The Witches of Karres

The captain looked again, for an instant only, at the screens. There was no need to study them to see what they contained. All about the ship swam the great glowing globes of Manaret, moving with them, preceding them, following them. Above his own ragged breathing there was a small, momentary near-sound, a click not quite heard.

Then he knew there was only one thing left to do. And almost no time in which to do it.

“I was wrong!” he said loudly, beginning to rise from the chair. “There is nothing there—” The entire port screen was filling with yellow fire now, reflecting its glare down into the room, staining the air, the walls, the Agandar’s motionless figure, the steadily held gun. But if he could get, even for an instant, within four or five feet of the man — “I’m in no shape to handle the ship, Mr. Yango!” he shouted desperately at the figure. “You’ll have to take over!”

“Stay in that chair!” Yango told him in a flat, strained voice. “And be quiet! Be absolutely quiet. Don’t speak. Don’t move. If you do either, I pull this trigger a trifle farther and your heart, sir, stops in that instant… I must listen and think!”

The captain checked all motion. The gun remained rock-steady; and Yango, with the yellow glare from the globe just beyond the port side of the ship still gradually strengthening about them, also sat motionless and silent while some seconds went by.

Then Yango said, “No, you were not wrong, sir. You were right. I see the Worm Weather now, too. But it makes no difference.”

The gun muzzle still pointed unswervingly at the captain’s chest. The captain suggested, very carefully, “If you’ll wake up Goth, or give me the antidote — then—”

“No. You don’t understand,” Yango told him. “We are all going to die unless, within the next fifteen or twenty minutes, you can think of a way to get us out of it in spite of anything I may do to stop you.”

He nodded at the screens. “Now I have no choice left! I found they have complete control of me. I can do only what they wish. They have tried to control you, but something prevents it. That makes no difference either. There is an object on this ship they fear and must destroy. I do not know what the nature of this object is, but it seems you know about it. The Worms are under a compulsion which prohibits them from harming it by their own actions. It is impossible for them to come closer to the ship than they are now.”

“So they have selected a new destination for us — that star you see almost dead ahead! The blue giant. You are to put the ship on full drive and turn towards it. They want the situation here to remain exactly as it is in all other respects until the ship and everything it contains plunges into the star and is annihilated. They believe that some witch stratagem may be employed to evade them if they relax their present control over us even for an instant. If you refuse to follow my orders, I am to kill you and guide the ship to the star in your stead.” Yango’s face twisted in a slow, agonized grimace. “And I will do it! I have no more wish to die in that manner than you have, Captain Pausert. But I cannot disobey the Worms — and die in that star we shall unless, between this moment and the instant before we arrive there, you have found a way of escape! There may be such a way! These beings seem hampered and confused by the proximity of the object concealed on the ship. I have the impression it blinds them mentally… You have only a few seconds left to make up your mind—”

OHO! exclaimed the vatch. WHAT A FASCINATING PREDICAMENT! BUT TO AVOID A PREMATURE END TO THIS GAME, LET US SHUFFLE THE PIECES A LITTLE…

Storm-bellowing around the ship and within it. Darkness closed in as the control room deck heaved up sharply. The captain felt himself flung forwards against the desk, then back away from it. Every light in the section had gone out and the Venture seemed to be tumbling through pitch blackness. Pieces of equipment or furnishing smashed here and there against the walls about him. Then the ship appeared to slew around and ride steady. Light simultaneously returned to the screens — dim, reddish brown light.

* * *

The captain had no time to notice other details just then. He was scrambling up on hands and knees when something slammed hard and painfully against his thigh. He heard Laes Yango curse savagely above him, and ducked forward in time to let the next boot heel coming down scrape past the back of his head. He caught the big man’s other leg, pulled sharply up on it. Yango came down on him like a sack of rocks.

They went rolling over the floor, into obstacles and away from them. The captain hit every section of Yango in reach from moment to moment, suspected rapidly he was not getting the best of this. Then he had one of Yango’s arms twisted under him. Yango’s other hand came up promptly and closed on his throat.

It was a large muscular hand. It seemed to tighten as inexorably as a motor-drive wrench. The captain, head swimming, let go the pirate’s other arm, heaved himself sideways on the floor, knocked his wrist against something solidly metallic, picked it up and struck where Yango’s head should be.

The head was there. Yango grunted and the iron grip on the captain’s throat went slack. He struggled out from under the heavy body, came swaying to his feet in the semi-dark room, eyes shifting to the screens. No Nuri globes in sight, anyway! Otherwise the view out there was not particularly inviting. But that could wait.

“Goth!” he called hoarsely, which sent assorted pains stabbing through his mauled throat Then he remembered that Goth couldn’t hear him.

He found her lying beside the couch which had skidded halfway to the end of the room and turned over. He righted it, pushed it back against the wall. Goth made small muttering noises as he picked her up carefully and placed her back on the couch; but they were noises of sleepy irritability, not of pain. She didn’t seem to have been damaged in whatever upheaval had hit the Venture. The captain discovered Hulik and Vezzarn lying nearby and let them lie for the moment. As he started back to the control desk the room’s lights came on. Some self-repair relay had closed.

There still wasn’t time to start pondering about exactly what had happened. First things had to come first, and he had a number of almost simultaneous first things on hand. The felled Agandar was breathing; so were the other two. Yango had an ugly swelling bruise on the right side of his forehead just below the hairline, where the captain’s lucky swing had landed. He got Yango’s wrists secured behind him with the ship’s single pair of emergency handcuffs, then went quickly through the man’s pockets. In one of them was a wallet-like affair designed to hold five small hypodermics, of which three were left. That almost had to be the antidote. The captain hesitated, but only for a moment. He badly wanted to wake up Goth but he wasn’t going to try to do it with something which, considering Yango’s purpose on the Venture, might have been a killing device.

There was nothing else on Yango’s person that seemed of immediate significance. The captain turned his attention to the ship and her surroundings. The Venture appeared to have gone on orbital drive automatically as soon as the unexplained tumult which had brought her to this section of space subsided — the reason was that she had found herself then within orbiting range of a planetary body.

At first consideration it was not a prepossessing planet, but that might have been because its light came from a swollen, dull-red glowing coal of a sun which filled most of the starboard screen. The captain turned up screen magnification on the port side for a brief closer look. Through the hazy reddish twilight below, which was this world’s midday illumination, he got an impression of a landscape consisting mostly of desert and low, jagged mountain ranges. He went on to test the instruments and drives, finally switched in the communicators. The Venture was in working condition; the detectors registered no hostile presence about, and the communicators indicated that nobody around here wanted to talk to them at the moment. So far, not bad.

And now — how had they got here?

Not through Goth this time, he told himself. Not via the Sheewash Drive. During the first moments of that spinning black confusion which plucked the ship out of the cluster of Nuri globes herding them towards fire-death in a terrible star, he’d been sure it was the Drive… that a surge of klatha magic had brought Goth awake in this emergency and she’d slipped unnoticed into her cabin.

But even before the ship began to settle out again, he’d known it couldn’t have been that. He’d seen Goth on the couch, slumped loosely against Hulik, moments before the blackness rushed and roared in on them. Something quite other than the Drive had picked them up, swung them roughly through space, dropped them at this spot -

That great, booming voice in his mind, the one he’d assumed was a product of dream — imagination —