“That you’d break up with them… That’s Threbus, my father. You met him a couple of times in the town. Big man with a blond beard. Maleen and the Leewit take after him. He looks a lot like you.”
“You wouldn’t mean my great-uncle Threbus?” the captain inquired. He was in a state of strange calm by now.
“That’s right,” said Goth.
“It’s a small galaxy,” the captain said philosophically. “So that’s where Threbus wound up! I’d like to meet him again some day.”
“You’re going to,” said Goth. “But probably not very soon.” She hesitated, added, “Guess there’s something big going on. That’s why they moved Karres. So we likely won’t run into any of them again till it’s over.”
“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. He couldn’t imagine what it might be and there was no 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 meanwhile.”
“Sure,” said Goth. She studied his face. “You still want to pay the money you owe back to those people?”
He nodded. “A debt’s a debt.”
“Well,” Goth informed him, “I’ve got some ideas.”
“None of those witch tricks now!” the captain said warningly. “We’ll earn our money the fair 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
“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, satisfied.
The door closed once more.
The captain began to run his finger down the lengthy index of K’s — could it be under W?
Chapter THREE
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 behavior of Councilor Onswud and the others suggested that reports they’d received of the
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
The viewscreens, mass detectors, and communicators 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 dialed 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.
