair station facilities on hand and the drive hauled clear of the ship, the adjustments he had to make might have been completed and tested in a matter of minutes. But for one man, working by the manual in the confined area of the Venture’s engine. room, it was a lengthy, awkward job. At last, stretched in a precarious sprawl a third down on the side of the drive shaft, the captain squinted wearily at the final setting he had to change. It was in a shadowed recess of the shaft below him, barely in reach of his tools.

He wished he had a better light on it…

His breath caught in his throat. There was a feeling as if the universe had stopped for an instant; then a shock of alarm. His scalp began prickling as if an icy, soundless wind had come astir above his head. He knew somehow exactly what was going to happen next, and that there was no use trying to revoke his wish. Some klatha machinery already was in motion now and couldn’t be stopped…

A second or two went past. Then an oval of light appeared quietly about the recess, illuminating the setting within. It grew strong and clear. The captain realized it came from above, past his shoulder. Cautiously, he looked up. And there the little monster was, suspended by its base from the upper deck. Its slender neck reached down in a serpentine curve to place a beam of light precisely where he’d wanted to have it. His skin kept crawling as if he were staring at some nightmare image…

But this was only klatha, he told himself. And after the Sheewash Drive and other matters, a lamp which began to move around mysteriously was nothing to get shaky about. Ignore it, he thought; finish up the job…

He reached down with the tools, laboriously adjusted the thrust setting, tested it twice to make sure it was adjusted right. And that wound up his work in the engine room. He hadn’t glanced at the lamp again, but its light still shone steadily on the shaft. The captain collapsed the tools, stowed them into his pockets, balanced himself on the curving surface of the drive shaft, and reached up for it.

It came free of the overhead deck at his touch. He climbed down from the shaft, holding the lamp away from him by the neck, as if it were a helpful basilisk which might suddenly get a notion to bite. In the control room he placed it back on the desk, and gave it no further attention for the next twenty minutes while he ran the throttled engines through a complete instrument check. They registered satisfactorily. He switched the main drive back on, tested the emergency override. Everything seemed in working condition; the Venture was operational again… within prudent limits. He turned the ship on a course which would hold it roughly parallel to the Empire eastern borders, locked it in, then went to the electric butler for a cup of coffee.

He came back with the coffee, finally stood looking at the lamp again. Since he’d put it down in it usual place, it had done nothing except sit there quietly, casting a pool of light on the desk before it. The captain put the cup aside, moved back a few steps.

“Well,” he said aloud, “let’s test this thing out!”

He paused while his voice went echoing faintly away through the Venture’s passages. Then he pointed a finger at the lamp, and swung the finger commandingly towards the worktable beside the communicator stand.

“Move over to that table!” he told the lamp.

The whole ship grew very still. Even the distant hum of the drive seemed to dim. The captain’s scalp was crawling again, kept on crawling as the seconds went by. But the lamp didn’t move.

Instead, its light abruptly went out.

“No,” Goth said. “It wasn’t me. I don’t think it was you either, exactly.”

The captain looked at her. He’d grabbed off a few hours sleep on the couch and by the time he woke up, Goth was up and around, energies apparently restored. She’d been doing some looking around, too, and wanted to know why the Venture was running on half power. The captain explained. “If we happen to get into a jam,” he concluded, “would you be able to use the Sheewash Drive at present?”

“Short hops,” the witch nodded reassuringly. “No real runs for a while, though!”

“Short hops should be good enough,” he reflected. “I read that item in the Regulations. They right about the klatha part?”

“Pretty much,” Goth acknowledged, a trifle warily.

“Well… ” He’d related his experiences with the lamp then, and she’d listened with obvious interest but no indications of surprise.

“What do you mean, it wasn’t me, exactly?” he said. “I was wondering for a while, but I’m dead sure now I don’t have klatha ability.”

Goth wrinkled her nose, hesitant, and suddenly, “You got it, captain. Told you you’d be a witch, too. You got a lot of it! That was part of the trouble.”

“Trouble?” The captain leaned back in his chair. “Mind explaining?”

Goth reflected worriedly again. “I got to be careful now,” she told him. “The way klatha is, people oughtn’t to know much more about it than they can work with. Or it’s likely never going to work right for them. That’s one reason we got rules. You see?”

He frowned. “Not quite.”

Goth tossed her head, a flick of impatience. “It wasn’t me who ported the lamp. So if you didn’t have klatha, it wouldn’t have got ported.”

“But you said… ”

“Trying to explain, Captain. You ought to get told more now. Not too much, though… On Karres they all knew you had it. Patham! You put it out so heavy the grownups were all messed up! It’s that learned stuff they work with. That’s tricky. I don’t know much about it yet… ”

“You mean I was, uh, producing klatha energy?”

But he gathered one didn’t produce klatha. If one had the talent, inborn to a considerable extent, one attracted it to oneself. Being around others who used it stimulated the attraction. His own tendencies in that direction hadn’t developed much before he got to Karres. There he’d turned promptly into an unwitting focal point of the klatha energies being manipulated around him, to the consternation of the adult witches who found their highly evolved and delicately balanced klatha controls thrown out of kilter by his presence. A light dawned. “That’s why they waited until I was off Karres again before they moved it!”

“Sure,” said Goth. “They couldn’t risk that with you there, they didn’t know what would happen… “He had been the subject of much conversation and debate during his stay on Karres. So as not to disturb whatever was coming awake in him, the witches couldn’t even let him know he was doing anything unusual. But only the younger children, using klatha in a very direct and basic, almost instinctive manner, weren’t bothered by it. Adolescents at around Maleen’s age level had been affected to some extent, though not nearly as much as their parents.

“You just don’t know how to use it, that’s all,” Goth said. “You’re going to, though.”

“What makes you think that?”

Her lashes flickered. “They said it was like that with Threbus. He started late, too. Took him a couple of years to catch on-but he’s a whizdang now!”

The captain grunted skeptically. “Well, we’ll see… You’re a kind of whizdang yourself, for my money.”

“Guess I am,” Goth agreed. “Aren’t many grown-ups could jump us as far as this.”

“Meaning you know where we went?”

Uh-huh. “

“I … no, let’s get back to that lamp first. I can see that after your big Sheewash push we might have had plenty of klatha stirred up around the Venture. But you say I’m not able to use it. So - .”

“Looks like you pulled in a vatch, “Goth told him.

She explained that then. It appeared a vatch was a sort of personification of klatha or a klatha entity. Vatches didn’t hang around this universe much but were sometimes drawn into it by human klatha activities, and if they were amused or intrigued by what they found going on they might stay and start producing klatha phenomena themselves. They seemed to be under the impression that their experiences of the human universe were something they were dreaming. They could be helpful to the person who caught their attention but tended to be quite irresponsible and mischievous. The witches preferred to have nothing at all to do with a vatch.

“So now we’ve got something like that on board!” the captain remarked nervously.

Goth shook her head. “No, not since I woke up. I’d rell him if he were around.”

“You’d rell him?”

She grinned.

“Another of the things I can’t understand till I can do it?” the captain asked.

“Uh-huh. Anyway, you got rid of that vatch for good, I think.”

“I did? How?”

“When you ordered the lamp to move. The vatch would figure you were telling him what to do. They don’t like that at all. I figure he got mad and left.”

“After switching the lamp off to show me, eh? Think he might be back?”

“They don’t usually. Anyway, I’ll spot him if he does.”

“Yes… .the captain scratched his chin. “So what made you decide to bring us out east of the Empire?”

Goth, it turned out, had had a number of reasons. Some of them sounded startling at first.

“One thing, here’s Uldune!” Her fingertip traced over the star map between them, stopped. “Be just about a week away, on half-power.”

The captain gave her a surprised look. Uldune was one of the worlds around here which were featured in Nikkeldepain’s history books; and it was not featured at all favorably. Under the leadership of its Daal, Sedmon the Grim, and various successors of the same name, it had been the headquarters of a ferocious pirate confederacy which had trampled over half the Empire on a number of occasions, and raided far and wide beyond it. And that particular section of history, as he recalled it, wasn’t very far in the past.

“What’s good about being that close to Uldune?” he inquired. “From what I’ve heard of them, that’s as blood-thirsty a bunch of cutthroats as ever infested space!”

“Guess they were pretty bad,” Goth acknowledged. “But that’s a time back. They’re sort of reformed now.”

“Sort of reformed?”

She shrugged. “Well, they’re still a bunch of crooks, Captain. But we can do business with them. “

“Business!”

She seemed to know what she was, talking about, though. The witches were familiar with this section of galactic space, Karres, in fact, had been shifted from a point east of the Empire to its recent station in the Iverdahl System not much more than eighty years ago. And while Goth was Karres born, she’d done a good deal of traveling around here with her parents and sisters. Not very surprising, of course. With the Sheewash Drive available to give their ship a boost when they felt like it, a witch family should be able to go pretty well where it chose.

She’d never been on Uldune but it was a frequent stop-over point for Karres people. Uldune’s reform, initiated by its previous Daal, Sedmon the Fifth, and continued under his successor, had been a matter of simple expediency, the Empire’s expanding space power was making wholesale piracy too unprofitable and risky a form of enterprise. Sedmon the Sixth was an able politician who maintained mutually satisfactory relations with the Empire and other space neighbors, while deriving much of his revenue by catering to the requirements of people who operated outside the laws of any government. Uldune today was banker, fence, haven, trading center, outfitter, supplier, broker, and middleman to all comers who could afford its services. It never asked embarrassing questions. Outright pirates, successful ones at any rate, were still perfectly welcome. So was anybody who merely wanted to transact some form of business unhampered by standard legal technicalities.

“I’m beginning to get it!” the captain acknowledged. “But what makes you think we won’t get robbed blind there?”

“They’re not crooks that way, at least not often. The Daal goes for the skinning-alive thing,” Goth explained. “You get robbed, you squawk. Then somebody gets skinned. It’s pretty safe!”

It did sound like the Daal had hit on a dependable method to give his planet a reputation for solid integrity in business deals. “So we sell the cargo there,” the captain mused. “They take their cut-probably a big one-“

“Uh-huh. Runs around forty per.”

“Of the assessed value?”

“Uh-huh. “

“Steep! But if they’ve got to see the stuff gets smuggled to buyers in the Empire or somewhere else, they’re taking the risks. And, allowing for what the new drive engines will cost us, we’ll be on Uldune then with what should still be a very good chunk of money… Hmm!” He settled back in his chair. “What were those other ideas?”

The first half of the week-long run to Uldune passed uneventfully. They turned around the plans Goth had been nourishing, amended them here and there. But basically the captain couldn’t detect many flaws in them. He didn’t tell her so, but it struck him that if Goth hadn’t happened to be born a witch she might have made out pretty well on Nikkeldepain. She seemed to have a natural bent for the more devious business angles. As one of their first transactions on the reformed pirate planet, they would pick up fictitious identities. The Daal maintained a special department which handled nothing else and documented its work so impeccably that it would stand up under the most thorough investigation. It was a costly matter, but the proceeds of the cargo sale would cover the additional expense. If the search for the Venture and her crew spread east of the Empire, established aliases might be very necessary. In that respect the Sheewash Drive had turned into a liability. Used judiciously, however, it should be an important asset to the independent trader the Venture was to become. This was an untamed area of space; there were sections where even the Empire’s heavily armed patrols did not attempt to go in less than squadron strength. And other sections which nobody tried to patrol at all…

“The Sea of Light, for instance,” Goth said, nodding at the twisted purple cosmic-cloud glow the captain had observed on his first look out of the screens. It had drifted meanwhile over to the Venture’s port side. “That’s a hairy place! You get too close to that, you’ve had it! Every time.”

She didn’t know exactly what happened when one got too close to the cloud. Neither did anyone else. It had been a long while since anybody had tried to find out.

The Drive wouldn’t exactly allow them to go wherever they chose, even if Goth had been able to make regular and unlimited use of it. But as an invisible and unsuspected part of the ship’s emergency equipment it would let them take on assignments not many others would care to consider.

There should be money in that, the captain thought. Plenty of money. Once they were launched, they shouldn’t have much to worry about on that score. But it meant having the Venture rebuilt very completely before they took her out again.

The prospects for the next few years looked good all around. Goth evidently wasn’t at all disturbed by the fact that it might be at least that long before she saw her people again. The witches seemed to look at such things a little differently. Well, he thought, the two of them should see and learn a lot while making their fortune as traders; and he’d. take care of Goth as best he could. Though from Goth’s point of view, it had occurred to him, it might seem more that she was taking care of Captain Pausert.

He couldn’t quite imagine himself developing witch powers. He’d tried to pump Goth about that a little and was told in effect not to worry, he’d know when it began to happen and meanwhile there was no way to hurry it up. Just what would happen couldn’t be predicted. The type of talents that developed and the sequence in which they appeared varied widely among Karres children and the relatively few adults in whom something brought klatha into sudden activity. Goth was a teleporting specialist and had, perhaps because of that, caught on to the Sheewash Drive very quickly and mastered it like a grown-up. So far she’d done little else. The Leewit, besides being the possessor of a variety of devastating whistles, which she used with considerable restraint under most circumstances, was a klatha linguist. Give her a few words of a language she’d never heard before, and something in her swept out, encompassed it all; and she’d soon be chattering away in it happily as if she’d spoken nothing else in all her young life.

Maleen was simply a very good all-around junior witch who’d recently been taken into advanced training three or four years earlier than was the rule. Goth clearly didn’t think he should be given much more information than that at present; and he didn’t press her for it. As long as he didn’t attract any more vatches he’d be satisfied. He retained mixed feelings about klatha. Useful it was, no doubt, if one knew how to handle it. But it was uncanny stuff.

There were enough practical matters on hand to keep them fully occupied. He gave Goth a condensed course in the navigation of the Venture; and she told him more of what had been going on east of the Empire than he’d ever learned out of history books. It confirmed his first impression that life around here should be varied and interesting…

One interesting variation came their way shortly after the calendric chronometer had recorded the beginning of the fourth day since they’d turned on course for Uldune. It was the middle of the captain’s sleep period. He woke up to find Goth violently shaking his shoulder.

“Ub, what is it?” he mumbled.

“You awake?” Her voice was sharp, almost a hiss. “Better get to the controls!”

That aroused him as instantly and completely as a bucketful of ice-cold water…

There was a very strange-looking ship high in the rear viewscreen, at an indicated distance of not many light-minutes away. Its magnified image was like that of a flattened ugly dark bug striding through space after them on a dozen spiky legs set around its edges.

The instruments registered a mass about twice that of the Venture. It was an unsettling object to find coming up behind one.

“Know who they are?” he asked.

Goth shook her head. The ship had been on the screens for about ten minutes, had kept its distance at first, then swung in and begun to pull up to them. She’d put out a number of short-range query blasts on the communicators, but there’d been no response.

It looked like trouble. “How about the Drive?” he asked. Goth indicated the open passage door. “Ready right out there!”

“Fine. But wait with it.” They didn’t intend to start advertising the Sheewash Drive around here if they could avoid it. “Try the communicators again,” he said. “They could be on some off-frequency.”

He hadn’t thrown the override switch on the throttled main drive engines yet. It might have been the Venture’s relatively slow progress which had attracted the creepy vessel’s interest, giving whoever was aboard the idea that here was a possibility of easy prey which should be investigated. But if they set off at speed now and the stranger followed, it could turn into a long chase and one long chase could finish his engines.

If they didn’t run, the thing would move into weapons range within less than five minutes.

“Captain!”

He turned. Goth was indicating the communicator screen. A green-streaked darkness flickered on and off in it.

“Getting them, I think!” she murmured.

He watched as she slowly fingered a pair of dials, eyes intent on the screen. There was a loud burst of croaking and whistling noises from one of the communicators. Then, for a second or two, the screen held a picture. The captain’s hair didn’t exactly stand on end, but it tried to. There was a sullen green light in the screen, lanky gray shapes moving through it; then a face was suddenly looking out at them. Its red eyes widened. An instant later the screen went blank, and the communicator racket ended.

“Saw us and cut us off” Goth said, mouth wrinkling briefly in distaste. The captain cleared his throat. “You know what those are?”

She nodded. “Think so! Saw a picture of a dead one once.”

“They’re uh, unfriendly?”

“If they catch us, they’ll eat us,” Goth told him. “Those are Megair Cannibals.”

The name seemed as unpleasant as the appearance of their pursuers. The captain, heart hammering, reflected a moment, eyes on the grotesque ship in the rear screens. It was considerably closer, seemed to have put on speed.

