The Witches of Karres (8 page)

"Something big in what way?" asked the captain.

Goth shrugged. "Politics. Secret stuff... I
was
going along with you, so they didn't tell me."

"Can't spill what you don't know, eh?"

"Uh-huh."

Interstellar politics involving
Karres
and the
Empire?
He pondered it a few seconds, then gave up. H
e
couldn't imagine what it might be and there was n
o
sense worrying about it.

"Well," he sighed, "seeing we've turned out to
be
distant relatives, I suppose it is all right if I adopt you
meanwhi
l
e."

"Sure," said Goth. She studied his face. "You
still
want to pay the money you owe back to thos
e
people?"

He
nodded.
"A debt's a debt."

"Well," Goth informed him, "I've got som
e
ideas."

"None of those witch tricks now!" the captain said
warningly.
"We'll earn our money the fail way."

Goth blinked not-so-innocent brown eyes at him.
"This'll
be fair! But we'll get rich." She shook her head,
yawned
slowly. "Tired," she announced, standing up. "Better hit the bunk a while now."

"Good idea," the captain agreed. "We can talk again later." At the passage door Goth paused, looking back at him.

"About all I could tell you about us right now," she said, "you can read in those Regulations, like the one man said. The one you kicked off the ship. There's a lot about
Karres
in there. Lots of lies, too, though!"

"And when did you find out about the intercom between here and the captain's cabin?" the captain inquired.

Goth
grinned.
"A while back. The others never noticed."

"All right," the captain said. "Good night, witch—if you get a stomach-ache, yell and I'll bring the medicine."

"Good night," Goth
yawned.
"I might, I think."

"And wash behind your ears!" the captain added, trying to remember the bedtime instructions he'd overheard
Maleen
giving the junior witches.

"All right," said Goth
sleepily.
The passage door closed behind her—but half a minute later it was briskly opened again. The captain looked up
startled
from the voluminous stack of General Instructions and Space Regulations of the Republic
of Nikkeldepain
he'd just discovered in the back of one of the drawers of the control desk.

Goth stood in the doorway, scowling and wide-awake. "And you wash behind yours!" she said.

"Huh?" said the captain. He reflected a moment
,
"All right," he said. "We both will, then."

"Right," said Goth, sat
i
sfied. The door closed once more.

The captain began to run his finger down the lengthy index of
K's
—or could it be under
W?

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 behaviour of Councilor Onswud and the others suggested that reports they'd received of the Venture's unorthodox behaviour 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 dialled 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, colourful, 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 travelling 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….