James Schmiz - The Witches of Karres

DREAM MONSTER, muttered a shaky wind-voice, RELEASE ME BEFORE YOU DESTROY ME! WHAT HORROR AM I EXPERIENCING HERE? LET ME AWAKE!

“One more job,” the captain told it. “Then you can go — and you might be able to pick up a piece of what you’ve lost while you’re doing the job.”

WHAT IS THIS JOB?

“Return me to my ship…”

He was plopped down with a solid thump on the center of the Venture’s control room floor almost before he completed the order. The walls of the room swirled giddily around him -

“ Captain! ” Goth’s voice was yelling from somewhere in the room. Then: “ He’s here! ”

There was an excited squeal from the Leewit a little farther off; a sound of hurrying footsteps. And a wind-voice wailing, DREAM MONSTER… YOUR PROMISE!

Struggling up to a sitting position as the control room began to steady, the captain released the klatha hooks. He had a momentary impression of a wild, rising moan outside the ship which seemed to move off swiftly and fade in an instant into unimaginable distance.

As he came to his feet, helped up part way by Goth tugging with both hands at his arm, the Leewit arrived. Hulik do Eldel and Vezzarn appeared in the doorway behind her, stopped and stood staring at him. By then the walls of the room were back where they belonged. The feeling of giddiness was gone.

“All right, folks!” the captain said quickly and heartily, to get in ahead of questions he didn’t want to answer just yet. “This has been rough, but I think we can relax…” The viewscreens were a dark blur, which indicated the Venture was in space as she should be, while the screens were still set for close-up planetary scanning. The ship engines were silent. “Let’s find out where we are. It should be north of the Chaladoor—”

“North of the Chaladoor — !” Vezzarn and Hulik chorused hoarsely.

“ — around two hours from Emris.” The captain slid into the control chair, flicked the screen settings to normal space-view. Stars appeared near and far. He turned up the detectors, got an immediate splattering of ship blips from medium to extreme range — a civilized area! “Vezzarn, pick me up some beacons here! I want a location check fastest!”

The spacer hurried towards the communicators, Hulik following. The captain cut in the main drive engines. They responded with a long, smooth roar and the Venture surged into flight. Before departing, the vatch appeared to have thriftily reabsorbed the speck of vatch-stuff it had left in the engine room to nullify drive energies…

“Worm World?” Goth’s urgent whisper demanded. The Leewit was pressed next to her against the chair, both staring intently at him.

“Went pffttt! ” the captain muttered from the side of his mouth. “Tell you later—”

They gasped. “You better! ” hissed the Leewit, gray eyes shining with a light of full approval the captain rarely had detected in them before. “What you do? That was the scaredest vatch I ever relled!”

“Emris beacons all around, skipper!” Vezzarn announced, voice quavvering with what might have been excitement or relief. “Have your location in a moment—”

The captain glanced at the witches. “Got a number we can call on Emris, to get in contact?” he asked quietly.

They nodded. “Sure do!” said Goth.

“We should be in range. Give it a try as soon as we have our course…”

It seemed almost odd, a couple of minutes later, to be speaking to Toll by a method as unwitchy as ship-to-planet communicator contact. Hulik and Vezzarn had retired to the passenger section again when the captain told them there’d be Karres business coming up. The talk was brief. Toll had sheewashed to Emris from the Dead Suns Cluster just before their call came in, because someone she referred to as a probability calculator had decided the Venture and her crew should be showing up around there by about this time. Karres was still battling Nuri globes but winning handily in that conflict; and they’d realized something had happened to Manaret, but not what.

The captain explained as well as he could. Toll’s eyes were shining much as the Leewit’s as she blew him a kiss. “Now listen,” she said, “all three of you. There’s been more klatha simmering around the Venture lately than you’d normally find around Karres. Better let it cool off! We want to see you soonest but don’t use the Drive to get here. Don’t do anything but stay on course… Captain, a couple of escort ships will meet you in about an hour to pilot you in. Children, we’ll see you at the governor’s spacefield in Green Galaine — oh, yes, and tell the captain what the arrangement is on Emris… Now let’s cut this line before someone taps it who shouldn’t!”

“I just thought,” the captain said to Goth and the Leewit as he switched off the communicator, “we’d better go make sure Olimy’s all right! Come on… I’d like to hear about that Emris business then.”

Olimy, unsurprisingly, was still in his stateroom, aloof and unaffected by the events which had thundered about him. On the way back they stopped to tell Hulik and Vezzarn they’d be making landfall on Emris in a couple of hours, and to find out what the experience of the two had been when they found themselves alone on the Venture . “There was this noise—” Hulik said. She and Vezzarn agreed it was an indescribable noise, though not a very loud one. “It was alarming!” said Hulik. It had come from the control section. They hadn’t tried to investigate immediately, thinking it was some witch matter they shouldn’t be prying into; but when the noise was followed by a complete silence from the forward part of the ship, they’d first tried to get a response from the control section by intercom, and when that failed they’d gone up front together. Except for the fact that there was no one present nothing had changed… the viewscreens showed the familiar rocky slope about them and the rain still pelting down steadily on the Venture . Not knowing what else to do, they’d sat down in the control section to wait… and they hadn’t really known what they were waiting for.

“If you’ll excuse me for saying so, skipper,” said Vezzarn, “I wasn’t so sure you three hadn’t just gone off and left us for good! Miss do Eldel, she said, ‘No, they’ll be back.’ But I wasn’t so sure.” He shook his grizzled head. “That part was bad!”

The captain explained there’d been no chance to warn them — didn’t add there’d been a rather good chance, in fact, that no one ever would come back to the Venture again.

“Then the strongbox went!” reported Hulik. “I was looking at it, wondering what you had inside — and there was a puff of darkness about it, and that cleared, and the box was gone. Vezzarn hadn’t seen it and didn’t notice it, and I didn’t tell him.”

“If she’d told me, I’d’ve fainted dead!” Vezzarn muttered earnestly.

Then the blackness had come… Blackness about the ship and inside it and around them, lasting for perhaps a minute. When it cleared away suddenly, Goth and the Leewit were standing in the control room with them. Everyone had started looking around for the captain then until Goth suddenly announced his arrival from the control room a couple of minutes later…

“Well, I’m sorry you were put through all that,” the captain told the two. “It couldn’t be helped. But you’ll be safe down on Emris within another two hours… Happen to remember just when it was you heard that strange noise?”

The do Eldel checked her timepiece. “It seems like several lifetimes,” she said. “But as a matter of fact, it was an hour and fifteen minutes ago.”