The Witches of Karres

“Worm — HUH?”

“That’s right. Say, that crystal thing of Olimy’s — it’s still on the ship, isn’t it?”

“How’d I know?” Goth said. “Worm World!” She looked stunned. She shook her head, added, “Ship came just now, with you.”

“Just now?”

“Minute ago. I was headed back to camp—”

“Camp? Well, skip that. Hulik and Vezzarn are with you?”

“Both. Not Olimy. I relled a vatch. Giant-vatch — you don’t do things small, Captain! Turned around, and there the Venture was. Then you stood up—”

“Come along,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure it’s on board! I know what it is now. Ever hear of a synergizer in connection with Manaret?”

“Syner… no,” said Goth, trotting beside him. “Important, huh?”

“The most!” the captain assured her. “The most! Tell you later.”

They scrambled up the ramp and through the lock. The control section lighting was on, the heating system going full blast. The bulkheads felt icy to the touch. They took a moment to check the control desk, found everything but the general emergency switch and the automatic systems in off position, left things as they were and headed for the back of the ship. They paused briefly again at the first emergency wall. The Sheem Spider hadn’t exactly burned out a hole in it; it had cut out a section big enough to let it through endwise along with its master and knocked the loose chunk of battle-steel into the next compartment, shattering fifteen feet of deck.

“One tough robot!” remarked Goth, impressed, “Kind of sorry I slept through all that!”

“So were we, child,” the captain told her. “Come on…”

The lost synergizer of Manaret was in the strongbox in the vault, in its wrappings. They picked their way back out of the shattered vault, opened Olimy’s locked stateroom next and saw him imprisoned but safe in his eternal disminded moment there, locked up the room and left the ship by the ramp.

“Let’s sit,” said Goth. She settled down cross-legged in the grass. “The others are all right. What happened to you? How’d you get to the Worm World? What’s that synergizer thing?”

She listened without interrupting, face intent, as he related his experience up to the point where he’d decided to take a fling at constructing a vatch lock. For various reasons it didn’t seem advisable to mention that at the moment. “The vatch seemed to say something about going on with the game,” he concluded. “Next thing I knew I was here.”

Goth sighed. “That vatch!” she muttered. She rubbed her nose tip. “Looks sort of bad, doesn’t it?”

“Not too good at present,” the captain admitted. “But we have the synergizer safe here. That’s something… We don’t know what the vatch intends to do next, of course.”

“No.”

“But if it leaves us alone for a while… any idea of where we are here?”

“Know exactly where we are,” Goth told him. “Can’t see that’ll help much, though!” She patted the ground beside her. “This is Karres.”

“What!” He came to his feet. “But then—”

“No,” Goth said. “It’s not that simple. This isn’t Karres-now. It’s Karres-then.”

“Huh?”

She indicated the big yellow sun disk above the mountains. “Double star,” she said. “Squint your eyes, you can see just a little bit of white sticking out behind it on the left. That’s its twin. This is the Talsoe System where Karres was when witches found it — its own system. There’s nobody here yet but us.”

“How do you… You think that vatch sent us back in time?”

“Long way back in time!” Goth nodded.

“How can you be sure? Now you’ve mentioned it, this could be Karres by its looks! But a lot of worlds—”

“Uh-uh!” Her forefinger pointed at a shining white mountain peak beyond the rise. “I ought to know that mountain, Captain! That’s where I was born… or where I’m going to be born, thirty miles from here. Town’s going to be in the valley north of it.” Goth’s hand swept about. “I know all this country — it’s Karres!”

“All right But they could have moved it to the Talsoe System the last time, couldn’t they? Let’s get in the ship and…”

Goth shook her head. “Not a bit of klatha around except ours and the vatch. There’re no witches here yet, believe me! And won’t be for another three hundred thousand years anyway—”

“Three hundred thou… !” the captain half shouted. He checked himself. “How do you know that?”

“Got a little moon here. You’ll see it tonight. Karres had one early, but then it smacked down around the north pole and messed things up pretty bad for a while. They figured that must have been a bit more than three hundred thousand years back… so we’re back before that! Besides, there’s the animals. A lot of them aren’t so much different from what they’re going to be. But they’re different. You see?”

“Yeah, I guess I do!” the captain admitted. He cleared his throat. “It startled me for a moment.”

“Pretty odd, isn’t it?” Goth agreed. “No Empire at all yet, no Uldune! Patham — no starships even! Everybody that’s there is still back on old Yarthe!” Her head tilted up quickly. “Umm!” she murmured, eyes narrowing a little.

* * *

The captain had caught it, too. Vatch sign! Old Windy was somewhere around. Not too close, but definitely present… They remained quiet for a minute or two. The impression seemed to grow no stronger in that time. Suddenly it was gone again.

“Giant-vatch, all right!” Goth remarked a few seconds later. “Brother! You picked yourself a big one, Captain!”

“They’re not all the same then, eh?”

“Come in all sizes. Bigger they are, the more they can do. That’s mostly make trouble, of course! This one’s a whale of a vatch!” She frowned. “I don’t know…”

“They can read our minds — human minds, can’t they?” asked the captain.

“Lot of them can.”

“Can they do it from farther away than we can rell them?”

“Not supposed to be able to do it,” said Goth. “But I don’t know.”

“Hmm — is there such a thing as a klatha lock that will keep vatches from poking around in your thoughts?”

“Uh-huh. Takes awfully heavy stuff, though! I don’t know how to do that one. There’s only three, four people I know that use a vatch lock.”

“Oh?” said the captain, somewhat startled. Goth looked up at him questioningly, then with sudden speculation. “Ummm,” she said slowly. She considered a moment again, remarked, “Now there’s something I do that works about as good as a lock against vatches. Can’t tell you how to do that either, though.”

“Why not?” he asked.

Goth shrugged. “Don’t know how I do it. Born with it, I guess. Takes just a little low intensity klatha. Dab of it on anything particular I don’t want anybody to know I’m thinking about, and that’s it! Somebody sneaks a look into my mind then, he just can’t see it.”

“You sure?” the captain asked thoughtfully.

“Ought to be! Some real high-powered mind-readers tried it. Wanted to study out how it was done so others could use it. They never did figure that out — but it works just fine! They couldn’t even tell there’d been anything blurred.”

“That will be a help now,” the captain said.

“Uh-huh! Vatch isn’t going to find out anything from me he shouldn’t know about.” She cocked her head, looking up at him. “Did you make yourself a vatch lock, Captain?”

“I think so.” He gave her a general description of the process. Goth listened, eyes first round with