“Let’s see if we can scare them off first,” he said suddenly. “If that doesn’t work, you better hit the Drive!”

Goth’s expression indicated approval. The captain turned, settled himself in the control chair, tripped the override switch, fed the Venture power, and set her into a tight vertical turn as the engine hum rose to a roar. His hand shifted to the nova gun mechanisms. The image of the pursuing ship flicked through the overhead screens, settled into the forward ones, spun right side up and was dead ahead, coming towards them. The gun turrets completed their lift through the Venture’s hull and clicked into position. The small sighting screen lit up; its cross-hairs slid around and locked on the scuttling bug shape.

He snapped in the manual fire control relays. They still had a good deal of space to cover before they came within reasonable range of each other; and if he could help it they wouldn’t get within reasonable range. He’d done well enough in gunnery training during his duty tour on a space destroyer of the Nikkeldepain navy, but the Megair Cannibals might be considerably better at games of that kind. However, it was possible they could be bluffed out of pressing their attack. He edged the Venture up to full speed, noted the suggestion of raggedness that crept into the engines’ thunder, put his thumb on the firing stud, pressed down.

The nova guns let go together. Reaching for the ship rushing towards them and falling far short of it, their charge shattered space into shuddering blue sheets of fire.

It was an impressive display, but the Megair ship kept coming. Something hot and primitive, surprisingly pleasurable, began to roil in the captain as he counted off thirty seconds, pressed the firing stud again. Blue sheet lightning shivered and crashed. The scuttling thing beyond held its course. Answering fire suddenly speckled space with a cluster of red and black explosions.

“Aa-aa-ah!” breathed the captain, head thrust forwards, eyes riveted on the sighting screen. Something about those explosions…

Why, he thought joyfully, we’ve got the range on them!

He slapped the nova guns on automatic, locked on target, rode the Venture’s thunder in a dead straight line ahead in the wake of the guns’ trail of blue lightning. Red and black fire appeared suddenly on this side of the lightning, roiling towards them…

Then it vanished.

There was something like the high-pitched yowl of a small jungle cat in the captain’s ears. A firm young fist pounded his shoulder delightedly. “They’re running! They’re running!”

He cut the guns. The sighting screen was empty. His eyes followed Goth’s pointing finger to another screen. Far under their present course, turning away on a steep escape curve, went the Megair Cannibals’ ship, scuttling its best, dipping, weaving, dwindling…

As they drew closer to Udune, other ships appeared with increasing frequency in the Venture’s detection range. But these evidently were going about their own business and inclined to keep out of the path of strange spacecraft. None came close enough to be picked up in the viewscreens. While still half a day away from the one-time pirate planet, the Venture’s communicators signaled a pickup. They switched on the instruments and found themselves listening to a general broadcast from Uldune, addressed to all ships entering this area of space.

If they were headed for Uldune on business, they were invited to shift to a frequency which would put them in contact with a landing station off-planet. Uldune was anxious to see to it that their visit was made as pleasant and profitable as possible and would facilitate matters to that end in every way. Detailed information would be made available by direct-beam contact from the landing station.

It was the most cordial reception ever extended to the captain on a planetary approach. They switched in the station, were welcomed warmly to Uldune. Business arrangements then began immediately. Before another hour was up Uldune knew in general what they wanted and what they had to offer, had provided a list of qualified shipbuilders, scheduled immediate appointments with identity specialists, official assessors who would place a minimum value on their cargo, and a representative of the Daal’s Bank, who would assist them in deciding what other steps to take to achieve their goals to best effect on Uldune.

Helpful as the pirate planet was to its clients, it was also clear that it took no unnecessary chances with them. Visitors arriving with their own spacecraft had the choice of leaving them berthed at the landing stations and using a shuttle to have themselves and their goods transported down to a spaceport, or of allowing foolproof seals to be attached to offensive armament for the duration of the ship’s stay on Uldune. A brief, but presumably quite effective, contamination check of the interior of the ship and of its cargo was also carried out at the landing station. Otherwise, aside from an evident but no-comment interest aroused by the nova guns in the armament specialists engaged in securing them, the Daal’s officials at the station displayed a careful lack of curiosity about the Venture, her crew,, her cargo, and her origin. An escort boat presently guided them down to a spaceport and their interview at the adjoining Office of Identities.

FOUR

Captain Aron, of the extremely remote world of Mulm, and his young niece Dani took up residence late that evening in a rented house in an old quarter of Uldune’s port city of Zergandol. It had been a strenuous though satisfactory day for both of them. Much business had begun to roll. Goth, visibly struggling for the past half hour to keep her eyelids open wide enough to be able to look out, muttered good-night to the captain as soon as they’d located two bedrooms on the third floor of the house, and closed the door to one of them behind her. The captain felt bone-weary himself but his brain still buzzed with the events of the day and he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while. He brewed a pot of coffee in the kitchen and took it up to a dark, narrow fourth-story balcony which encircled the house, where he sipped it from a mug, looking around at the sprawling, inadequately lit city. Zergandol, from what he had seen of it, was a rather dilapidated town, though it had one neatly modern district. One might have called it quaint, but most of the streets and buildings were worn, cracked, and rather grimy; and the architecture seemed a centuries-old mixture of conflicting styles. The house they were in looked like a weathered layer cake, four round sections containing two rooms each, placed on top of one another, connected by a narrow circular stairway. Inside and out, it was old. But the rent was moderate-he wasn’t sure yet where they would stand financially by the time they were done with Uldune and Uldune was done with them; and the house was less than a mile up a winding street from the edge of the spaceport and the shipyards of the firm of Sunnat, Bazim & Filish where, during the following weeks, the Venture would be rebuilt.

The extent to which the ship would be rebuilt wasn’t settled yet. So far there’d been time for only a brief preliminary discussion with the partners. And the day had brought an unexpected development which would make it possible to go a great deal farther with that than they’d planned. It was one of the things the captain was debating now. The Daals’ appraiser, with whom they’d gotten together immediately after being equipped with new identities, hadn’t seemed quite able to believe in the Karres cargo:

“Wintenberry jelly and Lepti liquor?” he’d repeated, lifting his eyebrows, when the captain named the first two of the items the witches had loaded on the Venture. “These are, uh, the genuine article?”

Surprised, the captain glanced at Goth, who nodded. “That’s right,” he said.

“Most unusual!” declared the appraiser interestedly. “What quantity of them do you have?”

The captain told him and got a startled look from the official. “Something wrong?” he asked, puzzled.

The appraiser shook his head. “Oh, no! Not, not at all.” He cleared his throat. “You’re certain … well, you must be, of course!” He made some notes, cleared his throat again. “Now, you’ve indicated you also have peltries to sell-“

“Yes, we do,” said the captain. “Very fine stuff!”

“Hundred and twenty-five tozzami,” Goth put in from her end of the table. She sounded as if she were enjoying herself. “Fifty gold-tipped lelaundel, all prime adults.”

The appraiser looked at her, then at the captain.

“That is correct, sir?” he asked expressionlessly.

The captain assured him it was. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask Goth about the names of the creatures that had grown the magnificent furs in the storage; but “tozzami” and “gold-tipped lelaundel” evidently were familiar terms to this expert. His reactions had indicated he also knew about the green Lepti liquor and the jellies. Possibly Karres exported such articles as a regular thing.

“That perfume I put down,” the captain went on. “I don’t know if you’ve heard of Kell Peak essences-“

The appraiser bared his teeth in a strained smile.

“Indeed, I have, sir!” he said softly. “Indeed, I have!” He looked down at his list. “Eight thousand three hundred and twenty-three half-pints of Kell Peak essences… In my twenty-two years of professional experience, Captain Aron, I have never had the opportunity to evaluate an incoming cargo of this nature. I don’t know what you’ve done, but allow me to congratulate you.”

He left with samples of the cargo to have their genuineness and his appraisal notations confirmed by other specialists. The captain and Goth went off to have lunch in one of the spaceport restaurants. “What was he so excited about?” the captain asked, intrigued.

Goth shrugged. “He figures we stole it all.”

“Why?”

“Hard stuff to just buy!”

She explained while they ate. Tozzamis and lelaundels. were indigenous to Karres, part of its mountain fauna; but very few people knew where the furs came from. They had high value, not only because of their quality, but because they were rarely available. From time to time, when the witches wanted money, they’d make up a shipment and distribute it quietly through various contacts. It was a somewhat different matter with the other items, but it came out to much the same thing. The significant ingredients of the liquor, jellies, and perfume essences could be grown only in three limited areas of three different Empire planets, and in such limited quantities there that the finished products hardly ever appeared on the regular market. The witches didn’t advertise the fact that they’d worked out ways to produce all three on Karres. Klatha apparently could also be used to assist a green thumb…

“That might be worth a great deal more than we’ve calculated on, then!” the captain said hopefully.

“Might,” Goth agreed. “Don’t know what they’ll pay for it here, though.”

They found out during their next appointment, which was with a dignitary of the Daal’s Bank. This gentleman already had the appraiser’s report on hand and had opened an account for Captain Aron of Mulm on the strength of it. He went over their planned schedule on Uldune with them, added up the fees, licenses, and taxes that applied to such activities, threw in a figure to cover general expenses involved with getting the Venture, renamed Evening Bird, operating under a fictitious Mulm charter established as a trading ship, and deducted the whole from the anticipated bid value of the cargo, which allowed for the customary forty per cent risk cut on the appraised real value. In this instance the bidding might run higher. What they’d have left in cash in any case came to slightly less than half a million Imperial maels, and they could begin drawing on the bank immediately for anything up to that sum. He’d counted on reimbursing Councilor Onswud via a nontraceable subradio deposit for the estimated value of the Venture, the Venture’s original Nikkeldepain cargo, and the miffel farm loan, plus interest. And on investing up to a hundred and fifty thousand in having the Venture re-equipped with what it took to make her dependably spaceworthy. It had looked as if they’d be living rather hand-to-mouth after that until they’d put a couple of profitable trading runs behind them. .

Now, leaving themselves only a reasonable margin in case general expenses ran higher than the bank’s estimate, they could, if they chose, sink nearly four hundred thousand into the Venture. That should be enough to modernize her from stem to stem, turn her into a ship that carried passengers in comfort as well as cargo, a ship furthermore equal to the best in her class for speed, security, and navigational equipment, capable of running rings around the average bandit or slipping away if necessary from a nosy Imperial patrol. All that without having to fall back on the Sheewash Drive, which still would be available to them when required.

There hadn’t been a good opportunity today to discuss that notion with Goth. But Goth would like it. As for himself. …

The captain shook his head, realizing he’d already made up his mind. He smiled out over the balcony railing at dark Zergandol. After all, what better use could they make of the money? Tomorrow they’d get down to business with Sunnat, Bazim & Filish!

He placed the empty coffee mug on a window ledge beside the chair he’d settled himself in and stretched out his legs. There was a chill in the air now and it had begun to get, through to him, but he still wasn’t quite ready to turn in. If someone had told him even a month ago that he’d find himself one day on blood-stained old Uldune…

They’d varnished over their evil now, but there was evil enough still here. As far as the Daal’s Bank knew, he’d committed piracy and murder to get his hands on the rare cargo they’d taken on consignment from him. And if anything, they respected him for it.

In spite of the Daal’s rigid, limitations on what was allowable nowadays, they weren’t really far away from the previous bad pirate period. In the big store where he and Goth had picked up supplies for the house, the floor manager earnestly advised them to invest in adequate spy-proofing equipment. The captain hadn’t seen much point to it until Goth gave him the sign. The device they settled on then was small though expensive, looked like a pocket watch. Activated, it was guaranteed to make a twenty-foot sphere of space impervious to ordinary eavesdroppers, instrument snooping, hidden observers, and lip-readers. They checked it out with the store’s most sophisticated espionage instruments and bought it. There’d be occasions enough at that when they’d want to be talking about things nobody here should know about; and apparently no one on the planet was really safe from prying eyes and ears unless they had such protection.

In the open space about Uldune, of course, the old wickedness flourished openly. During the day, he’d heard occasional references to a report that ships of a notorious modern-day pirate leader, called the Agandar, had cleaned out a platinum mining settlement on an asteroid chain close enough to Uldune to keep the Daal’s space defense forces on red alert overnight…

The captain’s eyes shifted to the sky. Low over the western horizon hung the twisted purple glow of the Sea of Light, as familiar to him by now as any of the galactic landmarks in the night skies of Nikkeldepain. He watched it a few minutes. It was like a challenge, a cold threat; and something in him seemed to reply to it:

Wait till we’re ready for you…

About it lay the Chaladoor. Another ill-omened name out of history, out of legend … a vast expanse of space beginning some two days’ travel beyond Uldune, with a reputation still as bad as it ever had been in the distant past. Very little shipping moved in that direction, although barely half a month away, on the far side of the Chaladoor, there were clusters of prosperous independent worlds wide open for profitable trade. They could be reached by circumnavigating the Chaladoor, but that trip took the better part of a year. The direct route, on the other hand, meant threading one’s way through a maze of navigational hazards, hazards to an ordinary kind of ship such as to discourage all but the hardiest. Inimical beings, like the crew of the Megair highwayman which had stalked the Venture during the run to Uldune, were a part of the hazards. And other forces were at work there, disturbing and sometimes violently dangerous forces nobody professed to understand. Even the almost universally functioning subradio did not operate in that area. Nevertheless there was a constant demand for commercial transportation through the Chaladoor, the time saved by using the direct route outweighing the risks. And the passage wasn’t impossible. Certain routes were known to be relatively free of problems. Small, fast, well-armed ships stood the best chance of traversing the Chaladoor successfully along them, and one or two runs of that kind could net a ship owner as much as several years of ordinary trading. More importantly, from the captain’s and Goth’s point of view, Karres ships, while they carefully avoided certain sections of the Chaladoor, crossed it as a matter of course whenever it lay along their route. Constant alertness was required. Then the Sheewash Drive simply took them out of any serious trouble they encountered…

What it meant was that the remodeled, rejuvenated Venture also could make that run.

The captain settled deeper into the chair, blinking drowsily at the bubble of light over the spaceport, which seemed the one area still awake in Zergandcl. Afterwards, he couldn’t have said at what point his reflections turned into dream-thoughts. But he did begin to dream.

It was a vague, half-sleep dreaming, agreeable to start with. Then, by imperceptible degrees, uneasiness came creeping into it, a dim apprehension which strengthened and ebbed but never quite faded. Later he recalled nothing more definite about that part of it, but considerable time must have passed in that way.

Then the vague, shifting dream imagery gathered, took on form and definite menace. He was aware of color at first, a spreading yellow glow, a sense of something far away but drawing closer. it became a fog of yellow light, growing towards him. A humming came from it.

Fear awoke in him. He didn’t know of what until he discovered the fog wasn’t empty. There were brighter ripplings and flashes within it, a seething of energies. These energies seemed to form linked networks inside the cloud. At the points where they crossed were bodies.

It would have been difficult to describe those bodies in any detail. They seemed made of light themselves, silhouettes of dim fire in the yellow haze of the cloud. They were like fat worms which moved with a slow writhing; and he had the impression that they were not only alive but aware and alert; also that in some manner they were manipulating the glowing fog and its energies. What alarmed him was that this mysterious structure was moving steadily closer. If he didn’t do something he would be engulfed by it. He did something. He didn’t know what. But suddenly he was elsewhere, sitting in chilled darkness. The foggy fire and its inhabitants were gone. He discovered he was shaking, and that in spite of the cold air his face was dripping with sweat. It was some seconds before he was able to grasp where he was still on the fourth-story balcony of the old house they had rented that day in the city of Zergandol.

So he’d fallen sleep, had a nightmare, come awake from it… And he might, he thought, have been sleeping for several hours because Zergandol looked almost completely blacked out now. Even the spaceport area showed only the dimmest reflection of light. And there wasn’t a sound. Absolute silence enclosed the dark buildings of the old section of the city around him. To the left a swollen red moon disk hung just above the horizon. Zergandol might have become a city of the dead.

Chilled to the bone by the night air, shuddering under his clothes, the captain looked around, And then up.

Two narrow building spires loomed blackly against the night sky. Above and beyond them, eerily outlining their tips, was a yellowish haze, a thin, discolored glowing smear against the stars which shone through it. It was fading as the captain stared at, it, already very faint. But it was so suggestive of the living light cloud of his dream that his heart began leaping all over again.

