Wizards’ Worlds (62 page)

It was Mald who snatched the baby and sped from that room, at a greater speed than
her years might warrant, to be joined by another within a secret way of the castle.
The twisted, limping figure took the child eagerly into long empty arms, to hold it
tenderly as a long-desired gift.

But neither of the two Mald left were aware of her flight. What was done there cannot
be told, but before the coming of dawn Varoff shot himself.

Where is the magic in all this, besides the muttering of old woman? Just this: when
Dagmar demanded a son from the Countess Ana, she indeed obtained her desire. But the
child she bore had fine black hair growing in a sharp peak above a wolf cub’s face—a
face which Andrei Varoff and Dagmar Kark had excellent reason to know well. Who fathered
Dagmar’s child, a man nigh twelve months dead? And who was its true mother? Think
carefully, my friend.

Not a pretty story, eh? But, you see, old gods do not tend to be mild when called
on to render justice.

All Cats Are Gray

S
TEENA
of the Spaceways—that sounds just like a corny title for one of the Stellar-Vedo
spreads. I ought to know; I’ve tried my hand at writing enough of them. Only this
Steena was no glamorous babe. She was as colorless as a lunar planet—even the hair
netted down to her skull had a sort of grayish cast, and I never saw her but once
draped in anything but a shapeless and baggy gray spaceall.

Steena was strictly background stuff, and that is where she mostly spent her free
hours—in the smelly, smoky, background corners of any stellar-port dive frequented
by free spacers. If you really looked for her you could spot her—just sitting there
listening to the talk—listening and remembering. She didn’t open her own mouth often.
But when she did, spacers had learned to listen. And the lucky few who heard her rare
spoken words—these will never forget Steena.

She drifted from port to port. Being an expert operator on the big calculators, she
found jobs wherever she cared to stay for a time. And she came to be something like
the masterminded machines she tended—smooth, gray, without
much personality of their own.

But it was Steena who told Bub Nelson about the Jovan moon rites—and her warning saved
Bub’s life six months later. It was Steena who identified the piece of stone Keene
Clark was passing around a table one night, rightly calling it unworked Slitite. That
started a rush which made ten fortunes overnight for men who were down to their last
jets. And, last of all, she cracked the case of the
Empress of Mars.

All the boys who had profited by her queer store of, knowledge and her photographic
memory tried at one time or another to balance the scales. But she wouldn’t take so
much as a cup of canal water at their expense, let alone the credits they tried to
push on her. Bub Nelson was the only one who got around her refusal. It was he who
brought her Bat.

About a year after the Jovan affair, he walked into the Free Fall one night and dumped
Bat down on her table. Bat looked at Steena and growled. She looked calmly back at
him and nodded once. From then on they traveled together—the thin gray woman and the
big gray tomcat. Bat learned to know the inside of more stellar bars than even most
spacers visit in their lifetimes. He developed a liking for Vernal juice, drank it
neat and quick, right out of the glass. And he was always at home on any table where
Steena elected to drop him.

This is really the story of Steena, Bat, Cliff Moran, and the
Empress of Mars,
a story which is already a legend of the spaceways. And it’s a damn good story, too.
I ought to know, having framed the first version of it myself.

For I was there, right in the Rigel Royal, when it all began on the night that Cliff
Moran blew in, looking lower than an antman’s belly and twice as nasty. He’d had a
spell of luck foul enough to twist a man into a slug snake, and we all knew that there
was an attachment out for his ship. Cliff had fought his way up from the back courts
of Venaport. Lose his ship and he’d slip back there—to rot. He was at
the snarling stage that night when he picked out a table for himself and set out to
drink away his troubles.

However, just as the first bottle arrived, so did a visitor. Steena came out of her
corner, Bat curled around her shoulders stolewise, his favorite mode of travel. She
crossed over and dropped down, without invitation, at Cliff’s side. That shook him
out of his sulks. Because Steena never chose company when she could be alone. If one
of the man-stones on Ganymede had come stumping in, it wouldn’t have made more of
us look out of the corners of our eyes.

She stretched out one long-fingered hand, set aside the bottle he had ordered, and
said only one thing. “It’s about time for the
Empress of Mars
to appear.”

Cliff scowled and bit his lip. He was tough, tough as jet lining—you have to be granite
inside and out to struggle up from Venaport to a ship command. But we could guess
what was running through his mind at that moment. The
Empress of Mars
was just about the biggest prize a spacer could aim for. But in the fifty years she
had been following her queer derelict orbit through space, many men had tried to bring
her in—and none had succeeded.

A pleasure ship carrying untold wealth, she had been mysteriously abandoned in space
by passengers and crew, none of whom had ever been seen or heard of again. At intervals
thereafter she had been sighted, even boarded. Those who ventured into her either
vanished or returned swiftly without any believable explanation of what they had seen—wanting
only to get away from her as quickly as possible. But the man who could bring her
in—or even strip her clean in space—that man would win the jackpot.

“All right!” Cliff slammed his fist on the table. “I’ll try even that!”

Steena looked at him, much as she must have looked at Bat that day Bub Nelson brought
him to her, and nodded. That was all I saw. The rest of the story came to me in
pieces, months later and in another port half the system away.

Cliff took off that night. He was afraid to risk waiting—with a writ out that could
pull the ship from under him. And it wasn’t until he was in space that he discovered
his passengers—Steena and Bat. We’ll never know what happened then. I’m betting Steena
made no explanation at all. She wouldn’t.

It was the first time she had decided to cash in on her own tip and she was there—that
was all. Maybe that point weighed with Cliff, maybe he just didn’t care. Anyway, the
three were together when they sighted the
Empress
riding, her deadlights gleaming, a ghost ship in night space.

