The Witches of Karres

the boat. Beat it!”

He was alone. He let the locks slam shut and banged down the oxygen release switch. The air had become a little thin.

He cussed.

The communicator began rattling for attention. He turned it on.

“Pausert!” Councilor Onswud was calling in a friendly but shaking voice. “May we not depart, Pausert? Your nova guns are still fixed on this boat!”

“Oh, that…” said the captain. He deflected the turrets a trifle. “They won’t go off now. Scram!”

The police boat vanished.

There was other company coming, though. Far below him but climbing steadily, a trio of atmospheric revolt ships darted past on the screen, swung around and came back for the next turn of their spiral. They’d have to get closer before they started shooting, but they’d stay between him and the surface of Nikkeldepain while space destroyers closed in from above. Between them then, they’d knock out the Venture and bring her down in a net of paramagnetic grapples, if he didn’t surrender.

He sat a moment, reflecting. The revolt ships went by once more. The captain punched in the Venture’s secondary drives, turned her nose towards the planet, and let her go. There were some scattered white puffs around as he cut through the revolt ships’ plane of flight. Then he was below them, and the Venture groaned as he took her out of the dive. The revolt ships were already scattering and nosing over for a countermaneuver. He picked the nearest one and swung the nova guns toward it.

“ — and ram them in the middle!” he muttered between his teeth.

SSS-whoosh!

It was the Sheewash Drive — but like a nightmare now, it kept on and on…

* * *

“Maleen!” the captain bawled, pounding at the locked door of the captain’s cabin. “Maleen, shut it off! Cut it off! You’ll kill yourself. Maleen!”

The Venture quivered suddenly throughout her length, then shuddered more violently, jumped and coughed, and commenced sailing along on her secondary drives again.

“Maleen!” he yelled, wondering briefly how many light-years from everything they were by now. “Are you all right?”

There was a faint thump-thump inside the cabin, and silence. He lost nearly two minutes finding the right cutting tool in the storage and getting it back to the cabin. A few seconds later a section of steel door panel sagged inwards; he caught it by one edge and came tumbling into the cabin with it.

He had the briefest glimpse of a ball of orange-colored fire swirling uncertainly over a cone of oddly bent wires. Then the fire vanished and the wires collapsed with a loose rattling to the table top.

The crumpled small shape lay behind the table, which was why he didn’t discover it at once. He sagged to the floor beside it, all the strength running out of his knees.

Brown eyes opened and blinked at him blearily.

“Sure takes it out of you!” Goth muttered. “Am I hungry!”

“I’ll whale the holy howling tar out of you again,” the captain roared, “if you ever—”

“Quit your yelling!” snarled Goth. “I got to eat.”

She ate for fifteen minutes straight before she sank back in her chair and sighed.

“Have some more Wintenberry jelly,” the captain offered anxiously. She looked pretty pale.

Goth shook her head. “Couldn’t… and that’s about the first thing you’ve said since you fell through the door, howling for Maleen. Ha-ha! Maleen’s got a boy friend!”

“Button your lip, child,” the captain said. “I was thinking.” He added, after a moment, “Has she really?”

Goth nodded. “Picked him out last year. Nice boy from the town. They get married as soon as she’s marriageable. She just told you to come back because she was upset about you. Maleen had a premonition you were headed for awful trouble!”

“She was quite right, little chum,” the captain said nastily.

“What were you thinking about?” Goth inquired.

“I was thinking,” said the captain, “that as soon as we’re sure you’re going to be all right, I’m taking you straight back to Karres.”

“I’ll be all right now,” Goth said. “Except, likely, for a stomach-ache. But you can’t take me back to Karres.”

“Who will stop me, may I ask?” the captain asked.

“Karres is gone,” Goth said.

“Gone?” the captain repeated blankly, with a sensation of not quite definable horror bubbling up in him.

“Not blown up or anything,” Goth reassured him. “They just moved it. The Imperials got their hair up about us again. This time they were sending a fleet with the big bombs and stuff, so everybody was called home. And right after you’d left… we’d left, I mean… they moved it.”

“Where?”

“Great Patham!” Goth shrugged. “How’d I know? There’s lots of places!”

* * *

There probably were, the captain agreed silently. A scene came suddenly before his eyes — that lime-white, arenalike bowl in the valley, with the steep tiers of seats around it, just before they’d reached the town of Karres. The “Theater where—”

But now there was unnatural night-darkness all over and about that world; and the eight-thousand-some witches of Karres sat in circles around the Theater, their heads turned towards one point in the center where orange fire washed hugely about the peak of a cone of curiously twisted girders.

And a world went racing off at the speeds of the Sheewash Drive! There’d be lots of places, all right. What peculiar people!

“Aren’t they going to be worried about you?” he asked.

“Not very much. We don’t get hurt often.”

Once could be too often. But anyway, she was here for now… The captain stretched his legs out under the table, inquired, “Was it the Sheewash Drive they used to move Karres with?”

Goth wrinkled her nose doubtfully. “Sort of like it.” She added, “I can’t tell you much about those things till you’ve started to be one yourself.”

“Started to be what myself?” he asked.

“A witch like us. We got our rules. And that likely won’t be for a while. Couple of years maybe, Karres time.”

“Couple of years, eh?” the captain repeated thoughtfully. “You were planning on staying around that long?”

Goth frowned at the jar of Wintenberry jelly, pulled it towards her and inspected it carefully. “Longer, really,” she acknowledged. “Be a bit before I’m marriageable age!”

The captain blinked at her. “Well, yes, it would be…”

“So I got it all fixed,” Goth told the jelly, “as soon as they started saying they ought to pick out a wife for you on Karres. I said it was me, right away; and everyone else said finally that was all right then — even Maleen, because she had this boy friend.”

“You mean,” said the captain, startled, “your parents knew you were stowing away on the Venture?”

“Uh-huh.” Goth pushed the jelly back where it had been standing and glanced up at him again. “It was my father who told us you’d be breaking up with the people on Nikkeldepain pretty soon. He said it was in the blood.”

“What was in the blood?” the captain asked patiently.