It dimmed further, was gone. Not a trace remained. And while he was still wondering what it all meant, the captain heard the sound of voices. They came from the street below the balcony, two or three people speaking rapidly, in hushed tones. They might have been having a nervous argument about something, but it was the Uldunese language, so he wasn’t sure. He heaved himself stiffly out of the chair, moved to the balcony railing and peered down through the gloom. A groundcar was parked in the street, two shadowy, gesticulating figures standing beside it. After some seconds they broke off their discussion and climbed into the car. He heard a metallic click as its door closed. The driving lights came on, dimmed, and the car moved off slowly along the street. In the reflection of the lights he’d had a glimpse of markings on its side, which just might have been the pattern of bold squares that was the insignia of the Daal’s police.

Here and there, as he gazed around now, other lights began coming on in Zergandol. But not too many. The city remained very quiet. Perhaps, he thought, there had been an attempted raid from space by the ships of that infamous pirate, the Agandar, which had now been beaten off. But if there’d been some kind of alert which had darkened the city, he’d slept through the warning; and evidently so had Goth.

He had never heard of a weapon though which could have produced that odd yellow discoloring of a large section of the night sky. It was all very mysterious. For a moment the captain had the uneasy suspicion that he was still partly caught up in his nightmare and that what he’d thought he’d seen up there had been nothing more real than a lingering reflection of his musings about the ancient evil of Uldune and the space about it. Confused and dog-tired, he left the balcony, carefully locking its door behind him, found his bedroom and was soon asleep.

He didn’t tell Goth about his experiences next day. He’d intended to, but when they woke up there was barely time for a quick breakfast before they hurried off to keep an early appointment with Sunnat, Bazim & Filish. The partners made no mention of unusual occurrences during the night, and neither did anybody else they met during the course of the crowded day. The captain presently became uncertain whether he hadn’t in fact dreamed up the whole odd business. By evening he was rather sure he had. There . was no reason to bore Goth with the account of a dream.

Within a few days, with so much going on connected with the rebuilding of the Venture and their other plans, he forgot the episode completely. It was several weeks then before he remembered it again. What brought it to mind was a conversation he happened to overhear between Vezzarn, the old Uldunese spacedog they’d hired on as purser, bookkeeper, and general crewhand for the Venture, and one of Vezzarn’s cronies who’d dropped in at the office for a visit. They were talking about something called Worm Weather…

Meanwhile there’d been many developments, mostly of a favorable nature. Work on the Venture proceeded apace. The captain couldn’t have complained about lack of interest on the side of his shipbuilders. After the first few days either Bazim or Filish seemed always around, supervising every detail of every operation. They were earnest, hardworking, middle-aged men-Bazim big, beefy, and sweaty, Filish lean, weathered, and dehydratedlooking-who appeared to know everything worth knowing about the construction and outfitting of spaceships. Sunnat, the third member of the firm and apparently the one who really ran things, was tall, red-headed, strikingly handsome, and female. She could be no older than the captain, but he had the impression that Bazim and Filish were. more than a little afraid of her.

His own feelings about Sunnat were mixed. During their first few meetings she’d been polite, obviously interested in an operation which should net the firm a large, heavy profit, but aloof. Her rare smiles remained cold and her gray-green eyes seemed constantly on the verge of going into a smoldering rage about something. She left the practical planning and work details to Bazim and Filish, while they deferred to her in the financial aspects. That had suddenly changed, at least as far as the captain was concerned. From one day to another, Sunnat seemed to have thawed to him; whenever he appeared in the shipyard or at the partners’ offices, she showed up, smiling, pleasant, and talkative. And when he stayed in the little office he’d rented to take care of other business, in a square of the spaceport administration area across from S., B. & F, she was likely to drop in several times a day. It was flattering at first. Sunnat’s sternly beautiful face and graceful, velvet-skinned body would have quickened any man’s pulses; the captain wasn’t immune to their attractiveness. In public she wore a gray cloak which covered her from neck to ankles, but the outfit beneath it, varying from day to day, calculatingly exposed some sizable section or other of Sunnat’s person, sculptured shoulders and back, the flat and pliable midriff, or a curving line of thigh. Her perfumes and hair-styling seemed to change as regularly as the costumes. It became a daily barrage, increasing in intensity, on the captain’s senses; and on occasion his senses reeled. When Sunnat put her hand on his sleeve to emphasize a conversational point or brushed casually along his side as they clambered about together on the scaffoldings now lining the Venture’s hull, he could feel his breath go short.

But there still was something wrong about it. He wasn’t sure what ‘except perhaps that when Goth came around he had the impression that Sunnat stiffened inside. She always spoke pleasantly to Goth on such occasions, and Goth replied as pleasantly, in a polite little-girl way, which wasn’t much like her usual manner. Their voices made a gentle duet. But beneath them the captain seemed to catch faint, distant echoes of a duet of another kind, like the yowling of angry jungle cats.

It got to be embarrassing finally, and he found himself increasingly inclined to avoid Sunnat when he could. If he saw the tall, straight shape in the gray cloak heading across the square towards his office, he was as likely as not to slip quietly out of the back door for lunch, leaving instructions with Vezzarn to report that he’d been called out on business elsewhere. Vezzarn was a couple of decades beyond middle age but a spry and wiry little character, whose small gray eyes didn’t seem to miss much. He was cheery and polite, very good with figures. Above all, he’d logged six passes through the Chaladoor and didn’t mind making a few more for the customary steep risk pay and with, as he put it, the right ship and the right skipper. The Evening Bird, building in the shipyard, plus Captain Aron of Mulm seemed to meet his requirements there.

The day the captain recalled the odd dream he’d had during their first night in Zergandol, a man named Tobul had dropped by at the office to talk to Vezzarn. They were distant relatives, and Tobul was a traveling salesman whose routes took him over most of Uldune. He’d been a spacer like Vezzarn in his younger days; and like most spacers, the two used Imperial Universum in preference to Uldunese when they talked together. So the captain kept catching scraps of the conversation in Vezzarn’s cubicle.

He paid no attention to it until he heard Tobul inquire, “Safe to mention Worm Weather around here at the moment?”

Wondering what the fellow meant, the captain looked up from his paper work.

“Safe enough,” replied Vezzarn. “Hasn’t been a touch of it for a month now. You been running into any?”

“More’n I like, let me tell you! There was a bad bout of it in… ” He gave the name of some Uldune locality which the captain didn’t quite get. “Just before I got there. Very bad! Everywhere you went people were still going off into screaming fits. Didn’t hang around there long, believe me!”

“Don’t blame you.”

“That evening after I left, I saw the sky starting to go yellow again behind me. I made tracks… They could’ve got hit as bad again that night. Or worse!

Course you never hear anything about it.”

“No.” There was a pause while the captain listened, straining his ears now. The sky going yellow? Suddenly and vividly he saw every detail of that ominous fiery dream-structure again, drifting towards him, and the yellow discoloration fading against the stars above Zergandol.

“Seems like it keeps moving farther west and south,” Vezzarn went on thoughtfully. “Ten years ago nobody figured it ever would get to Uldune.”

“Well, it’s been all around the planet this time!” Tobul assured him. “Longest bout we ever had. And if I… ”

The captain lost the rest of it. He’d glanced out the window just then and spotted Sunnat coming across the square. It was a one-way window so she couldn’t see him. He hesitated a moment to make sure she was headed for the office. Once before he’d ducked too hastily out the back entrance and run into her as she was coming through the adjoining building arcade. There was no reason to hurt her pride by letting her know he preferred to avoid her. Today she was clearly on her way to see him. The captain picked up his cap, stopped for an instant at Vezzarn’s cubicle.

“I’ve been gone for a couple of hours,”, he announced, “and may not be back for a few more.”

“Right, sir!” said Vezzarn understandingly. .”The chances are you’re at the bank this very moment.”

“Probably,” the captain agreed, and left. Once outside, he recalled several matters he might as well be taking care of that afternoon; so it was, in fact, getting close to evening before he returned to the office. Tobul had left and Sunnat wasn’t around; but Goth showed up, and Vezzarn was entertaining her in the darkening office with horror tales of his experiences in the Chaladoor and elsewhere. He told a good story, apparently didn’t exaggerate too much, and Goth, who no doubt could have topped his accounts by a good bit if she’d felt like it, always enjoyed listening to him.

The captain told him to go on, and sat down. When Vezzarn reached the end of his yam, he asked, “By the way, just what is that Worm Weather business you and Tobul were talking about today?”

He got a quick look from Goth and Vezzarn both. Vezzarn appeared puzzled.

“Just what … ? I’m not sure I understand, sir,” he said. “We’ve had a good bit of it around Uldune for the past couple of months, and that’s very unusual for these longitudes, of course. But… ”

“I meant,” explained the captain, “what is it?”

Vezzarn now looked startled. He glanced at Goth, back at the captain.

“You’re serious? Why, you’re really a long way from home!” he exclaimed. Then he caught himself. “Uh, no offense, sir! No offense, little lady! Where you’re from is none of my foolish business, and that’s the truth… But you’ve never heard of Worm Weather? The Nuris? Manaret, the Worm World?… Moander Who Speaks with a Thousand Voices?”

“I don’t know a thing about any of them,” the captain admitted. Goth very likely did, now that he thought of it; but she said nothing.

“Hm!” Vezzarn scratched the grizzled bristles on his scalp, and grimaced.

“Hm!” he repeated dubiously. He got up behind his desk, went to the window, glanced out at the clear evening sky and sat down on the sill.

“I’m not particularly superstitious,” he remarked. “But if you don’t mind, sir, I’ll stay here where I can keep an eye out while I’m on that subject. You’ll know why when I’m done… ”

If Vezzarn had been more able to resist telling a good story to someone who hadn’t heard it before, it is likely the captain would not have learned much about Worm Weather from him. The little spaceman became increasingly nervous as he talked on and the world beyond the window continued to darken; his eyes swung about to search the sky every minute or so. But whatever apprehensions he felt didn’t stop him.

Where was the Worm World, dread Manaret? None knew. Some thought it was concealed near the heart of the Chaladoor, in the Sea of Light. Some believed it lay so far-to Galactic East that no exploring ship had ever come upon it, or if one had, it had been destroyed too swiftly to send back word of its awesome find. Some argued it might be sheathed in mile-thick layers of solidified poisonous gas. Any of those guesses could be true, because almost all that was known of Manaret was of its tunneled, splendidly ornamented interior.

Vezzarn inclined to the theory it was to be found, if one cared to search for it, at some vast distance among the star swarms to Far Galactic East. Year after year, decade after decade, as long as civilized memory went back, the glowing plague of Worm Weather had seemed to come drifting farther westward to harass the worlds of humanity.

And what was Worm Weather? Eh, said Vezzarn, the vehicles, the fireships of the Nuri worms of Manaret! Hadn’t they been seen riding their webs of force in the yellow-burning clouds, tinging the upper air of the planets they touched with their reflections? He himself was one of the few who had encountered Worm Weather in deep space and lived to tell of it. Two months east of Uldune it had been. There, in space it was apparent that the clouds formed globes, drifting as swiftly as the swiftest ships.

“In the screens we could see the Nuris, those dreadful worms,” Vezzarn said hoarsely, hunched like a dark gnome on the window sill against the dimming city. “And who knows, perhaps they saw us! But we turned and ran and they didn’t follow. It was a bold band of boys who crewed that ship; but of the twelve of us, three went mad during the next few hours and never recovered. And the rest couldn’t bring ourselves to slow the ship until we had eaten up almost all our power-so we barely came crawling back to port at last!”

The captain pushed his palm over his forehead, wiping clammy sweat, “But what are they?” he asked. “What do they want?”

“What are they? They are the Nuris… What do they want?” Vezzarn shook his head. “Worm Weather comes! Perhaps only a lick of fire in the sky at night. Perhaps nothing else happens… ” He paused. “But when they send out their thoughts, sir, then it can be bad! Then it can be very bad!”

People slept, and woke screaming. Or walked in fear of something for which they had no name. Or saw the glorious and terrible caverns of Manaret opening before them in broad daylight… Some believed they had been taken there, and somehow returned.

People did vanish when Worm Weather came. People who never were seen again. That was well established. It did not happen always, but it had happened too often…

Perhaps it wasn’t even the thoughts of the Nuris that poured into a human world at such times, but the thoughts of Moander. Moander the monster, the god, who crouched on the surface of Manaret… who spoke in a thousand voices, in a thousand tongues. Some said the Nuris themselves were no more than Moander’s thoughts drifting out and away endlessly through the universe. It had been worse, it seemed, in the old days. There were ancient stories of worlds whose populations had been swept by storms of panic and such wildly destructive insanity that only mindless remnants were later found still huddling in the gutted cities. And worlds where hundreds of thousands of inhabitants had tracelessly disappeared overnight. But those events had been back in the period of the Great Eastern Wars when planets enough died in gigantic battlings among men. What role Manaret had played in that could no longer be said with any certainty.

“One thing is true though, sir,” Vezzarn concluded earnestly. “I’ve been telling you this because you asked, and because you should know there’s danger in it. But it’s a bad business otherwise to talk much about Worm Weather or what it means, even to think about it too long. That’s been known a long time. Where there’s loose talk about Worm Weather, there Worm Weather will go finally. It’s as if they can feel the talk and don’t like it. So nobody wants to say much about it. It’s safer to take no more interest in them than you can help. Though it’s hard to keep from thinking about the devil-things when you see the, sky turning yellow above your head!

“Now I’ll wish you good-night, Dani and Captain Aron. It’s time and past for supper and a nightcap for old Vezzarn, who talks a deal more than he should, I think.”

“Didn’t know the Worm stuff had been around here,” Goth remarked thoughtfully as they turned away from the groundcab that had brought them back up to their house.

“You already knew about that, eh?” The captain nodded. “I had the impression you did. Got something to tell you, but we’d better wait till we’re private.”

“Uh-huh!”

She went up the winding stairway to the living room while the captain took the groceries they’d picked up in the port shopping area to the kitchen. When he followed her upstairs he saw an opaque cloudy shimmering just beyond the living room door, showing she’d switched on their spy-proofing gadget. The captain stepped into the shimmering and it cleared away before him. The watch-shaped device lay on the table in the center of the room, and Goth was warming her hands at the fireplace. She looked around.

“Well,” he said, “now we can talk. Did Vezzarn have his story straight?”

Goth nodded. “Pretty straight. That Worm World isn’t really a world at all, though.”

“No? What is it?”

“Ship,” Goth told him. “Sort of a spaceship. Big one! Big as Uldune or Karres…

Better tell me first what you were going to.”

“Well-“The captain hesitated. “It’s that description Vezzarn gave of the Nuris… ” He reported his dream, the feelings it had aroused in him, and what had been going on when he woke up. “Apparently there really was Worm Weather over Zergandol that night,” he concluded.

“Uh-huh!” Goth’s teeth briefly indented her lower lip. Her eyes remained reflectively on his face.

“But I don’t have any explanation for the dream,” the captain said. “Unless it was the kind of thing Vezzarn was talking about.”

“Wasn’t exactly a dream, Captain. Nuris have a sort of klatha. You were seeing them that way. Likely, they knew it.”

“What makes you think that?” he asked, startled.

“Nuris hunt witches,” Goth explained.

“Hunt them? Why?”

She shrugged. “They’ve figured out too much about the Manaret business on Karres… Other reasons, too!”

Now he became alarmed. “But then you’re in danger while we’re on Uldune!”

“I’m not,” Goth said. “You were in danger. You’d be again if we got Worm Weather anywhere near Zergandol.”

“But… ”

“You got klatha. Nuris would figure you for a witch. We’ll fix that now!”

She moved out before him, facing him, lifted a finger, held it up in front of his eyes, a few feet away. Her face grew dead serious, intent. “Watch the way it moves!”

He followed the fingertip as it drew a fleeting, wavy line through the air. Goth’s hand stopped, closed quickly to a fist as if cutting off the line behind it. “You do it now,” she said. “In your head.”

“Draw the same kind of line, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

She waited while the captain went through some difficult mental maneuverings.

“Got it!” he announced at last, with satisfaction.

Goth’s finger came up again. “Now this one… ”

Three further linear patterns were traced in the air for him, each quite different from the others. Practicing them mentally, the captain felt himself grow warm, perspiry, vaguely wondered why. When he was able to say he’d mastered the fourth one, Goth nodded.