She must have been an eerie sight because her other lights were on too, in addition
to the red warnings at her nose. She seemed alive, a Flying Dutchman of space. Cliff
worked his ship skillfully alongside and had no trouble in snapping magnetic lines
to her lock. Some minutes later the three of them passed into her. There was still
air in her cabins and corridors, air that bore a faint corrupt taint which set Bat
to sniffing greedily and could be picked up even by the less sensitive human nostrils.

Cliff headed straight for the control cabin, but Steena and Bat went prowling. Closed
doors were a challenge to both of them and Steena opened each as she passed, taking
a quick look at what lay within. The fifth door opened on a room which no woman could
leave without further investigation.

I don’t know what had been housed there when the
Empress
left port on her last lengthy cruise. Anyone really curious can check back on the
old photo-reg cards. But there was a lavish display of silk trailing out of two travel
kits on the floor, a dressing table crowded with crystal and jeweled containers, along
with other lures for the female which drew Steena in. She was standing in front of
the dressing table when she glanced into the mirror—glanced into it and froze.

Over her right shoulder she could see the spider-silk cover on the bed. Right in the
middle of that sheer, gossamer expanse was a sparkling heap of gems, the dumped contents
of some jewel case. Bat had jumped to the foot of the bed and flattened out as cats
will, watching those gems, watching them and—something else!

Steena put out her hand blindly and caught up the nearest bottle. As she unstoppered
it, she watched the mirrored bed. A gemmed bracelet rose from the pile, rose in the
air and tinkled its siren song. It was as if an idle hand played. . . . Bat spat almost
noiselessly. But he did not retreat. Bat had not yet decided his course.

She put down the bottle. Then she did something which perhaps few of the men she had
listened to through the years could have done. She moved without hurry or sign of
disturbance on a tour about the room. And, although she approached the bed, she did
not touch the jewels. She could not force herself to do that. It took her five minutes
to play out her innocence and unconcern. Then it was Bat who decided the issue.

He leaped from the bed and escorted something to the door, remaining a careful distance
behind. Then he mewed loudly twice. Steena followed him and opened the door wider.

Bat went straight on down the corridor, as intent as a hound on the warmest of scents.
Steena strolled behind him, holding her pace to the unhurried gait of an explorer.
What sped before them was invisible to her, but Bat was never baffled by it.

They must have gone into the control cabin almost on the heels of the unseen—if the
unseen had heels, which there was good reason to doubt—for Bat crouched just within
the doorway and refused to move on. Steena looked down the length of the instrument
panels and officers’ station seats to where Cliff Moran worked. Her boots made no
sound on the heavy carpet, and he did not glance up but sat humming through set teeth,
as he tested the tardy and
reluctant responses to buttons which had not been pushed in years.

To human eyes they were alone in the cabin. But Bat still followed a moving something,
which he had at last made up his mind to distrust and dislike. For now he took a step
or two forward and spat—his loathing made plain by every raised hair along his spine.
And in that same moment Steena saw a flicker—a flicker of vague outline against Cliff’s
hunched shoulders, as if the invisible one had crossed the space between them.

But why had it been revealed against Cliff and not against the back of one of the
seats or against the panels, the walls of the corridor or the cover of the bed where
it had reclined and played with its loot? What could Bat see?

The storehouse memory that had served Steena so well through the years clicked open
a half-forgotten door. With one swift motion, she tore loose her spaceall and flung
the baggy garment across the back of the nearest seat.

Bat was snarling now, emitting the throaty rising cry that was his hunting song. But
he was edging back, back towards Steena’s feet, shrinking from something he could
not fight but which he faced defiantly. If he could draw it after him, past that dangling
spaceall . . . He had to—it was their only chance!

“What the . . .” Cliff had come out of his seat and was staring at them.

What he saw must have been weird enough: Steena, bare-armed and bare-shouldered, her
usually stiffly-netted hair falling wildly down her back; Steena watching empty space
with narrowed eyes and set mouth, calculating a single wild chance. Bat, crouched
on his belly, was retreating from thin air step by step and wailing like a demon.

“Toss me your blaster.” Steena gave the order calmly—as if they were still at their
table in the Rigel Royal.

And as quietly, Cliff obeyed. She caught the small weapon out of the air with a steady
hand—caught and leveled it.

“Stay where you are!” she warned. “Back, Bat, bring it back.”

With a last throat-splitting screech of rage and hate, Bat twisted to safety between
her boots. She pressed with thumb and forefinger, firing at the spaceall. The material
turned to powdery flakes of ash—except for certain bits which still flapped from the
scorched seat—as if something had protected them from the force of the blast. Bat
sprang straight up in the air with a screech that tore their ears.

“What . . .?” began Cliff again.

Steena made a warning motion with her left hand. “
Wait!”

She was still tense, still watching Bat. The cat dashed madly around the cabin twice,
running crazily with white-ringed eyes and flecks of foam on his muzzle. Then he stopped
abruptly in the doorway, stopped and looked back over his shoulder for a long, silent
moment. He sniffed delicately.

Steena and Cliff could smell it too now, a thick oily stench which was not the usual
odor left by an exploding blaster shell.

Bat came back, treading daintily across the carpet, almost on the tips of his paws.
He raised his head as he passed Steena, and then he went confidently beyond to sniff,
to sniff and spit twice at the unburned strips of the spaceall. Having thus paid his
respects to the late enemy, he sat down calmly and set to washing his fur with deliberation.
Steena sighed once and dropped into the navigator’s seat.