The Witches of Karres

It was a moving pattern, and it gave off faintly audible sounds. Vezzarn stared and listened, first with surprise, then in blank puzzlement, at last with growing consternation. The reproduced contrivance in there buzzed, clicked, hummed, twinkled, spun. It sent small impulses of assorted energy types shooting about through itself. It remained spectacularly, if erratically, busy. And within five minutes Vezzarn became completely convinced that it did, and could do, absolutely nothing that would serve any practical purpose.

Whatever it might be, it wasn’t a spacedrive. Even the most unconventional of drives couldn’t possibly resemble anything like that!

Then what was it? Presently it dawned on Vezzarn that he’d been tricked. That thing behind the bulge on the bulkhead had served a purpose! The entire little locked compartment in the engine room was set up to draw the interest of somebody who might be prowling about the Evening Bird in search of a hidden drive installation.

It was something of a shock! The skipper had impressed him as an open, forthright fellow. An act of such low cunning didn’t fit the impression. Briefly, Vezzarn felt almost hurt. But at any rate he’d spotted the camera and hadn’t got caught…

That was only one of the unsettling developments for Vezzarn that day. Since Captain Aron’s precautionary measures might have been intended to keep tab on passengers rather than himself, he’d set up his own system of telltale bugs in various parts of the ship. They were considerably more efficient bugs than the ones which had been installed for Captain Aron; even a first-class professional would have to be very lucky to avoid them all. If Vezzarn had competitors on board in his quest for the secret drive, he wanted to know it.

It appeared now that he did. Running a check playback on the telltales, he discovered they’d been agitated by somebody’s passage in several off-limit ship sections at times when the skipper, young Dani, and he himself had been up in the control compartment.

Which of the two was it? The Hulik do Eldel female, or that nattily dressed, big bruiser of a trader, Laes Yango?

Perhaps both of them, acting independently, Vezzarn thought worriedly. Two other agents looking for the same thing he was — that was all he needed on this trip!

* * *

Captain Aron, at about that hour, was doing some worrying on the same general subject. If he’d been able to arrange it, there would have been no passengers on the Venture — or Evening Bird — when she left Uldune. What they’d taken on board made the commercial aspects of the run to Emris completely insignificant. And not only that — their experience with Sunnat, Bazim Filish raised the question of how many other groups on Uldune suspected the ship of containing the secrets of some new drive of stupendous power and incalculable value. Subradio had spread information about the Venture faster and farther than they’d foreseen. Almost anyone they ran into now could be nourishing private designs on the mystery drive.

One way to have stopped the plotting might have been to let word get out generally that they were Karres witches. Apparently few informed people here cared to cross the witches. But because of Olimy and his crystalloid item again, it was the last thing they could afford to do at present. The Worm World, from all accounts, had its own human agents about, enslaved and totally obedient minds; any such rumor was likely to draw the Nuris’ attention immediately to them. They wanted to make the Venture’s departure from Uldune as quiet a matter as possible.

So he’d been unable to leave Laes Yango and Hulik do Eldel behind. To do it against their wishes certainly would have started speculation. After Kambine canceled voluntarily, he’d invited the two to come to the office. The day before, a ship had limped into Zergandol Port after concluding a pass through the Chaladoor. The ship was in very bad shape, its crew in worse. It seemed, the captain said, that the Chaladoor’s hazards had reached a peak at present. If they’d prefer to reconsider the trip for that reason, he would refund the entire fare.

The offer got him nowhere. Hulik do Eldel became tearfully insistent that she must rejoin her aging parents on Emris as soon as possible. And Yango stated politely that, if necessary, he would obtain an injunction to keep the Evening Bird from leaving without him. Some office of the Daal’s no doubt would have quietly overruled the injunction; but meanwhile there would have been a great deal of loose talk. So the captain gave in.

“In case one of those two is after the Sheewash Drive,” he told Goth, “we’d better do something about it.”

“Do what?” asked Goth. It would have been convenient just now if her talents had included reading minds; but they didn’t.

The captain had thought about it. “Set up a decoy drive.”

Goth liked the idea. He’d almost forgotten what had happened to the leftovers of the cargo with which he had started out from Nikkeldepain — sometimes that day seemed to lie years in the past now — but he located them finally in storage at the spaceport. One of the crates contained the complicated, expensive, and somewhat explosive educational toys which probably were the property of Councilor Rapport and which had turned out to be unsalable in the Empire.

“There’s a kind of gadget in there that could do the trick,” he said to Goth. “Called the Totisystem Toy, I think.”

He found a Totisystem Toy and demonstrated it for her. It had been designed to provide visual instruction in all forms of power systems known to Nikkeldepain, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the lot. When the toy was set in action, the systems all started to operate simultaneously. The result was a bewildering, constantly changing visual hash.

“Might not fool anybody who’s got much sense for long,” he admitted. “But all it has to do is let us know whether there’s someone on board we have to watch… Could have the ship bugged, too, come to think of it!”

They had the Totisystem Toy installed in the engine room, concealed but not so well concealed that a good snooper shouldn’t be able to find it, and set up a camera designed for espionage work. The espionage supplies outfit which sold them the camera, and sent an expert to bug the Venture unobtrusively in the areas the captain wanted covered, acknowledged the devices couldn’t be depended upon absolutely. Nothing in that class could. It was simply a matter of trying to keep a jump ahead of the competition.

“Spiders!” Goth remarked thoughtfully.

“Eh?” inquired the captain.

Spiders spun threads, she explained, and spiders got in everywhere. Even a very suspicious spy probably wouldn’t give much attention to a spider thread or two even if he noticed them.

They brought a couple of well-nourished spiders aboard the ship and attached a few threads to the camouflaged camera in the engine room. Anyone doing anything at all to the camera was going to break a thread.

Vezzarn, of course, couldn’t be completely counted out now as a potential spy. The old spacer’s experience might make him very useful on the run; but if it could be made to seem that it was his own decision, they’d leave him on Uldune.

Vezzarn scratched his gray head.

“Sounds like the Chaladoor’s acting up kind of bad right now, at that!” he agreed innocently. “But I’ll come along anyway, skipper, if it’s all right with you.”

So Vezzarn also came along. If they’d discharged him just before starting on the trip for which he’d been hired, people would have been wondering again.

On the night before take-off, Daalmen in an unmarked van brought two sizable crates out to the Evening Bird and loaded them on the ship at the captain’s directions. One crate went into a brand-new strongbox in the storage vault with a time lock on it. When it was inside, the captain set the lock to a date two weeks ahead. The other crate went into a stateroom recently sealed off from the rest of the passenger compartment. The first contained the crystalloid object which had been on Olimy’s ship; and the other contained Olimy himself.

They’d completed all preparations as well as they could.

After they’d been aloft twelve hours, Goth went down to the engine room with one of the spiders in a box in