The Witches of Karres (4 page)

The Sheewash Drive! Boy, he thought in sudden excitement, if he could just get the principles of that. Maybe he would!

He raised his head suddenly. The Leewit's voice had lifted clearly over the communicator.

"... not such a bad old dope!" the childish treble remarked.

The captain blinked indignantly.

"He's not so old," Maleen's soft voice returned. "And he's certainly no dope!"

"Yeah, yeah!" squeaked the Leewit offensively.

"Maleen's sweet on the --ulp!"

A vague commotion continued for a while, indicating, he hoped, that someone he could mention was being smothered under a pillow.

He drifted off to sleep before it was settled.

If you didn't happen to be thinking of what they'd done, they seemed more or less like normal children. Right from the start they displayed a flattering interest in the captain and his background; and he told them all about everything and everybody in Nikkeldepain. Finally he even showed them his treasured pocket-sized picture of Illyla; the one with which he'd held many cozy conversations during the earlier part of his trip.

Almost at once, though, he realized that was a mistake. They studied it intently in silence; their heads crowded close together.

"Oh, brother!" the Leewit whispered then, with entirely the wrong kind of inflection.

"Just what did you mean by that?" the captain inquired coldly.

"Sweet!" murmured Goth. But it was the way she closed her eyes briefly, as though gripped by a light spasm of nausea.

"Shut up, Goth!" Maleen said sharply. "I think she's very swee ... I mean, she looks very nice!" she told the captain.

The captain was disgruntled. Silently, he retrieved the maligned Illyla and returned her to his breast pocket. Silently, he went off and left them standing there.

But afterwards, in private, he took it out again and studied it worriedly.

His Illyla! He shifted the picture back and forth under the light. It wasn't really a very good picture of her, he decided. It had been bungled. From certain angles, one might even say that Illyla did look the least bit insipid.

What was he thinking, he thought, shocked.

He unlimbered the nova gun turrets next and got in a little firing practice. They had been sealed when he took over the Venture and weren't supposed to be used, except in absolute emergencies. They were somewhat uncertain weapons, though very effective, and Nikkeldepain had turned to safer forms of armament many decades ago. But on the third day out from Nikkeldepain, the captain made a brief notation in his log:

"Attacked by two pirate craft. Unsealed nova guns. Destroyed one attacker; survivor fled..."

He was rather pleased by that crisp, hard-bitten description of desperate space adventure, and enjoyed rereading it occasionally. It wasn't true, though. He had put in an interesting four hours at the time pursuing and annihilating large, craggy chunks of an asteroid swarm he found the Venture plowing through. Those nova guns were fascinating stuff! You'd sight the turrets on something; and so long as it didn't move after that, it was all right. If it did move, it got it, just the thing for arresting a pirate in midspace.

The Venture dipped back into the Empire's borders four days later and headed for the capital of the local province. Police ships challenged them twice on the way in; and the captain found considerable comfort in the awareness that his passengers foregathered silently in their cabin on these occasions. They didn't tell him they were set to use the Sheewash Drive, somehow it had never been mentioned since that first day, but he knew the queer orange fire was circling over its skimpy framework of twisted wires there and ready to act.

However, the space police waved him on, satisfied with routine identification. Apparently the Venture had not become generally known as a criminal ship, to date.

Maleen accompanied him to the banking institution which was to return Wansing's property to Porlumma. Her sisters, at the captain's definite request, remained on the ship.

The transaction itself went off without a visible hitch. The jewels would reach their destination on Porlumma within a month. But he had to take out a staggering sum in insurance. "Piracy, thieves!" smiled the clerk. "Even summary capital punishment won't keep the rats down!" And, of course, he had to register name, ship, home planet, and so on. But since they already had all that information on Porlumma, he gave it without hesitation.

On the way back to the spaceport, he sent off a sealed message by subradio to the bereaved jeweler, informing him of the action taken and regretting the misunderstanding.

He felt a little better after that, though the insurance payment had been a severe blow. If he didn't manage to work out a decent profit on Karres somehow, the losses on the miffel farm would hardly be covered now...

Then he noticed Maleen was getting uneasy.

"We'd better hurry!" was all she would say, however. Her face turned pale.

The captain understood. She was having another premonition! The hitch to this premoting business was apparently that when something was brewing you were informed of the bare fact but had to guess at most of the details. They grabbed an aircab and raced back to the spaceport.

They had just been cleared there when he spotted a group of uniformed men coming along the dock on the double. They stopped short and scattered as the Venture lurched drunkenly sideways into the air. Everyone else in sight was scattering, too.

That was a very bad take-off, one of the captain's worst. Once afloat, however, he ran the ship promptly into the nightside of the planet and turned her nose towards the border. The old pirate-chaser had plenty of speed when you gave her the reins; and throughout the entire next sleep period he let her use it all.

The Sheewash Drive was not required that time.

Next day he had a lengthy private talk with Goth on the Golden Rule and the Law, with particular reference to individual property rights. If Councilor Onswud had been monitoring the sentiments expressed by the captain, he could not have failed to rumble surprised approval. The delinquent herself listened impassively, but the captain fancied she showed distinct signs of being impressed by his earnestness.

It was two days after that, well beyond the borders again, when they were obliged to make an unscheduled stop at a mining moon. For the captain discovered he had badly miscalculated the extent to which the prolonged run on overdrive after leaving the capital was going to deplete the Venture's reserves. They would have to juice up...