“Now you do them together, Captain … one after the other, the way I showed you, as quick as you can!”

“Together, eh?” He loosened his collar. He wasn’t just perspiring now; he was dripping wet. A distinct feeling of internal heat building up … some witch trick she was showing him. He might have felt more skeptical about it if it weren’t for the heat. “This helps against Nuris?”

“Uh-huh. A lock.” Goth didn’t smile; she was disregarding his appearance, and her small brown face was still very intent. “Hurry up! You mustn’t forget any of it.”

He grunted, closed his eyes, concentrated.

Pattern One-easy! Pattern Two… Pattern Three…

His mind wavered an instant, groping. Internal heat suddenly surged up. Startled, he remembered:

Four!

A blurred pinwheel of blue brilliance appeared, spun momentarily inside his skull, collapsed to a diamond-bright point, was gone. As it went, there was a snapping sensation, also inside his skull-an almost audible snap. Then everything was relaxing, went quiet. The heat magically ebbed away while he drew a breath. He opened his eyes, somewhat shaken.

Goth was grinning. “Knew you could do it, Captain!”

“What did I do?” he asked.

“Built a good lock! You’ll have to practice a little still. That’ll be easy. The Nuris come around then, you switch the lock on. They won’t know you’re there!”

“Well, that’s fine!” said the captain weakly. He looked about for a cloth, mopped at his face. He’d have to change his clothes, he decided. “Where’d that heat come from?”

“Klatha heat. It’s a hot pattern, all right, that’s why it’s so good… Don’t show those moves to somebody who can’t do them right. Not unless you don’t mind about them.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because they’ll burn right up, flames and smoke, if they try to do them and don’t stop fast enough,” Goth said. “Never seen someone do it, but it’s happened. “

She might have thought he was nervous if he hadn’t repeated the experiment right away to get in the practice she felt he needed. So he did. It was surprisingly easy then. On the first run through, the line patterns seemed to flicker into existence almost as his thoughts turned to one after another of them. On the second, he could barely keep up with the overall pattern as it took shape and was blanked out again by the spinning blue blur. On the third, there was only an instant flash of brilliance and that odd semi-audible snap near the top of his skull. At that point he realized there had been no recurrence of the uncomfortable heat sensations.

“You got it now!” his mentor decided when he reported. “Won’t matter if you’re asleep either. The locks know their business.”

“Incidentally, how did you know I could do it?” the captain inquired.

“You picked up the Nuris,” Goth said. “That’s good, so early… ” Over dinner she filled out his picture of the Worm World and its unpleasant inhabitants. Manaret and the witches had been at odds for a considerable time, around a hundred and fifty years, Karres time, Goth said; though she wasn’t sure of the exact period. The baleful effect of the Worm World on human civilizations was more widespread and more subtle than anyone like Vezzarn could guess, and not limited to the Nuri raids. There were powerful and malignant minds there which could act across vast reaches of space and created much mischief in human affairs.

Telepathic adepts among the people of Karres set out to trace these troubles to their source and presently discovered facts about Manaret no one had suspected. It was not a world at all, they found, but a ship of unheard-of size that had come out of an alien universe which had no normal connections to the universe known to humanity. Several centuries ago, some vast cataclysm had temporarily disabled the titanic ship and hurled it and its crew into this galaxy; and the disaster was followed by a mutiny led by Moander, the entity who “spoke in a thousand voices.” Moander, the witches learned, was a monstrous robot-brain which had taken almost complete control of the great ship, forcing the race which had built Manaret and been its masters to retreat to a heavily defended interior section where Moander’s adherents could not reach them.

Karres telepaths contacted these people who called themselves the Lyrd-Hyrier, gaining information from them but no promise of help against Moander. Moander was holding the ship in this universe with the apparent purpose of gaining control of human civilizations here and establishing itself as ultimate ruler. The Nuris, whose disagreeable physical appearance gained Manaret the name of Worm World, were a servant race which in the mutiny had switched allegiance from the Lyrd-Hyrier to Moander.

“So-then,” Goth said, “Moander found out Karres was spying on him. That’s when the Nuris started hunting witches… ”

The discovery also slowed down Moander’s plans of conquest. Karres, the megalomaniac monster evidently decided, must be found and destroyed before it could act freely. The witches at that time had no real defense against the Nuris’ methods of attack and, some eighty years ago, had been obliged to shift their world beyond the western side of the Empire to avoid them. The Nuris were not only a mental menace. They had physical weapons of alien type at their disposal which could annihilate the life of a planet in very short order. There had been a great deal to learn and work out before the witches could consider confronting them openly.

“They’ve been coming along with that pretty well, I think,” Goth said. “But it’s about time, too. Manaret’s been making a lot of trouble and it’s getting worse.”

“In what way?” The captain found himself much intrigued by all this. The Worm World more recently had developed the tactics of turning selected individual human beings into its brain-washed tools. It was suspected the current Emperor and other persons high in his council were under the immediate influence of Moander’s telepathic minions. “One of the reasons we don’t get along very well with the Imperials,” Goth explained, “is the Emperor’s got orders out to find a way to knock out Karres for good. They haven’t found one yet, though.”

The captain reflected. “Think the reason your people moved Karres had to do with Manaret again?” he asked.

Goth shrugged. “Wouldn’t have to,” she said. “The Empire’s politics go every which way, I guess. We help the Empress Hailie, she’s the best of the lot. Maybe somebody got mad about that. I don’t know. Anyway, they won’t catch Karres that easy… ”

He reflected again. “Have they found out where the Worm World is? Vezzarn thought… ”

“That’s strategy, Captain,” Goth said, rather coldly.

“Eh?”

“If anyone on Karres knows where it is, they won’t say so to anyone else who doesn’t have to know they know. Supposing you and I got picked up by the Nuris tonight… ”

“Hm!” he said. “I get it.”

It sounded like the witches were involved in interesting maneuvers on a variety of levels. But he and Goth were out of all that. Privately, the captain regretted it a little.

Their own affairs on Uldune, however, continued to progress satisfactorily. Public notice had been posted that on completion of her outfitting by the firm of Sunnat, Bazim & Filish, the modernized trader Evening Bird, skippered by Captain Aron of Mulm, would embark on a direct run through the Chaladoor to the independent world of Emris. Expected duration of the voyage: sixteen days. Reservation for cargo and a limited number of passengers could be made immediately, at standard risk run rates payable with the reservations and not refundable. A listing of the Evening Bird’s drive speeds, engine reserves, types of detection equipment, and defensive and offensive armament was added. All things considered, the response had been surprising. Apparently competition in the risk run business was not heavy at present. True, only three passengers had signed up so far, while the Venture’s former crew quarters had been remodeled into six comfortable staterooms and a combined dining room and lounge. But within a week the captain had been obliged to put a halt to the cargo reservations. He’d have to see how much space was left over after they’d stowed away the stuff he’d already committed himself to carry.

They were in business. And the outrageous risk run rates made it rather definitely big business.

Of the three passengers, one was a beautiful darkeyed damsel, calling herself Hulik do Eldel, who wanted to get to Emris as soon as she possibly could, for unspecified personal reasons, and who had, she said, complete confidence that Captain Aron and his niece would see her there safely. The second was a plump, fidgety financier named Kambine, who perspired profusely at any mention of the Chaladoor but grew hot-eyed and eager when he spoke of an illegal fortune he stood to make if he could get to a certain address on Emris within the next eight weeks. The captain liked that part not at all when he heard of it. But penalties on cancellations of risk run reservations by the carrier were so heavy that he couldn’t simply cross Kambine off the passenger list. They’d have to get him there; but he would give Emris authorities the word on the financier’s underhanded plot immediately on arrival. That might be very poor form by Uldune’s standards; but the captain couldn’t care less. The last of them was one Laes Yango, a big-boned, dour faced businessman who stood a good head taller than the captain and had little to say about himself. He was shepherding some crates of extremely valuable hyperelectronic equipment through the Chaladoor, would transfer with them on Emris for a destination several weeks’ travel beyond. Yango, the captain thought, should create no problems aboard. He wasn’t so sure of the other two. When it came to problems on Uldune, he still had a number to handle there. But they were business matters and would be resolved. Sunnat appeared to have realized at last she’d been making something of a nuisance of herself and was now behaving more sensibly. She was still very cordial to the captain whenever they met; and he trusted he hadn’t given the tall redhead any offense. FIVE

Sedmon the Sixth, the Daal of Uldune, was a lean, dark man, tall for the Uldunese strain, with pointed, foxy features and brooding, intelligent eyes. He was a busy ruler who had never been known to indulge in the frivolity of purely social engagements. Yet he always found time to grant an audience to Hulik do Eldel when she requested it. Hulik was a very beautiful young woman who, though native to Uldune, had spent more than half her life in the Empire. She had been an agent of Central Imperial Intelligence for several years; and she and the Daal had been acquainted for about the same length of time. Sometimes they worked together, sometimes at cross-purposes. In either situation, they often found it useful to pool their information, up to a point.

Hulik had arrived early that morning at the House of Thunders, the ancient and formidable castle of the Daals in the highlands south of Zergandol, and met Sedmon in his private suite in one of the upper levels of the castle.

“Do you know,” asked Hulik, who could be very direct when she felt like, it,

“whether this rumored super spacedrive of Karres really exists?”

“I have no proof of it,” the Daal admitted. But I would not be surprised to discover it exists.”

“And if you did, how badly would you want it?”

Sedmon shrugged. “Not badly enough to do anything likely to antagonize Karres,” he said.

“Or to antagonize the Empire?”

“Depending on the circumstances,” the Daal said cautiously, “I might risk the anger of the Empire.”

Hulik was silent a moment. “The Imperium,” she said then, “very much wants to have this drive. And it does not care in the least whether it antagonizes Karres, or anybody else, in the process of getting it.”

Sedmon shrugged again. “Each to his taste,” he said dryly. Hulik smiled. “Yes,” she said, “and one thing at a time. To begin with then, do you believe a ship we have both shown interest in during the past weeks is the one equipped with this mysterious drive?”

The Daal scratched his neck. “I’m inclined to believe the ship was equipped with the drive,” he acknowledged. “I’m not sure it still is.” He blinked at her. “What are you supposed to do?”

“Either obtain the drive or keep trace of the ship until other agents can obtain it,” Hulik said promptly.

“No small order,” said Sedmon.

“Perhaps. What do you know about the man and the girl? The information I have is that the man is a Captain Pausert, citizen of Nikkeldepain, and that the child evidently is one of three he picked up in the Empire shortly before the first use of the drive was observed and reported. A child of Karres.”

“That is also the story as I know it,” Sedmon told her. “Let’s have a look at those two… .”

He went to a desk, pressed a switch. A picture of the captain and Goth appeared in a wall screen. They came walking toward the observer along one of the winding, hilly streets of Zergandol. When their figures filled the screen, the Daal stopped the motion, stood staring at them.

“To all appearances,” he said, “this man is the citizen of Nikkeldepain described and shown in the reports. But there are still unanswered questions about him. I admit I find those questions disturbing.”

“What are they?” Hulik asked, a trace of amusement in her voice.

“He may be officially the citizen of Nikkeldepain he is supposed to be, now masquerading with the assistance of my office as Captain Aron of Mulm and still be a Karres agent and a witch. Or he may be a Karres witch who had taken on the appearance of Captain Pausert of Nikkeldepain. One simply never knows with these witches… .”

He paused, shaking his head irritably. After a moment Hulik said, “Is that what’s bothering you?”

“That is what is bothering me,” Sedmon agreed. “If Captain Pausert, alias Captain Aron, is in fact a witch, I want no trouble with him or his ship.

“And if he isn’t?”

“The girl almost certainly is of the witches, the Daal said. “But I might be inclined to take a chance with her. Even that I would not like too well, since Karres has ways of finding out about occurrences that are of interest to it. “

“May I point out,” said Hulik, “that the entire world of Karres was reliably reported to have disappeared about the time this Captain Pausert was last observed in the Nikkeldepain area? The official opinion in the Imperium is that the planet was accidentally destroyed when the witches tested some superweapon of their devising, against the impending arrival of a punitive Imperial Fleet.”

The Daal scratched his neck again. “I have heard of that,” he said. “And, in fact, I have received a report from one of my own men in the meanwhile, to the effect that Karres does seem to be gone from the Iverdahl System. It is possible that it is destroyed. But I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“I have had dealings with a good number of witches, Hulik, and for many years I have made a study of Karres and its history. This is not the first time it was reported that world had disappeared. Nor, when it was observed again, was it necessarily within some months of ship travel of the point where it had been observed before.”

“A super spacedrive which moves a world?” Hulik smiled. “Really, Sedmon!” “As to that, I will say nothing more,” replied the Daal. “There are other possibilities. For all I know, Karres still is at present in the Iverdahl System but made invisible, undetectable, by the skills of the witches.”

“That, too, seems rather improbable,” Hulik remarked.

“It may seem that way,” said Sedmon. “But I know it to be a fact that, before this, ships have gone to the Iverdahl System in search of the world of Karres and were unable to find it there.” He shrugged. “In any event, it seems much safer to me to assume that the world of Karres and the witches of Karres have not disappeared permanently… ”

He stared at the frozen figures in the screen, pursed his mouth in puzzled worriment. “And besides… ”

“Well?” said Hulik as he hesitated.

The Daal waggled his fingers at the screen. “I have the strangest feeling I have encountered that man before! Perhaps also the child … And yet I find no place for either of them in my memories.”

Hulik glanced curiously at him. “That must be your imagination,” she told him.

“But your nervousness about the witches explains why you have been conducting your search for Captain Pausert’s mystery drive in what I felt was an excessively roundabout manner. “

The Daal grinned briefly. “I have,” he said, “great faith in the basic unscrupulousness of Sunnat, Bazim & Filish. And in the boldness of Sunnat. The story that came to her naturally did not mention the possibility that her clients were witches. But she and her partners are completely convinced the superdrive exists.”

“And have been searching most industriously for it in the course of rebuilding the ship,” Hulik added. “Sunnat also has attempted to bedazzle Captain Aron with her obvious physical assets… you, in the meanwhile, hovering above all this, hoping they would discover the drive for you.”

“That in part,” nodded the Daal.

“Yes. Sunnat has the greed and fury of a wild pig. I think she is not quite sane. She has not bedazzled Captain Aron, and nothing resembling concealed drive mechanisms has been found so far in the ship. Before the Evening Bird is ready to leave, you expect her then to resort to actions which will force this Captain Aron or Pausert to reveal whether or not he is a witch?”

“It will not surprise me if that occurs,” Sedmon admitted. “If it becomes apparent that he is a witch, I simply will be through with the matter.”

“And still be unimplicated,” Hulik agreed. “Of course,” she went on, “if he is not a witch and does not have a mystery drive to produce, even if strenuously urged, it’s probable that he and the child will be murdered before Sunnat decides she may have made a mistake-“

Sedmon shifted his eyes from the wall screen to her, said slowly, “This drive, if I can get it, and have afterwards a little time to work in, undisturbed, will restore Uldune to its ancient place in the hierarchy of galactic power!”

“A point,” said Hulik, “of which the Imperium is well aware. He watched her, his face expressionless.

“We shall work in different ways,” Hulik smiled. “If I get it, it may bring me great honor and rewards from the Imperium. Or it may, which really seems at least as likely, bring me quick death, by decision of the Imperium.” The smile became almost impish. “On Uldune, on the other hand… well, I would be most interested in seeing that the House of Eldel is also restored to something approximating the place of power it once held here.”

“An honorable ambition!” Sedmon nodded approvingly. “As for me, I am perhaps overly prudent and certainly not as young as I was, I could very well use a partner with youth, audacity, and intelligence, to help me direct the affairs of Uldune. In particular, of the greater Uldune that may be.”

Hulik laughed. “Great dreams! But very well… We shall work carefully. I have not yet made a report that the ship once named the Venture appears to be at present on Uldune.”

The Daal’s eyes lightened.

“But,” Hulik went on; “I shall proceed exactly as if I had made that report. If, in spite of Sunnat’s efforts and yours, the Evening Bird lifts from Uldune on schedule I’ll be on board as passenger… Now, I believe that little Vezzarn they’ve signed on for the ship is your man?”

“He is,” Sedmon said. “Of course be doesn’t know for whom he’s working.”

“Of course. I know Kambine’s background. He’s nothing. “

“Nothing,” the Daal agreed.

“Laes Yango?”

