Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

At first it was more or less a closed circle, and then inside of it a five-pointed star with some odd symbols that looked mostly like swashes inside the outer portion between each star point.

Murphy and Maslovic both stared hard now, not at the design but inside it, and above it, and, to their mutual surprise, they could actually see the three witches, sort of. They seemed to flicker in and out, and parts of them flashed here and there. Finally, though, they attained a more permanent solidity, and the two men could hear them chanting in some unknown tongue.

They looked bedraggled and downright filthy, their hair in tangles, their bodies stained with not only whatever they’d used to paint themselves a day or so earlier but also grease and all sorts of other stuff. There were some fresh scrapes, too, and the red-haired one had a cut on her leg that was still bleeding slightly. Others had small cuts and scratches all over that had healed, and were in a few cases already beginning to bruise.

They also stank of piss and shit and body odors and more. Clearly they hadn’t cleaned themselves up in any way since they’d gone missing, and it was going to make them tough company unless they decided to do so on their own here.

Now all three were standing within the ancient symbol, eyes closed, as the chant came to a rhythmic but definite end.

It was as if they were suddenly out of a trance and back to normal. They let go holding hands, opened their eyes, and looked around. “ Ew! Something stinks! ” said the red-headed Irish O’Brian, her nose up and contorting her face.

“You said it,” Mary Margaret, the brown-haired one, agreed. Brigit, the blonde, simply said, “ Bleah! ” in a tone that left no doubt as to her meaning.

“Ah, girls! So happy to see you again!” Murphy said effusively. “But I’m afraid that the stench you’re smellin’ is your own ordinarily sweet selves.”

Mary Margaret looked at each of her companions and then at as much of herself as she could see. “Oh my gawd! ” she exclaimed.

“Jeez!” Irish chimed in. “We need baths, and bad! ”

“No baths here, darlin’s,” Murphy told them, “but there’s a shower here and a place to clean up and make yourselves presentable again. If you wanted more you shoulda come in while we was still on the big ship, but this is what you asked.”

“Shit! How was we to know?” Irish O’Brian responded. “Well, look, if you two can help us down off this thing, at least we can try and clean up!”

The sergeant got to his feet. “Allow me,” he said pleasantly. In turn, each of the trio came towards him and he picked them up like they weighed nothing at all and put them down on the deck.

“Wow! Feels like I don’t weigh nothin a-tall,” Mary Margaret commented, sort of stomping up and down with her bare feet on the deck. “Neat!”

“It’ll be more comfortable this way,” Murphy assured them. “Now, look, I’ll show you where the toilet is, and you go back there and get clean and nice, and then we’ll all sit here and have somethin’ to eat and talk a bit. We got a long while to go to get to Barnum’s World yet. Three days most likely. No rush.”

For him, though, they couldn’t get there fast enough.

It did not bother either of the military people aboard that the three girls wore just about nothing on the trip, but it made Murphy uncomfortable and he couldn’t even say why. Certainly he wasn’t sexually attracted to them; even if they weren’t so hugely pregnant, he found himself more frightened of them than anything else, something he hadn’t even thought about before being intercepted by the navy. Possibly it was that demonstration of power they’d done; but, he reflected, it was more like being uncomfortable because he felt helpless and surrounded by three idiots with loaded weapons.

Interestingly, though, they barely remembered the experience, and could not explain how they’d done what they’d done. It did not, however, bother them much. Ignorance was true bliss sometimes, even when you didn’t know that what you did was so remarkable.

At least with all that time to Barnum’s World they didn’t have much to do but eat, sleep, and talk. It was tough to get them to stay on that or any subject for long, but slowly Maslovic began getting some information from them that seemed useful, and Murphy got more than he thought was healthy for him. There was, for example, the eerie feeling in his gut that, even in this small shuttle, what everyone was saying and doing was somehow being monitored and recorded and analyzed. Not by the navy—he expected that, and did not fear it one bit. No, by someone or something else, the ones behind this strangeness.

It’s them damned medals, he decided. I don’t care if they’re worth a fortune or what, there’s something unnatural about ’em.

They had allowed the trio to eat, and they’d had really massive appetites, although for some combinations that not even Murphy could tolerate thinking hard about, and then they’d slept for ten solid hours each. They seemed to sleep a lot, which Murphy put down to their condition. He was most frightened that one or more of the young women would decide to have her kid then and there. He knew the two military people weren’t prepared for such a thing, and he was damned sure he wasn’t.

It was easiest when one or another of them would come to the lounge leaving the other two still asleep. This happened quite a lot after that initial sleep-off, although if it was the blonde-haired Moran, you couldn’t get a full sentence out of her if you tried. O’Brian never stopped talking, which was quite typical of people who had little to say, and McBride seemed the most normal of the bunch although no brighter, willing to engage in small talk or not as needed. She also seemed the most curious about the navy pair, which allowed for a give-and-take exchange of information. Over a few sessions, Maslovic in particular was able to get pretty direct with the brown-haired self-described witch.

“Where’d you learn to do that magic spell that caused the vanishing trick?” he asked her casually as she ate. Murphy sat away from them, curious but not exactly motivated to join in.

“Tip told us how,” McBride responded with that slightly off-kilter view of conversation they all shared and which had nearly driven the senior officers of the Thermopylae nuts.

“Tip? Who’s Tip? A kind of spirit?”

She nodded, munching on a potato pancake and sipping very dark tea mixed half and half with cream and sugar. “Tip can’t do things in our plane without us, we can’t do nothin’ neat here without him and his friends givin’ us the power and all.”

“Tip talks only to you, then? Not to Moran or O’Brian?”

“See? There y’go again! Why do you and the driver up there always use only the family names? Don’t you have another name?”

“What? You mean like you?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I mean, I got three names, and only one isn’t just me. And there’s Brigit Maureen and then there’s Colleen Megan, and she even has a name all her own that everybody uses instead of them.”

“Irish, you mean? Why do you need all those names?”

She shrugged. “ ’Cause I guess there’s only so many names and we don’t want to have nobody else’s, that’s why. Don’t always work even then. I mean, I can’t count the number of Mary Margarets back home. I always thought I wanted me own name, like Irish done, only I never come up with none I really liked.”

“We have ranks and we have numbers,” the sergeant explained. “The numbers are never the same so we can always be ourselves. The rank changes if we do a good job, but the number is unique. The number’s all we really need, but it’s just too much of a mouthful to say, particularly when you’re in a hurry. Easier to say ‘Sarge,’ or, if there’s more than one of my rank, ‘Maslovic,’ instead of, oh, ‘Hurry up, M2174-34K77-41CK!’ See what I mean?”