A large, extremely handsome Sirian freighter lay beside them at the moon station. It was half a battlecraft really, since it dealt regularly beyond the borders. They had to wait while it was being serviced; and it took a long time. The Sirians turned out to be as unpleasant as their ship was good-looking, a snooty, conceited, hairy lot who talked only their own dialect and pretended to be unfamiliar with Imperial Universum.

The captain found himself getting irked by their bad manners, particularly when he discovered they were laughing over his argument with the service superintendent about the cost of repowering the Venture.

"You're out in deep space, Captain," said the superintendent. "And you haven't juice enough left even to travel back to the border. You can't expect Imperial prices here!"

"It's not what you charged them!" The captain angrily jerked his thumb at the Sirian.

The superintendent shrugged. "Regular customers. You start coming by here every three months like they do, and we can make an arrangement with you, too. "

It was outrageous; it actually put the Venture back in the red. But there was no help for it.

Nor did it improve the captain's temper when he muffed the take-off once more; and then had to watch the Sirian floating into space, as sedately as a swan, a little behind him.

an hour later,
as he sat
glumly
at the controls, debating the chances of recouping his losses before returning to
Nikkeldepain,
Maleen
and the
Leewit
hurriedly entered the room. They did something to a port screen.

"
They sure are!" the Leewit exclaimed. She seemed childishly pleased.

"Are what?" the captain inquired absently.

"Following us," said Maleen. She did not sound pleased. "It's that
Sirian
ship, Captain
Pausert!"

The captain stared
bewilderedly
at the screen. There was a ship in focus there. It was quite obviously the Sirian and, just as obviously, it was following them.

"What do they want?" he wondered. "They're stinkers but they're not pirates. Even if they were, they wouldn't spend an hour running after a crate like the Venture."

The Leewit observed, "Got their bow turrets out now
!
Better get those nova guns ready!"

"But it's all nonsense!" the captain said, flushing angrily. He turned towards the communicators. "What's that Sirian general beam length?"

"
Point zero zero four four,
"
said Maleen.

A roaring, abusive voice flooded the control room immediately. The one word understandable to the captain was
"
Venture." It was repeated frequently.

"Sirian," said the captain. "Can you understand them?" he asked Maleen.

She shook her head. "The Leewit can." The Leewit
nodded,
grey eyes
glistening.

"What are they saying?"

"They says you're for stopping," the Leewit translated rapidly, apparently retaining some of the original sentence structure. "They says you're for skinning alive
.
.
.
ha! They says you're stopping right now and for only hanging. They says—
"

Maleen scuttled from the control room. The Leewit banged the communicator with one small fist.

"Beak-wock!"
she shrilled. It sounded like that anyway. The loud voice paused a moment.

"BEAK-Wock?"
it returned in an aggrieved, startled tone.

"Beak-Wock!"
the Leewit affirmed with apparent delight. She rattled off a string of similar-sounding syllables.

A howl of inarticulate wrath responded. The captain, in a whirl of outraged emotions, was
yelling
at the Leewit to shut up, at the Sirian to go to Great
Patham's
Second Hell—the worst—and wrestling with the nova gun adjust
e
rs at the same time. He'd had about enough! He'd—

SSS
whoosh!

It was the
Sheewash
Drive.

"And where are we now?" the captain inquired, in a voice of unnatural calm.

"Same place, just about," the Leewit told him. "Ship's still on the screen. Way back though—take them an hour again to catch up." She seemed disappointed; then brightened.
"
You got lots of time to get the guns ready..."

The captain didn't answer. He was marching down the passage towards the rear of the Venture. He passed the captain's cabin and noted the door was shut. He went on without pausing. He was mad clean through—he knew what had happened! After all he'd told her, Goth had
teleported
again. It was all there, in the storage. Items of up to a pound in weight seemed as much as she could handle. But amazing quantities of stuff had met that one requirement—bottles filled with what might be perfume or liquor or dope, expensive-looking garments and cloths in a shining variety of colours, small boxes, odds, ends, and, of course, jewellery...

He spent half an hour getting it loaded into a steel space crate. He wheeled the crate into the big storage lock, sealed the inside lock door and pulled the switch that activated the automatic launching device.

The outer lock door slammed shut. He stalked back to the control room. The
Leewit
was still in charge, fiddling with the communicators.

"
I could try a whistle over them," she suggested, glancing up. She added,
"
But they'd bust somewheres, sure."

"
Get them on again!" the captain said.

"Yes, sir," said the Leewit, surprised. The roaring voice came back faintly.

"SHUT UP!" the captain shouted in Imperial
Universum.
The voice shut up.

"Tell them they can pick up their stuff—it's been dumped out in a crate," the captain instructed the Leewit. "Tell them I'm proceeding on my course. Tell them if they follow me one light-minute beyond that crate, I'll come back for them, shoot their front end off, shoot their rear end off, and ram
'em
in the middle."

"Yes, SIR!" the Leewit sparkled. They proceeded on their course. Nobody followed.

"Now I want to speak to Goth," the captain announced. He was still at a high boil. "Privately," he added. "Back in the storage—
"

Goth followed him
expressionlessly
into the storage. He closed the door to the passage. He'd broken off a two-foot length from the tip of one of Councilor Rapport's over-priced
tinklewood
fishing poles. It made a fair switch.

But Goth looked terribly smal
l
just now! He cleared his throat. He wished for a moment he was back on
Nikkeldepain.
"I warned you," he said. Goth didn't move. Between one second and the next, however, she seemed to grow remarkably. Her brown eyes focused on the captain's Adam's apple; her lip lifted at one side. A slightly hungry look came into her face.