“A man to be reckoned with in his field.”

“What specifically is his field? I’ve been able to get very little information on him.

“He deals. High-value, high-profit items only. He maintains his own cruiser; makes frequent space trips, uses other carriers for special purposes, as in this case. He banks a considerable amount of money at all times, makes and receives large payments at irregular intervals to and from undisclosed accounts by subradio. Some of his business seems to be legitimate.”

“He should not become a problem then?” Hulik said.

“There is no reason to assume he would be, in this matter.” The Daal looked at her curiously. “Am I to understand you intend to continue your efforts to obtain the drive, even if Captain Aron turns out to be what I suspect he is?”

“I do intend that,” Hulik nodded. “I have my own theory about your Karres witches.”

“What is that?”

“They are, among other things, skilled and purposeful bluffers. The disappearing world story, for example. Karres has been described to me as a primitive, forested planet showing no detectable signs of inhabitation. There are many such uninhabited worlds. Few are even indicated in standard star maps. It seems most probable to me that the witches, instead of moving Karres through space, themselves move by more conventional methods of travel from one world of that sort to a similar one elsewhere and presently let it be known that Karres was magically transported by them to a new galactic sector! I believe their purpose is to frighten everyone, including even the Imperium, into leaving them severely alone. That they are capable of a number of astonishing tricks seems true. It is even possible they have developed a superdrive to transport ordinary spaceships. But worlds?” She shook her head skeptically. “Pausert may be a Karres witch. If so, his mysterious powers have not revealed to him even the simple fact that Vezzarn was planted on him as a spy… No, I’m not afraid of the witches!”

“You don’t feel afraid of the Chaladoor either?” the Daal asked.

“A little,” Hulik admitted. “But considerably more afraid of not getting the drive from Captain Pausert, if it should turn out later that there really was such a thing on his ship. When the stakes high, the Imperium becomes a stringent employer!” She shrugged. “And since success in this might be a deadly to me as failure, you and Uldune can count on me…. afterwards.”

A colored, soundless whirlwind was spinning slowly and steadily about the captain. He watched it bemusedly a while, then had his attention distracted by a puzzled awareness that he seemed to be sitting upright, none too comfortably, on something like cold stone floor, his back touching something like cold stone wall. He realized suddenly that he had his eyes closed, and decided he might as well open them. He did. The giddily spinning colors faded from his vision; the world grew steady. But what place was this? What was he doing here?

He glanced around. It seemed a big underground vault, wide and low, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet long. Thick stone pillars supported the curved ceiling sections. A number of glowing white globes in iron cages hung by chains from the ceiling, giving a vague general illumination to the place. Across the vault the captain saw a narrow staircase leading up through the wall. It seemed the only exit.

On his right, some thirty feet away, was a fireplace…

He gazed at the fireplace thoughtfully. It was built into the wall; in it was a large, hot coal fire. The individual coals glowed bright red, and continuous flickerings of heat ran over the piled mass. A poker shaped like a small slender spear stood at a slant, it tip in the coals, its handle resting on a bronze fire grate.

Some feet away from the fire was a marble-topped table. Beside it, a large wooden tub.

It was an odd-looking arrangement. And why should anyone build such a great fire on a warmish spring evening on Uldune? He could feel the waves of heat rolling out of it from here.

Warmish spring evening… . the captain’s memory suddenly awoke. This was the day they’d made a complete ground check of the Evening Bird’s instrumentation. Everything was in faultless working order; he and Goth had been delighted. Then Goth had gone back to the house. Sunnat, who’d attended the check-out with Filish, suggested sociably he buy them a drink as reward for the good job the firm had had done so far. But Filish had excused himself. He could see no harm in buying her a drink. There’d been a low ceilinged, half-dark, expensive bar off the spaceport. Somebody guided them around a couple of corners, left them at a table in a dim-lit niche by themselves. The drinks appeared and right around then that rainbow hued whirlwind seemed to have begun revolving around him. He couldn’t recall another thing. Well, no sense sitting here and pondering about it! He’d go upstairs, find someone to tell him where he was and what had happened to Sunnat. He gathered his legs under him, then made another discovery. This one was startling. A narrow metal ring was closed around his right ankle. A slender chain was locked to the ring and eight feet away the chain ended in a link protruding from the solid wall. He stared down at it in shocked outrage. Why, he was a prisoner here! Conflicting surmises tumbled in momentary confusion through his mind. The most likely thought seemed then that there’d been trouble of some kind in the bar and that as a result he’d wound up in one of the Daal’s jails…

but he still couldn’t remember a thing about it.

The captain scrambled to his feet, the chain making mocking clanks along the floor beside him. “Hey!” he yelled angrily. “Hey! Somebody here?”

For a moment he thought he’d heard a low laugh somewhere. But there was no one in sight.

“Hey!”

“Why, what’s the trouble, Captain Aron?”

He turned, saw Sunnat twenty feet off on his left, standing beside one of the thick pillars which supported the ceiling of the vault. She must have stepped out from behind it that very moment.

The captain stared at her. She was in one of her costumes. This one consisted of crimson trousers and slippers, a narrow strip of glittering green material wound tightly about her breasts, and a crimson turban which concealed her hair and had a great gleaming green stone set in the front of it above her forehead. She stood motionless, her face in shadow, watching him. The costume didn’t make her appear attractive or seductive. Standing in the big, silent vault, she looked spooky and menacing. Her head shifted slightly and there seemed to be a momentary glitter in the eyes of the shadowed face. The captain cleared his throat, twisted his mouth into a smile.

“You had me worried, Sunnat!” he admitted. “How did you do it? I really thought I was waking up in an Uldune prison!”

Sunnat didn’t answer. She turned and started over towards the fireplace as if he hadn’t spoken.

“How about getting me loose from the wall now?” the captain said coaxingly. “A joke’s a joke but there are really a number of things I should be taking care of. And I told Dani I’d be home in time for dinner. “

Sunnat turned her head, eyes half shut, and gave him an odd, slow smile. It sent a chill down his spine. He wished he hadn’t mentioned Goth.

“Come on, Sunnat!” He put a touch of annoyance into his voice. “We’re grown-ups, and this game’s getting a little childish!”

Sunnat muttered something he didn’t understand. She might have been talking to herself. She’d reached the fireplace, stood staring down at the poker a moment, then picked it out of the coals by its handle and came towards him with it, holding it lightly like a sword, the fiery tip weaving back and forth. The captain watched her. Her eyes were wide open now, fixed on him. The tall body swayed forward a little as she walked. She looked like some snake-thing about to strike.

He wasn’t too alarmed. Sunnat might be drugged or drunk, or she might have gone out of her mind. And he didn’t like the poker. This was trouble, perhaps bad trouble. But if she got close enough to use the poker, he’d jump her and get it from her…

She didn’t come that close. She stopped twelve feet away, well beyond his reach.

“Captain Aron,” she said, “I think you already know this isn’t really a joke!

I want something you have, and you’re going to give it to me. Now let me tell you a story.”

It was the story, somewhat distorted and with many omissions, of his experiences with the Sheewash Drive on the far side of the Empire. It didn’t mention Karres and didn’t mention klatha. Neither did it mention that he’d picked up three witch children on Porlumma. Otherwise, it came comfortably close to the facts.

“I don’t have any such drive mechanism on ship,” the captain repeated, staring at her, wondering how she could possibly have got that information. “Whoever told you I did was lying!”

Sunnat smiled unpleasantly. He knew by now that she wasn’t drunk or drugged. Neither was she out her mind, at least by her own standards. She was engaged in a matter of business, in the old Uldune style. And she looked the part. The poker was cooling but could be quickly reheated; She might have been some pirate chieftain’s lady, who had volunteered to interrogate a stubborn prisoner.

“No, you’re lying,” she said. “Though it may be true that the drive mechanism is not on the ship presently. But you know where it is. And you’ll tell me.”

As the captain started to speak, she brought some small golden object from a pocket of her trousers and lifted it to her mouth. There was a short, piercing whistle. Sunnat turned away from him, smiled back at him over her shoulder and returned to the fireplace, the poker dangling loosely from her hand. He heard sounds from the stairway, shuffling footsteps.

Filish and Bazim appeared, coming carefully down the stairs side by side, carrying a chair between them. Goth was in the chair. There was a gag in her mouth; and even at that distance the captain could see her arms were fastened by the wrists to the sides of the chair.

“Over here!” Sunnat called to her partners. They started towards her with Goth. She put the poker back in the coals, its handle resting on the grate, and stood waiting for them. As they came up, she reached out and snatched the gag from Goth’s mouth. Goth jerked forward then settled back while the two men put the chair down beside the table, facing the fire. Sunnat tossed the gag into the coals.

“No need for that here, you see!” she informed the captain. “This is a very old place, Captain Aron, and there’s been a great deal of strange noise made down here from time to time, which never disturbed anybody outside. It will cause no disturbance tonight.

“Now then, we have your brat. You’re quite fond of her, I think. In a minute, or two, I’ll also have a very hot poker. If you don’t wish to talk now, you needn’t. On the other hand, you may tell me anything you wish, until I decide the poker is as hot as I want it to be. After that I’m afraid I’ll be too busy to listen to what you have to say, if I’m able to hear you, which I doubt, for well… . perhaps ten minutes… .”

She swung to face him fully, jabbed a finger in his direction.

“And then, Captain Aron, when it’s become quiet enough so you can speak to me again, then I’ll be convinced that what you want to tell me is no lie but the truth. But that may be a little late for your little Dani.”

He felt like a chunk of ice. Goth had glanced over at him with her no-expression look, but only for an instant; she was watching Sunnat again now. The two men clearly didn’t like this much, Bazim was sweating heavily and Filish’s face showed a frozen nervous grimace. He could expect no interference from those two. Sunnat was running the show here, as she usually did in the firm. But perhaps he could gain a little time.

“Wait a moment, Sunnat,” he said suddenly. “You don’t have to hurt Dani, I’ll tell you where the thing is.”

“Oh?” replied Sunnat. She’d pulled the poker out of the coals, was waving the glowing tip back and forth in the air, studying it. “Where?” she asked.

“It’s partly disassembled,” the captain improvised rapidly. “Part of it is still in the ship, very difficult to find, of course… .”

“Of course,” Sunnat nodded. “And the rest?”

“One small piece is in the house. Everything else has been locked up in two different bank vaults. I had to be careful… .”

“No doubt,” she said. “Well, Captain Aron, you’re still lying, I’m afraid!

You’re not frightened enough yet… Bazim, get the water ready. Let’s test this on the brat’s sleeve, as a start.”

Bazim reached into the wooden tub beside the table and brought out a dripping ladle of water. He moved behind Goth’s chair, stood holding the ladle in a hand that shook noticeably. Water sloshed from it to the floor.

“Steady, now”‘ Sunnat laughed at him. “This won’t even hurt the brat yet, if I’m careful. Ready?”

Bazim grunted. Sunnat’s hand moved and the poker tip delicately touched the sleeve of Goth’s jacket. The captain held his breath. Smoke curled from the jacket as the poker moved up along the cloth. There was a sudden flicker of fire.

Bazim reached over hastily. But his hand shook too hard, water spilled all over Goth’s lap instead of on the sleeve. Sunnat stepped back, laughing. Bazim turned, dipped the ladle back into the tub, and flung its contents almost blindly in Goth’s direction. It landed with a splat and a hiss exactly where it was needed. The line of fire vanished, and Sunnat let out a startled yell…

The captain found he was breathing again. Crouched and tense, he watched. Sunnat was behaving very strangely! Grasping the poker handle in both hands, she backed away from Goth and the others along the wall, holding the poker out and down, arms stiff and straight. The partners stared open-mouthed. The captain saw the muscles in Sunnat’s arms strain as if it took all the strength she had to hold the poker. Her face was white and terrified.

“Quick!” she screamed suddenly. “Filish! Bazim! Your guns! Kill him now! He’s doing it. He’s pulling it away from me! Ah-no!”

The last was a howl of despair as the poker twitched violently, spun out of Sunnat’s hands and fell. It twisted on the flooring, its fiery tip darting back up towards her legs. She gave a shriek, leaped high and to one side, looked back, saw the poker rolling after her. She dodged away from it again, screaming, “Shoot! Shoot!”

But other things were happening. Bazim began to bellow wildly and went into a series of clumsy leaps, turns and twists, clutching his seat with both hands. Filish swung around towards the captain, reaching under his coat… and the captain felt something smack into the palm of his right hand. He wrapped his fingers around it before it could drop, saw with no surprise at all that it was a gun, lifted to trigger a shot above Filish’s head. But by then there was no need to shoot, Filish too, was howling and gyrating about with Bazim. Sunnat was sprinting towards the stairs while something clattered and smoked along the floor a yard behind her.

There were a couple of light clinks at the captain’ feet. Another gun lay there, and a small key. There was a mighty splash not far away. He looked up, saw Bazim and Filish sitting side by side in the tub, their leg hanging over its edge, tears streaming down their faces Sunnat had disappeared up the stairs. He couldn’t see the poker.

Quite calmly, the captain went down on his left knee and fitted the key into the lock of the metal ring around his ankle and turned it. The ring snapped open. He put the other gun, which would be Bazim’s, into a pocket, stood up and went over to Goth. The partners stared at him in wide-eyed horror, trying to crouch deeper into the tub.

“Thanks, Captain!” Goth said in a clear, unruffled voice as he came up. “I was wondering when you’d let those three monkeys have it!”

The captain couldn’t think immediately of something appropriate to reply to that. He knew it hadn’t been some vagrant vatch at work this time, it had been Goth. So he only grunted as he began to loosen the cords around her wrists. Then he ran his finger along the burned streak on her jacket sleeve. “Get singed?” he asked.

“Uh-uh!” Goth smiled up at him. “Didn’t even get warm.” She looked over at Bazim and Filish. “Serves them right to get hot coals in their back pockets for that though!”

“I thought so,” the captain agreed.

“I’m afraid that poker didn’t catch up with Sunnat” Goth added. She’d got out of the chair, stood rubbed her wrists, looking around.

“No. I was rather busy, you know… I doubt she’ll get far.” If Goth felt it was best to let Bazim and Filish believe he was the one who’d done the witching around here, he’d go along with it. He gave the two a look. They cringed anew.

“Well, now… ” he began.

“Somebody’s coming, Captain!” Goth interrupted, cocking her head. It seemed quite a number of people were coming. Boots clattered hurriedly on the staircase, descending towards them. Then a dozen or so men in the uniform of the Daal’s Police bolted down the stairs into the vault, spread out, holding guns. The one in the lead caught sight of the captain and Goth, shouted, “Halt!” to the others and hurried towards them while his companions stayed where they were.

“Ah, Your Wisdoms!” the officer greeted them respectfully as he approached.

“You are unharmed, of course, but accept the Daal’s profound apologies for this occurrence, extended for the moment through his unworthy servant. We learned of the plans these rascals were devising against you too late to spare you the annoyance of having to deal with them yourselves.” He gave the partners a look of stem loathing. “I see you have been merciful, they live. But not for long. I feel! We captured the woman as she attempted to escape to the street… Now if Your Wisdoms will permit me to speak to you privately while my men remove this scum from your presence… ”

The captain found it difficult to get to sleep that night. The policeman, a Major something-or-other, he hadn’t caught the name, had transmitted an invitation to them from the Daal to attend the judging of the villainous partners at the Daal’s Little Court in the House of Thunders next day. He’d accepted. A groundcar would come by two hours after sunrise to take them there.

Goth had explained the “Your Wisdoms” form of address after they returned to the house and switched on their spy-screen. “It’s how they talk to a witch around here,” she said, “when they want to be polite… and when they’re supposed to know you’re a witch.”

Apparently it was regarded as good policy on Uldune to be polite to witches of Karres. And the Daal evidently had intended to let them know in this roundabout way that he knew they were witches.

He was only half right, of course…

Did Sedmon the Sixth have something else in mind with the invitation? Goth figured he did but she didn’t feel it was anything to worry about. “The Daal wants to get along with Karres… ”

There shouldn’t be any trouble with the overlord of Uldune in connection with the Sheewash Drive, of which he would hear from the prisoners tomorrow, if he didn’t already know about it. But the captain’s thoughts kept veering towards some probably very unpleasant aspects of their visit to the House of Thunders. He realized presently that he was afraid to go to sleep because he probably would start dreaming about them.

He raised his head suddenly from the pillow. There was shimmering motion in the dim-lit hall beyond the open door of the room, a blurred suggestion of a small figure beyond it. The shimmering came into the room, advanced towards the bed, blotting but the room behind it, moved along the bed, passed over the captain’s head, and went on into the wall. The room had become visible again and Goth, in her white sleep-pants, was now perched on the foot of the bed, legs crossed, looking at him. She had their spy-proofing device in one hand.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“You’re worrying about that pig getting skinned!” Goth told him.

“Hmm … Sunnat?”

“Who else?”

“Well, the others, too,” said the captain. “It’s a rather horrid practice, you know!”

“Uh-huh. You needn’t worry, though.”

“Why not?”

“Sedmon isn’t having anyone skinned tomorrow, if we don’t say so.”

“Why should he care what we say?”

“We’re witches, Your Wisdom!” Goth said. She chuckled gently.

“Well, but… ”

“Threbus and Toll know Sedmon, Captain. They visited his place four, five times before I was born. They told me about him. He’s got a sort of skullcap he uses that keeps klatha waves out of his mind. You can bet he’ll wear it tomorrow! But he still doesn’t want trouble with witches. He knows too much about them.”

“That’s why you got them to think I did those klatha tricks tonight?” the captain asked.

“Sure. If they found out we got the Drive here, they better think we can keep it. Far as Sedmon is concerned, you’re a witch now.”

“What kind of a fellow is he otherwise?” the captain asked. “I’ve heard stories… ”

“I can tell you stories about Sedmon you won’t believe,” Goth said. “But not tonight. Just one thing. If we’re alone with him, not if someone else is around and it looks as if he’s starting to wonder again if you’re a witch, call him ‘Sedmon of the Six Lives.’ He’ll snap to it then.”

“Sedmon of the Six Lives, eh? What does that mean?”

“Don’t know,” Goth said. She yawned. “Threbus can tell you when we see him. But it’ll work.”

“I’ll remember it,” the captain said.

“Going to do any more worrying?” Goth asked.

“No. Night, witch!”

“Night, Your Wisdom!” She slipped down from the bed, clicking off the spy-screen, and was gone from the room.

Impressive as the House of Thunders looked from a distance, it became apparent, as the military groundcar carrying Goth and the captain approached it up winding mountain roads, that its exterior was as weather-beaten and neglected as the streets of the old quarter of Zergandol. The Daal’s penuriousness was proverbial on Uldune. Evidently it extended even to keeping up the appearance of the mighty edifice which was the central seat of his government.

The section of the structure through which they presently were escorted was battered, but filled with not particularly unobtrusive guards. Several openings and hallways revealed the metallic gleam of heavy armament, obviously in excellent repair. Dilapidated the House of Thunders might look, the captain thought, but for the practical purpose of planetary defense it should still be a fortress to be reckoned with. The escorting officers paused presently before an open door, bowed the visitors through it and drew the door quietly shut behind them.

This was a windowless room, well furnished, its walls concealed by the heavy ornamental hangings of another period. Sedmon stood here waiting for them. The captain saw a lean, middle-aged man, dark-skinned, with steady, watchful eyes. Uldune’s lord wore a long black robe and a helmetlike cap of velvet green, which covered half his forehead and enclosed his skull to the nape of his neck. The last must be the anti-klatha device Goth had mentioned. He greeted them cordially, using the names with which his Office of Identities had supplied them and apologized for the outrage attempted against them by Sunnat, Bazim & Filish.

“My first impulse,” he said, “was to have those wretches put to death without an hour’s delay!”

“Well,” said the captain uncomfortably, quickly blot-ting out another mental vision of the Daal’s executions peeling wicked Sunnat’s skin from her squirming body, “it may not be necessary to be quite so severe with them!”

Sedmon nodded. “You are generous! But that was to be expected. In fact, in the cases of Bazim and Filish Your Wisdom appears to have inflicted on the spot the punishment you regarded as suitable to their offense-“

“It was what they deserved,” the captain agreed.

The Daal coughed. “Also,” he said, “I have considered that Bazim and Filish are, when in their senses, most valuable subjects. They claim they acted as they did solely out of their great fear of Sunnat’s anger. If it is your wish then, I shall release them to conclude the work on your ship, as stipulated by contract, with this condition. They may not receive one Imperial mael from you in payment! Everything shall be done at their expense. Further, my inspectors will be looking over their shoulders; and if they, or you, should find cause for the slightest complaint, there will be additional penalties and far more drastic ones… Does this meet with Your Wisdoms’ approval?”

The captain cleared his throat, assured him it did.

“There remains the matter of Sunnat,” the Daal resumed. “Your testimony against her is not required, her partners’ separate statements have made it clear enough that she was the instigator of the plot. However, it would be well if Your Wisdoms would accompany me to the Little Court now to see that the judgment rendered against this pernicious woman is also in accordance with your wishes… ”

A handful of minor officials were arranged about the mirrored expanse of the Daal’s Little Court when they entered. Sedmon seated himself, and the visitors were shown to chairs at the side of the bench. A moment later two soldiers brought Sunnat in through a side door. She started violently when she caught sight of the captain and Goth and avoided looking in their direction again. Sunnat had clearly had a very bad night! Her face was strained and drawn; her reddened eyes flickered nerv-ously as they glanced about. But frightened as she must be, she soon showed she was still trying to squirm out of the situation.

“Lies, all lies, Your Highness!” she exclaimed tearfully but with a defiant toss of her head. “Never, never! would I have wished Their Wisdoms harm, or dared consider doing them harm if I hadn’t been forced to what I did by the cruel threats of Bazim and Filish. They… .”

It got her nowhere. The Daal pointed out quietly it was clear she hadn’t realized With whom she was dealing when she turned on Captain Aron and his niece. Malice and greed had motivated her. It was well known that her partners were fully under her sway. Justice could not be delayed by such arguments. No mention was made by either side of the mysterious spacedrive Sunnat had tried to get into her possession. It seemed she had been warned against saying anything about that in court.

Sunnat was weeping wildly at that point. Sedmon glanced over at the captain, then looked steadily at Goth.

“Since the criminal’s most serious offense was against the Young Wisdom,” he said, “it seems fitting that the Young Wisdom should now decide what her punishment should be.”

The Little Court became quiet. Goth remained seated for a moment, then stood up.

“It would be even more fitting, Sedmon, “somebody beside the captain said, “if the Young Wisdom herself administered the punishment… .”

He started. The words had come from Goth but that had not been Goth’s voice!

Everybody in the Little Court was staring silently at her. Then the Daal nodded.

“It shall be as Your Wisdom said… ”

Goth moved away from the captain, stopped a few yards from Sunnat. He couldn’t see her face. But the air tingled with eeriness and he knew klatha was welling into the room. He had a glimpse of the Daal’s face, tense and watchful; of Sunnat’s, dazed with fear.

“Look in the mirror, Sunnat of Uldune!”

It wasn’t her voice! What was happening? His skin shuddered and from moment to moment now his vision seemed to blur, then clear again. The voice continued, low, mellow, but somehow it was filling the room. Not Goth’s voice but he felt he’d heard it before somewhere, sometime, and should know it. And his mind strained to understand what it said but seemed constantly to miss the significance of each word by the fraction of a second, as the quiet sentences rolled on with a weight of silent thunder in them. Sunnat faced one of the great mirrors in the room; he saw her back rigid and straight and thought she was frozen, unable to move. Sedmon’s lean hands were clamped together, unconsciously knotting and twisting as he stared.

The voice rose on an admonitory note, ended abruptly in sharp command. It couldn’t, the captain realized, actually have been speaking for more than twenty seconds. But it had seemed much longer. There was silence for an instance now. Then Sunnat screamed.

One couldn’t blame her, he thought. Staring into the mirror, Sunnat had seen what everyone else in the Little Court could see by looking at her. Set on her shoulders instead of her own head was the bristled, red-eyed head of a wild pig, ugly jaws gaping and working, as screams continued to pour from them. There was a medley of frightened voices. The Daal shouted a command at Sunnat’s white-faced guards, and the two grasped the writhing figure by the arms, hustled it from the Little Court. As they passed through the side door, it seemed to the captain that Sunnat’s wails had begun to resemble a pig’s frightened squealing much more than the cries of a young woman in terrible distress…

“Toll!” the captain told Goth, rather shakily. “You were talking in Toll’s voice! Your mother’s voice!”

“Well, not really,” Goth said. They were alone for the moment, in a small room of the House of Thunders, to which they had been conducted by a stunned-looking official after the Daal, rather abruptly, concluded judicial proceedings in the Little Court following the Young Wisdom’s demonstration. Sedmon was to rejoin them here in a few minutes, the captain guessed the Daal had felt it necessary to get settled down a little first. Their spy-screen snapped on the instant the room’s door closed on the official, who seemed glad to be on his way.

“It’s pretty much like Toll’s voice,” she agreed. “That was my Toll pattern.”

“Your what?”

Goth rubbed her nose tip. “Guess I can tell you,” she decided. “You won’t get it all, though. I don’t either… ”

Her Toll pattern was a klatha learning device. In fact, a nonmaterial partial replica of the personality of an adult witch whose basic individuality was similar to that of the witch child given the device. In this case, Toll’s.

“It’s sort of with me in there,” Goth said, tapping the side of her head.

“Don’t notice it much but it’s helping. Now here, Sedmon was checking on how good I was. Don’t know why exactly. I figured I ought to get fancy to show him but wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So the Toll pattern took over. It knew what to do. See?”

“Hmm… not entirely.”

Goth pushed herself up on the edge of a gleaming blue table and looked at him, dangling her legs. “Course you don’t,” she said. She considered. “Pattern can’t do just anything. It has to be something I can almost do already so it only has to show me. Else it’d get me messed up, like I told you.”

“Meaning you’re almost able to plant a pig’s head on somebody if you feel like it?” the captain asked.

“Wasn’t a pig’s head.”

“Pretty good imitation then!”

“Bend light, bend color.” Goth shrugged. “That’s all. They’ll stay that way as long as you want. When Sunnat puts her hands up to feel, she’ll know she’s got her own head. But she’s going to look part pig for a time.”

“Can’t quite imagine you doing one of those incantations by yourself! That was impressive.”

“Incant…’ oh, that! You don’t need all that,” Goth told him. “Toll pattern did it to scare everybody. Especially Sedmon.”

“It worked, I think” He studied her curiously. “So when will you start bending light?”

Goth’s face took on a bemused expression. There was a blur. Then a small round pig’s head squinted at him from above her jacket collar, smirking unpleasantly.

“Oink!” it said in Goth’s voice.

“Cut it out!” said the captain, startled.

The head blurred again, became Goth’s. She grinned. “Told you I just had to be shown.”

“I believe you now. How long will Sunnat be stuck with the one she’s got?”

“Didn’t you hear what the pattern told her?”

He shook his head. “I heard it, it seemed to mean something. But somehow I wasn’t really understanding a word. And I don’t think anyone else there was.”

“Sunnat understood it,” Goth said. “It was talking to her… She’s got to quit wanting to do things like burning people and scaring people, like that fat old Bazim. The less she wants that, the less she’ll look like a pig. She works at it; she could look pretty much like she was in about a month. And… ”

Goth turned her head. There’d been a knock at the door. She put her hand in her pocket, snapped off the spy-screen, slid down from the table. The captain went over to the door to let in the Daal of Uldune.

“There are matters of such grave potential significance,” the Daal said vaguely, “that it is difficult, extremely difficult, to decide to whom one may unburden oneself concerning them. I… ”

His voice trailed off, not for the first time in this conversation. His gaze shifted across the shining blue table to the captain, to Goth, back to the captain. He shook his head again, bit at a knuckle with an expression of worried irritability.

The captain studied him with some puzzlement. Sedmon seemed itching to tell them something but unable to make up his mind to do it. What was the problem?

He’d implied he had information of great importance to Karres. If so, they’d better get it.

The Daal glanced at Goth again, speculatively. “Perhaps Your Wisdom understands,” he murmured.

“Uh-huh,” said Goth brightly, in her little-girl voice. He’d tell Goth if they were alone? The captain considered. There hadn’t been many “Your Wisdoms” coming his way since that business in the Little Court!

Possibly Sedmon had done some private reevaluating of the events in Sunnat’s underground dungeon last night. It would take, as, in fact, it had taken, only one genuine witch on the team to account for that.

Not so good, perhaps… He considered again.

“I really think,” he heard himself say pleasantly, “it might be best if you did unburden yourself to us, Sedmon of the Six Lives… ”

The Daal’s eyes flickered.

“So!” It was a small hiss. “I suspected … but it was a difficult thing to believe, even of such as you. Well, we all have our secrets, and our reasons for them… ” He stood up. “Come with me then Captain Aron and Dani! You should know better what to make of what I have here than I do.”

The captain hoped they would. He certainly did not know what to make of Sedmon the Sixth, and of the Six Lives, at the moment! But he seemed to have said the right thing at the right time, at that.

Sedmon led them swiftly, the hem of his black gown flapping about his heels, through a series of narrow passages and up stairways into another section of the House of Thunders. They met no one on the way. Three times the Daal stopped to unlock heavy doors with keys produced from a fold in the gown, locked them again behind them. He did not speak at all until they turned at last into a blind passage that showed only one door and that near the far end. There he slowed.

“Half the problem is here,” he said, addressing them equally as they came up to the door. “When you’ve seen it, I’ll tell you what else I know, which is little enough. There’ll be another thing to show you later in another place.”

He unlocked and opened the door. The room beyond was long and low, showed no furnishings. But something like a heavy, slowly rippling iron gray curtain screened the far end.

“A guard field,” said the Daal sourly. “I’ve done everything possible to keep the matter quiet. In that I think I’ve been successful. It was all I could do until I came in contact with a competent member of your people.” He gave them a sideways glance. “No doubt you have your own problems but for weeks I’ve been unable to learn where somebody who could act for Karres might be found!”

His manner had taken another turn. He was dropping all formality here, addressing them with some irritability as equals and including Goth as if she were another adult. And he was not concealing the fact that he felt he had reason for complaint, nor that he was a badly worried man. Reaching into his gown, he brought out a small device, glanced at it, pressed down with his thumb.

The guard field faded, and the far end of the room appeared beyond it. A couch stood there. On it, in an odd attitude of abruptly frozen motion, sat a man in spacer coveralls. He was strongly built, might have been ten years older than the captain. Goth’s breath made a sharp sucking sound of surprise.

“You know this fellow?” the Daal asked.

“Yes,” Goth said. “It’s Olimy!”

“He’s of Karres?”

“Yes.”

She started forward, the captain moving with her, while the Daal stayed a few feet behind. Olimy gazed into the room with unblinking black eyes. He sat at the edge of the couch, legs stretched out to the floor, arms half lifted and reaching forwards, fingers curled as if closing on something. His expression was one of alertness and intense concentration. But the expression didn’t change and Olimy didn’t move.

“He was found like this, a month and a half ago, sitting before the controls of his ship,” the-Daal said. “Perhaps you understand his condition. I don’t. He can be shifted out of the position you see him in, but when released he gradually returns to it. He can be lifted and carried about but can’t actually be touched. There’s a thin layer of force about him, unlike anything of which I’ve heard. It’s detectable only by the fact that nothing can pass through it. He appears to be alive but… ”

“He disminded himself.” Goth’s face and tone were expressionless. She looked up at the captain. “We got to take him to Emris, I guess. They’ll help him there.”

“Uh-huh.” Then she didn’t know either how to contact other witches this side of the Chaladoor at present. “You mentioned his ship,” the captain said to the Daal.

“Yes. It’s three hours’ flight from here, still at the point where it was discovered. He was the only one on board. How it approached Uldune and landed without registering on detection instruments isn’t known.” Sedmon’s mouth grimaced. “He had an object with him which I ordered left on the ship. I won’t try to describe it; you’ll see it for yourselves… . Are there any measures you wish taken regarding this man before we go?”

Goth shook her head. The captain said, “There’s nothing we can do for Olimy at the moment. He might as well stay here until we can take him off your hands.”

Olimy’s ship had come down in a nearly uninhabited section of Uldune’s southern continent, and landed near the center of a windy plain, rock-littered and snow streaked, encircled by misty mountains. It wasn’t visible from the air, but its position was marked by what might have been a patch of gray mist half filling a hollow in the plain, a spy-screen had been set up to enclose the ship. On higher ground a mile away lay a larger bank of mist. The Daal’s big aircar set down there first.

At ground level, the captain, sitting in a rear section of the car with Goth, could make out the vague outlines of four tents through the side of the screen. Two platoons of fur-coated soldiers and their commander had tumbled out and lined up. One of Daal’s men left the car, went over to the officer, and spoke briefly with him. He came back, nodded to the Daal, climbed in. The aircar lifted, turned and started towards Olimy’s ship, skimming along the sloping ground.

There’d been no opportunity to speak privately with Goth. Perhaps she had an idea of what this affair of a Karres witch who had disminded himself was about, but her expression told nothing. Any question he asked the Daal might happen to be the wrong one, so he hadn’t asked any.

The car settled down some fifty yards from the edge of the screening about Olimy’s ship, and was promptly enveloped itself by a spy-screen somebody cut in. Sedmon, as he’d indicated, evidently took all possible precautions to avoid drawing attention to the area. The captain and Goth put on the warm coats, which had been brought along for them, and climbed out with the Daal, who had wrapped a long fur robe about himself. The rest of the party remained in the car. They walked over to the screen about the ship, through it, and saw the ship sitting on the ground.

It was a small one with excellent lines, built for speed. The Daal brought an instrument out from under his furs.

“This is the seal to the ship’s lock,” he said. “I’ll leave it with you. The object your associate brought here with him is standing in a plastic wrapping beside the control console. When you’re finished you’ll find me waiting in the car.”

The last was good news. If Sedmon had wanted to come into the ship with them, it might have complicated matters. The captain found the lock mechanism, unsealed it and pulled the OPEN lever. Above them, a lock opened. A narrow ladder ramp slid down.

They paused in the lock, looking back. The Daal already had vanished beyond the screening haze about the ship. “Just to be sure,” the captain said,

“better put up our own spy-screen… Got any idea what this is about?”

Goth shook her head. “Olimy’s a hot witch. Haven’t seen him for a year, he goes around on work for Karres. Don’t know what he was doing this trip.”

“What’s this disminding business?”

“Keeps things from getting to you. Anything. Sort of a stasis. It’s not so good though. Your mind’s way off somewhere and can’t get back. You have to be helped out. And that’s not easy!” Her small face was very serious.

“Hot witch in a fast ship!” the captain reflected aloud. “And he runs into something in space that scares him so badly he disminds to get away from it!

Doesn’t sound good, does it? Could he have homed the ship in on Uldune on purpose, first?”

Goth shrugged. “Might have. I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s look around the ship a bit before we get at that object. Must be some reason the Daal didn’t feel like talking about it… .”

They saw it in its wrappings as soon as they stepped into the tiny control cabin. The large, lumpy item, which could have been a four hundred pound boulder concealed under twisted, thick, opaque space plastic stood next to the console. They let it stand there. The captain switched on the little ship’s viewscreens, found them set for normal space conditions, turned them down until various angles of the windy Uldune plain appeared in sharp focus. The small patch of gray haze, which masked the Daal’s aircar, showed on their port side.

They went through the little speedster’s other sections. All they learned for their trouble was that Olimy had kept a very neat ship.

“Might as well look at the thing now,” said the captain. “You figure it’s something pretty important to Karres, don’t you?”

“Got to be,” Goth told him. “They don’t put Olimy on little jobs!”

“I see.” Privately, the captain admitted to considerable reluctance as he poked gingerly around at the plastic. Whatever was inside seemed as hard and solid as the bulky rock he’d envisioned when he first saw the bundle. Taking hold of one strip of the space plastic at last he pulled it back slowly. A patch of the surface of the item came into view. It looked; he thought, like dirty ice, pitted old glacier ice. He touched it with a finger. Slick and rather warm. Some kind of crystal?

He glanced at Goth. She lifted her shoulders. “Doesn’t look like much of anything!” he remarked. He peeled the plastic back farther until some two feet of the thing were exposed. It could be a mass of worn crystal, lumpish and shapeless as it had appeared under its wrapping.

Shapeless?

Studying it, the captain began to wonder. There were a multitude of tiny ridged whorls and knobby protrusions on its surface, and the longer he gazed at them the more he felt they weren’t there by chance, but for a purpose, had been formed deliberately … that this was, in fact, some very curious sculptured pattern.

Within the cloudy gray of the crystal was a momentary flickering of light, a shivering thread of fire, which seemed somehow immensely far away. He caught it again, again had a sense of enormous distances. And now came a feeling that the surface of the crystal was changing, flowing, expanding, that he was about to drop through, to be lost forever in the dim, fire-laced hugeness that was its other side. Terror surged up; for an instant he was paralyzed. Then he felt himself moving, pulling the plastic wrappings frantically back across its surface, Goth’s hands helping him. He twisted the ends together, tightly, as they had been before.

Terror lost its edge in the same moment. It was as if something, which had attacked them from without, were now simply fading away. But he still felt uncomfortable enough. He looked at Goth, drew in a long breath.

“Whew!” he said, shaken. “Was that klatha stuff?”

“Not klatha!” said Goth, face pale, eyes sharp and alert. “Don’t know what it was! Never felt anything like it… .”

She broke off.

Inside the captain’s head there was a tiny, purposeful click. Not quite audible. As if something had locked shut.

“Worm Worlders!” hissed Goth. They turned to the viewscreens together. A pale-yellow stain moved in the eastern sky above the wintry plain outside, spread as it drifted swiftly up overhead, then faded in a sudden rush to the west.

“If we hadn’t put it back when we did… .” the captain said. Some minutes had passed. Worm Weather hadn’t reappeared above the plain, and now Goth reported that the klatha locks, which had blocked the Nuri probes from their minds, were relaxing. The yellow glow was a long distance away from them again.

“They’d have come here, all right!” Goth had her color back. He wasn’t sure he had yet. That was a very special plastic Olimy had enclosed the lumpish crystal in! A wrapping that deflected the Worm World’s sensor devices from what it covered.

But Manaret wanted the crystal. And Karres apparently wanted it as badly. Olimy had been carrying it in his ship, and for all his witch’s tricks, he’d been harried by the Nuris into disminding himself to escape them. Since then Worm Weather had hung About Uldune, turning up here and there, searching…

suspecting the crystal had reached the planet, but unable to locate it… .; He said, “You’d think Sedmon would blow up half the countryside around here to get rid of that thing! It’s what keeps the Nuris near Uldune.”

Goth shook her head. “They’d come back sometime. Sedmon knows a lot! He doesn’t have that cap of his just because of witches. He’s scared of the Worm World. So he wants Karres to get that crystal thing.”

“Should help against Manaret, eh?”

“Looks like Manaret thinks so!” Goth pointed out reasonably.

“Yes, it does… .” As important as that, then! The misty screen concealing the Daal’s aircar on the plain was still there. The men inside it had seen the Worm Weather, too, had known better than to try to take off. The car would be buttoned tight now, armor plates snapped shut over the windows, doors locked, as it crouched like a frightened bird on the empty slope. But in spite of his fears, Sedmon had come here with them today because he wanted Karres to get the crystal…

The captain said, “If we can take it as far as Emris… .”

Goth nodded. “Always somebody on Emris.”

“They’d do the rest, eh?” He paused. “Well, no reason we can’t. If we just take care it stays wrapped up in that stuff.”

“Maybe we can,” Goth said slowly. She didn’t sound too sure of it.

“The Daal thinks we can make it,” the captain told her, “or he wouldn’t have showed it to us. And, as you say, he’s a pretty knowing old bird!”

A grin flickered on her mouth. “Well, that’s something else, Captain!”

“What is?”

“You look a lot like Threbus.”

“I do?”

“Only younger,” Goth said. “And I look a lot like Toll, only younger. Sedmon knows Threbus and Toll, and we got him thinking that’s who we are. He figures we’ve done an age-shift.”

“Age-shift?”

“Get younger, get older,” explained Goth. “Either way. Some witches can. Threbus and Toll could, I guess.”

“I see. Uh, well, still-“

“And Threbus and Toll,” Goth concluded in a rather small voice, “are an almighty good pair of witches!”

For an instant, the barest instant then, and for the first time since he’d known her, Goth seemed a tiny, uncertain figure standing alone in a great and terrible universe.

Well, not exactly alone, the captain thought.

“Well,” he said heartily, “I guess that means we’re going to have to be an almighty good pair of witches now, too.”

She smiled up at him. “Guess we’d maybe better be, Captain!”

SIX

It was supposed to be Vezzarn’s sleep period, but for the past two hours he’d been sitting in his locked cabin on the Evening Bird, brooding. On this, the third ship-day after their lift-off from Port Zergandol, Vezzarn had a number of things to brood about.

Working as an undercover operator, for an employer known only as a colorless, quiet voice on a communicator, had its nervous moments; but over the years it had paid off for Vezzarn. There was a very nice sum of money tucked away under a code number in the Daal’s Bank in Zergandol, money which was all his. He hadn’t liked various aspects of the Chaladoor assignment too well. Who would? But the bonus guaranteed him if he found what he was supposed to find on Captain Aron’s ship was fantastic. He’d risked hide and sanity in the Chaladoor for a fraction of that before…

Then, ten days before they were to take off, the colorless voice told him the assignment was canceled…. in part. Vezzarn was to forget what he had been set to find, forget it completely. But he still was to accompany Captain Aron through the Chaladoor, use the experience he had gained on his previous runs through the area to help see the Evening Bird arrive safely at Emris. And what would he get for it?

“I’ll throw in a reasonable risk bonus,” the communicator told him. “You’re drawing risk pay from your skipper and your regular pay from me. That’s it. Don’t be a pig, Vezzarn.”

Vezzarn had no wish to anger the voice. But straight risk money, even collected simultaneously from two employers, wasn’t enough to make him want to buck the Chaladoor again. Not at his age. He mentioned the age factor, suggested a younger spacer with comparable experience but better reflexes might be of more value to Captain Aron on this trip. The voice said it didn’t agree. It was all it needed to say. Remembering things it had tonelessly ordered done on other occasions, Vezzarn shuddered.

“If that’s how you feel, sir,” he said, “I’ll be on board.”

“That’s sensible of you, Vezzarn,” the communicator told him and went dead. He smoldered for hours. Then the thought came that there was no reason why he shouldn’t work for himself in this affair. The voice had connections beyond the Chaladoor, but it would be a while before word about Vezzarn arrived there. And if he got his hands on the secret superdrive Captain Aron was suspected of using occasionally, Vezzarn could be a long way off and a very rich man by then.

The decision made, his fears of the Chaladoor faded to the back of his mind. The chance looked worth taking once more. He got his money quietly out of the bank and had nothing to do then but wait and watch, listen and speculate, while he carried out his duties as Captain Aron’s general assistant and handyman. His preparations for the original assignment had been complete; and the only change in it now would be that, if things worked out right, he’d have Captain Aron’s spacedrive for himself.

Then, after he’d watched and listened a day or two, he started to worry again. His alertness had become sharpened and minor differences in these final stages of preparing the Evening Bird for space that he hadn’t noticed before caught his attention. Attitudes had shifted. The skipper was more tense and quiet. Even young Dani didn’t seem quite the same. Bazim and Filish worked with silent, intent purpose as if the only thing they wanted was to get the Evening Bird out of their yard and off the planet. Oddly enough, both of them appeared to have acquired painful limps! The Sunnat character didn’t show up at all. Casual inquiry brought Vezzarn the information that the firm’s third partner was supposed to be recovering in the countryside from some very serious illness.

He scratched his head frequently. Something had happened, but what? Daalmen began coming around the shipyard and the ship at all hours of the day. Inspectors, evidently. They didn’t advertise their identity, but he knew the type. Captain Aron, reasonably prudent about cash outlays until now, suddenly was spending money like water. The system of detection and warning devices installed on the ship two weeks before was the kind of first-class equipment any trader would want and not many could afford. Vezzarn, interested in his personal safety while on the Evening Bird, had looked it over carefully. One morning, it was all hauled out like so much junk, and replaced by instruments impossibly expensive for a ship of that class. Vezzarn didn’t get to see the voucher. Later in the day the skipper was back with a man he said was an armaments expert, who was to do something about the touchiness of the reinstalled nova guns.

Vezzarn happened to recognize the expert. It was the chief armorer of the great firm that designed and produced the offensive weapons of Uldune’s war fleet. They could have had the Evening Bird bristling with battle turrets for the price of the three hours the chief armorer put in working over the ancient nova guns! Vezzarn didn’t see that voucher either, but he didn’t have to. And it didn’t seem to bother the skipper in the least.

What was the purpose? It looked as if the ship were being prepared for some desperate enterprise, of significance far beyond that of an ordinary risk run. Vezzarn couldn’t fathom it, but it made him unhappy. He couldn’t back out, however. Not and last long on Uldune. The voice would see to that. One of their three passengers did back out, Kambine, the fat financier. He showed up at the office whining that his health wouldn’t allow him to go through with the trip. Vezzarn wasn’t surprised; he’d felt from the first it was even money whether Kambine’s nerve would last until lift-off. What did surprise him was that the skipper instructed him then to refund two thirds of the deposited fare. You would have thought he was glad to lose a passenger!

The other two were on board and in their staterooms when the Evening Bird roared up from Zergandol Port at last and turned her needle nose towards the Chaladoor…

Vezzarn got busy immediately. There might have been a faint hope that, if he could accomplish his purpose before they reached the Chaladoor, an opportunity would present itself to slip off undetected in the Evening Bird’s lifeboat and get himself out of whatever perils lay ahead. If so, the hope soon faded. There was a group of ship-blips in the aft screens, apparently riding the same course.

The skipper told him not to worry. He’d heard a squadron of the Daal’s destroyers was making a sweep to the Chaladoor fringes and back, on the lookout for the Agandar’s pirates, and had obtained permission to move with them until they swung around. For the first two days, in effect, the Evening Bird would travel under armed escort.

That killed Vezzarn’s notion. He’d be picked up instantly by the destroyers’

instruments if he left while they were in the area. And he couldn’t leave after they turned back-a man who’d voluntarily brave the Chaladoor in a lifeboat was a hopeless lunatic. He’d have to finish the trip with the rest of them. Nevertheless, he should establish as soon as he could where Captain Aron’s drive was concealed. Knowing that, he could let further plans develop at leisure.

Vezzarn was a remarkably skilled burglar, one of the qualities that made him a valuable operator to the ungrateful voice. Now that they were in space, his duties had become routine and limited. He had plenty of time available and made good use of it.

There was a series of little surprises. He discovered that, except for the central passenger compartment and the control area in the bow, the ship had been competently bugged. Sections of it were very securely locked up. Vezzarn knew these precautions had been no part of the original remodeling design as set up by Sunnat, Bazim & Filish. Hence Captain Aron had arranged for them during the final construction period when other changes were made. Evidently he’d had a reason by then to make sure his passengers-and Vezzarn-didn’t wander about the Evening Bird where they shouldn’t.

Vezzarn wondered what the reason was. But the skipper’s precautions didn’t-handicap him much. He had his own instruments to detect and nullify bugs without leaving a trace of what happened; and he knew, as any good burglar would, that the place to look for something of value was where locks were strongest. In about a day he felt reasonably certain the secret drive was installed in one of three places, the storage vault, or another rather small vault-like section newly added to the engine room, or a blocked-off area on the ship’s upper level behind the passenger compartment and originally a part of it.

The engine room seemed the logical place. Next day, Vezzarn slipped down there, unlocking and relocking various doors on his route. It was his sleep period and it was unlikely anyone would look for him for an hour or two. He reached the engine room without mishap. The locks to the special compartment took some study and cautious experimentation. Then Vezzarn had it open. At first glance it looked like a storage place for assorted engine room tools. But why keep them shut away so carefully?

He didn’t hurry inside. His instruments were doing some preliminary snooping for him. They began to report there was other instrument activity in here, plenty of it! Almost all traces were being picked up from behind a large opaque bulge on a bulkhead across from the door. Vezzarn’s hopes soared but he still didn’t rush in. His devices kept probing about for traps. And presently they discovered a camera. It didn’t look like one and it was sitting innocently among a variety of gadgets on one 6f the wall shelves. But if was set to record the actions of anyone who came in here and got interested in the bulge on the bulkhead.

Well, that could be handled! Vezzarn edged his way up to the camera without coming into its view range, opened it delicately from behind and unset it. Then he put his own recording devices up before the bulge which concealed so much intriguing instrument activity, and for the next ten minutes let them take down in a number of ways what was going on in there. When he thought they’d got enough, he reset the camera, locked up the little compartment and re-turned to the upper ship level and his cabin by the way he had come. There he started the recorders feeding what they had obtained into a device which presently would provide him with a threedimensional blueprint derived from their combined reports. He locked the device into his cabin closet. He had to wait until the next sleep period rolled around before he had a chance to study the results. The Evening Bird was edging into the Chaladoor by then. The destroyers had curved off and faded from the screens, and the skipper had announced certain precautionary measures which would remain in effect until the risk area lay behind them again. One of them was that for a number of periods during the ship-day Vezzarn would be on watch at a secondary set of viewscreens off the passenger lounge. Only Captain Aron and his niece henceforth would enter the control section without special permission. As soon as he reached his cabin and locked the door, Vezzarn brought his device back out of the closet. He placed it on the small cabin table, activated it, checked the door again, set the device in motion and looked down through an eyepiece at a magnified view of the miniature three-dimensional pattern the instrument had produced within itself.

It was a moving pattern, and it gave off faintly audible sounds. Vezzarn stared and listened, first with surprise, then in blank puzzlement, at last with growing consternation. The reproduced contrivance in there buzzed, clicked, hummed, twinkled, spun. It sent small impulses of assorted energy types shooting about through itself. It remained spectacularly, if erratically, busy. And within five minutes Vezzarn became completely convinced that it did, and could do, absolutely nothing that would serve any practical purpose.

Whatever it might be, it wasn’t a spacedrive. Even the most unconventional of drives couldn’t possibly resemble anything like that!

Then what was it? Presently it dawned on Vezzarn that he’d been tricked. That thing behind the bulge on the bulkhead had served a purpose! The entire little locked compartment in the engine room was set up to draw the interest of somebody who might be prowling about the Evening Bird in search of a hidden drive installation.

It was something of a shock! The skipper had impressed him as an open, forthright fellow. An act of such low cunning didn’t fit the impression. Briefly, Vezzarn felt almost hurt. But at any rate he’d spotted the camera and hadn’t got caught…

That was only one of the unsettling developments for Vezzarn that day. Since Captain Aron’s precautionary measures might have been intended to keep tab on passengers rather than himself, he’d set up his own system of telltale bugs in various parts of the ship. They were considerably more efficient bugs than the ones which had been installed for Captain Aron; even a first-class professional would have to be very lucky, to avoid them all. If Vezzarn had competitors on board in his quest for the secret drive, he wanted to know it. It appeared now that he did. Running a check playback on the telltales, he discovered they’d been agitated by somebody’s passage in several off-limit ship sections at times when the skipper, young Dani, and he himself had been up in the control compartment.

Which of the two was it? The Hulik do Eldel female, or that nattily dressed big bruiser of a trader, Laes Yango?

Perhaps both of them, acting independently, Vezzarn thought worriedly. Two other agents looking for the same thing he was-that was all he needed on this trip!

Captain Aron, at about that hour, was doing some worrying on the same general subject. If he’d been able to arrange it, there would have been no passengers on the Venture -or Evening Bird-when she left Uldune. What they’d taken on board made the commercial aspects of the run to Emris completely insignificant. And not only that-their experience with Sunnat, Bazim & Filish raised the question of how many other groups on Uldune suspected the ship of containing the secrets of some new drive of stupendous power and incalculable value. Subradio had spread information about the Venture faster and farther than they’d foreseen. Almost anyone they ran into now could be nourishing private designs on the mystery drive.

One way to stop the plotting might have been to let word get out generally that they were Karres witches. Apparently few informed people here cared to cross the witches. But because of Olimy and his crystalloid item again, it was the last thing they could afford to do at present. The Worm World, from all accounts, had its own human agents about, enslaved and totally obedient minds; any such rumor was likely to draw the Nuris’ attention immediately to them. They wanted to make the Venture’s departure from Uldune as quiet a matter as possible.

So he’d been unable to leave Laes Yango and Hulik do Eldel behind. To do it against their wishes certainly would have started speculation. After Kambine canceled voluntarily, he’d invited the two to come to the office. The day before, a ship had limped into Zergandol Port after concluding a pass through the Chaladoor. The ship was in very bad shape, its crew in worse. It seemed, the captain said, that the Chaladoor’s hazards had reached a peak at present. If they’d prefer to reconsider the trip for that reason, he would refund the entire fare.

The offer got him nowhere. Hulik do Eldel became tearfully insistent that she must rejoin her aging parents on Emris as soon as possible. And Yango stated politely that, if necessary, he would obtain an injunction to keep the Evening Bird from leaving without him. Some office of the Daal’s no doubt would have quietly overruled the injunction; but meanwhile there would have been a great deal of loose talk. So the captain gave in.

“In case one of those two is after the Sheewash Drive,” he told Goth, “we’d better do something about it.”

“Do what?” asked Goth. It would have been convenient just now if her talents had included reading minds; but they didn’t.

The captain had thought about it. “Set up a decoy drive.”

Goth liked the idea. He’d almost forgotten what had happened to the leftovers of the cargo with which he had started out from Nikkeldepain, sometimes that day seemed to lie years in the past now, but he located them finally in storage at the spaceport. One of the crates contained the complicated, expensive, and somewhat explosive educa-tional toys which probably were the property of Councilor Rapport and which had turned out to be unsalable in the Empire.

“There’s a kind of gadget in there that could do the trick,” he said to Goth.

“Called the Totisystem Toy, I think.”

He found a Totisystem Toy and demonstrated it for her. It had been designed to provide visual instruction in all forms of power systems known to Nikkeldepain, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the lot. When the toy was set in action, the systems all started to operate simultaneously. The result was a bewildering, constantly changing visual hash.

“Might not fool anybody who’s got much sense for long,” he admitted. “But all it has to do is let us know whether there’s someone on board we have to watch…

Could have the ship bugged, too, come to think of it!”

They had the Totisystem Toy installed in the engine room, concealed but not so well concealed that a good snooper shouldn’t be able to find it, and set up a camera designed for espionage work. The espionage supplies outfit, which sold them the camera, and sent an expert to bug the Venture unobtrusively in the areas the captain wanted covered, acknowledged the devices couldn’t be depended upon absolutely. Nothing in that class could. It was simply a matter of trying to keep a jump ahead of the competition.

“Spiders!” Goth remarked thoughtfully.

“Eh?” inquired the captain.

Spiders spun threads, she explained, and spiders got in everywhere. Even a very suspicious spy probably wouldn’t give much attention to a spider thread or two even if he noticed them.

They brought a couple of well-nourished spiders aboard the ship and attached a few threads to the camouflaged camera in the engine room. Anyone doing anything at all to the camera was going to break a thread. Vezzarn, of course, couldn’t be completely counted out now as a potential spy. The old spacer’s experience might make him very useful on the run; but if it could, be made to seem that it was his own decision, they’d leave him on Uldune.

Vezzarn scratched his gray head. “Sounds like the Chaladoor’s acting up kind of bad right now, at that.” he agreed innocently. “But I’ll come along anyway, skipper, if it’s all right with you. “

So Vezzarn also came along. If they’d discharged him just before starting on the trip for which he’d been hired, people would have been wondering again. On the night before take-off, Daalmen in an unmarked van brought two sizable crates out to the Evening Bird and loaded them on the ship’ at the captain’s direction. One crate went into a brand-new strongbox in the storage vault with a time lock on it. When it was inside, the captain set the lock to a date two weeks ahead. The other crate went into a stateroom recently sealed off from the rest of the passenger compartment. The first contained the crystalloid object that had been on Olimy’s ship; and the other contained Olimy himself. They’d completed all preparations as well as they could. After they’d been aloft twelve hours, Goth went down to the engine room with one of the spiders in a box in her pocket, and looked into the locked compartment. The camera hadn’t come into action, but the two almost imperceptible threads attached to it were broken. Someone had been there. She had the spider attach fresh threads and came back up. None of their expensive bugs had been disturbed. The engine room prowler should be a spy of experience.

When they checked again next day, someone had been there again. It didn’t seem too likely it had been the same someone. The bugs still had recorded no movement. They had two veteran spies on board then-perhaps three. The Totisystem Toy might have had a third visitor before the spider threads were reattached to the camera. But the camera hadn’t gone into action even once.

Short of putting all three suspects in chains, there wasn’t much they could do about it at the moment. The closer they got to the Chaladoor, the less advisable it would be for either of them to be anywhere but in the control section or in their cabins, which opened directly on the control section, for any considerable length of time. The spies, whether two or three, might simply give up. After all, the only mystery drive to be found on the ship was a bundle of wires in a drawer of the bedside table in Goth’s cabin. Plus Goth. On the fourth ship-day something else occurred… .

The captain was in the control chair, on watch, while Goth napped in her cabin. The Chaladoor had opened up awesomely before them, and the Venture was boring through it at the peak thrust of her souped-up new drives. Their supersophisticated detection system registered occasional blips, but so far they’d been the merest of flickers. The captain’s gaze shifted frequently to the forward screens. A small, colorful star cluster hung there, a bit to port, enveloped in a haze of reddish-brown dust against the black of space. It was the first of the guideposts through the uncertainties of the Chaladoor but one it was wise to give a wide berth to, the reputed lair, in fact, of his old acquaintances, the Megair Cannibals.

He tapped in a slight course modification. The cluster slid gradually farther to port. Then the small desk screen beside him, connected to the entrance to the control section, made a burring sound. He clicked it on and Vezzarn’s face appeared.

“Yes?” said the captain.

Vezzarn’s head shifted as he glanced back along the empty passage behind him.

“Something going on you ought to know about, skipper!” he whispered hoarsely. The captain simultaneously pressed the button that released the entrance door and the one that brought Goth awake in her cabin.

“Come in!” he said.

Vezzarn’s face vanished. The captain slipped his Blythe gun out of a desk drawer and into his pocket, stood up as the little spaceman hastily entered the control room. “Well?” he asked.

“That NO ADMITTANCE door back of the passenger section, skipper! Looks like one of ‘em’s snooping around in there.”

“Which one?” asked the captain as Goth appeared in the control room behind Vezzarn.

Vezzarn shrugged. “Don’t know! No one in the lounge right now. I was coming by, saw the door open just a bit. But it was open!”

“You didn’t investigate?”

“No, sir!” Vezzarn declared virtuously. “Not me. Not without your permission, I wouldn’t go in there! Thought I’d better tell you right away though.”

“Come along,” the captain told Goth. He snapped the control section door lock on behind the three of them, and they hurried along the passage to the lounge screens. The captain and Vezzarn hastened on, stopped at the door to the sealed passage, at the far end of which Olimy sat unmoving in his dark stateroom.

“Closed now!” Vezzarn said.

The captain glanced at him, drawing the key to the passage from his pocket.

“Sure you saw it open?” he asked.

Vezzarn looked hurt. “Sure as I’m standing here, skipper! Just a bit. But it was open!”

“All right.” Whoever had been prowling about the ship before might have investigated the passage and the stateroom, discovered Olimy there, which should be a considerable shock to most people, and hurriedly left again. “You go wait with Dani in the lounge,” he said. “I’ll check.”

The key turned in the lock. The captain twisted the handle. The door flew open, banging into him; and he caught Hulik do Eldel by the arm as she darted out. She twisted a dead-white face up to him, eyes staring. Then, before he could say anything, her mouth opened wide and she screamed piercingly. The scream brought Vezzarn back to the scene, Laes Yango lumbering behind him. Hulik was babbling her head off. The captain shoved the passage door shut, said curtly, “Let’s get her to the lounge… ”

It was an awkward situation, but by the time they got to the lounge he had a story ready. The motionless figure Miss do Eldel had seen was simply another passenger and no cause for alarm. The man, whose name the captain was not at liberty to disclose, suffered from a form of paralysis for which a cure was to be sought on Emris. Some very important personages of Uldune were involved; and for reasons of planetary politics, the presence of the patient on board the Evening Bird was to have been a complete secret. It was unfortunate that Miss do Eldel bad allowed her curiosity to take her into an off-limits section of the ship and discover their fellow-passenger. He trusted, the captain concluded, that he could count on the discretion of those present to see that the story at least got no farther…

Laes Yango, Vezzarn, and Hulik nodded earnestly. Whatever Hulik had thought when she turned on a light in Olimy’s stateroom, she seemed to accept the captain’s explanations. She was looking both relieved and very much embarrassed as he went off to relock the stateroom and passage doors … not that locking things up on the ship seemed to make much difference at present.

“If I could see you in the control section, Miss do Eldel,” he said when he came back. “Vezzarn, you’d better stay at the viewscreens till Dani and I take over up front… .”

In the control room he asked Hulik to be seated. Goth already was at the console. But the detector system had remained reassuringly quiet, and the Megair Cluster was dropping behind them. The captain switched on the intercom, called Vezzarn off the lounge screens. Then he turned back to the passenger.

“I really must apologize, Captain Aron!” Hulik told him contritely. “I don’t know what possessed me. I assure you I don’t make it a practice to pry into matters that are not my business.”

“What I’d like to know,” the captain said, “is how you were able to unlock the passage door and the one to the stateroom.”

Hulik looked startled.

“But I didn’t!” she said. “Neither door was locked and the one to the passage stood open. That’s why it occurred to me to look inside… Couldn’t Vezzarn… . No, you hadn’t told Vezzarn about this either, had you?”

“No, I hadn’t,” said the captain.

“You’re the only one who has keys to the door?”

He nodded. “Supposedly.”

“Then I don’t understand it. I swear I’m telling the truth!” Hulik’s dark eyes gazed at him in candid puzzlement. Then their expression changed. “Or could the unfortunate person in there have revived enough to have opened the doors from within?” Her face said she didn’t like that idea at all. The captain told her he doubted it. And from what Goth knew of the disminded condition, it was in fact impossible that Olimy’s shape could have moved by itself, let alone begun unlocking doors. Otherwise, it seemed the incident hadn’t told them anything about the shipboard prowlers they didn’t already know. Hulik do Eldel looked as though she were telling the truth. But then an experienced lady spy would look as if she were telling the truth, particularly when she was lying…

He’d had an alarm device set up in the control desk that would go off if anyone tampered with the strongbox containing Olimy’s crystalloid in the storage vault. He was glad now he had taken that precaution, though it still did seem almost unnecessary, the time lock on the strongbox was supposed to be tamper-proof; and the storage vault itself had been installed on the ship by the same firm of master craftsmen who’d designed the vaults for the Daal’s Bank.

Most of the next ship-day passed quietly-or in relative quiet. They did, in fact, have their first real attack alert, but it was not too serious a matter. A round dozen black needle-shapes registered suddenly in the screens against the purple glare of a star. Stellar radiation boiling through space outside had concealed the blips till then … and not by accident; it was a common attack gambit and they’d been on the watch for it whenever their course took them too near a sun. The black ships moved at high speed along an interception course with the Venture. They looked wicked and competent. The buzzer roused Goth in her sleep cabin. Thirty seconds later one of the desk screens lit up and her face looked out at the captain. “Ready!” her voice told him. She raked sleep-tousled brown hair back from her forehead. “Now?”

“Not yet.” Sneaking through the sun system, he hadn’t pushed the Venture; they still had speed in reserve. “We might outrun them. We’ll see… Switch your screen to starboard… ”

The ship’s intercom pealed a signal. The passenger lounge. The captain cut it in. “Yes?” he said.

“Are you aware, sir,” Laes Yango’s voice inquired, “that we are about to be waylaid?”

The captain thanked him, told him he was, and that he was prepared to handle the situation. The trader switched off, apparently satisfied. He must have excellent nerves; the voice had sounded composed, no more than moderately interested. And sharp eyes, the captain thought-the lounge screens couldn’t have picked up the black ships until almost the instant before Yango called. It was too bad though that he was in the lounge at the moment. If the Sheewash Drive had to be used, the captain would slap an emergency button first, which among other things, blanked out the lounge screens. Nevertheless, that in itself was likely to give Yango some food for thought…

But perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary. The captain watched the calculated interception point in the instru-ments creep up. Still three minutes away. The black ships maintained an even speed. Four of them were turning off from the others, to cut in more sharply, come up again from behind…

He shoved the drive thrust regulator slowly flat to the desk. The drives howled monstrous thunder. A minute and a half later, they flashed through the interception point with a comfortable sixty seconds to spare. The black ships had poured on power at the last moment, too. But the Venture was simply faster.

His watch ended, and Goth’s began. He slept, ate, came on watch again…