The Witches of Karres

The captain hesitated. “No,” he said at last. “Not really. I just keep having a feeling — Look, witch, it’s getting late! Better run and get your sleep so you’ll stay fresh. I’ll sit up for another smoke. If that self-inflated cosmic clown does show up again, I’ll let you know.”

“Self-inflated cosmic… pretty good!” Goth said admiringly, and slipped off to her cabin. The captain took out a cigarette and lit it, scowling absently at the screens. The door between the control room and the rest of the section was closed — Hulik and Vezzarn had chosen to bunk up front on the floor tonight. What with the vatch’s startling thunderstorm trick coming on top of everything else they’d experienced lately, he hadn’t felt like suggesting they’d be more comfortable in their staterooms. On the other hand, the night still might provide events it would be better they didn’t witness, if it could be avoided. He’d brought the strongbox enclosing the Manaret synergizer out of the vault with the ship’s crane and set it down against the wall in the control room — an act which probably had done nothing to help Vezzarn’s peace of mind.

There was something vatchy around. That was the word for it. Not the vatch but something that seemed to go with the vatch. He wasn’t relling it. Goth figured his contacts with the vatch might have begun to develop some other perception. At any rate, he was receiving impressions of another kind here; and the impressions had kept getting more definite. The best description he could have given of them now would have been to say he was aware of a speck of blackness which seemed to be in a constant blur of internal motion.

The muted growl of thunder came through the pickups again, and the captain reached over and shut them off, then extended the screens’ horizontal focus outward by twenty miles. Except for fleecy wisps to the east, the skies of Karres were clear all about tonight — once one had moved five or six miles away from the Venture. The inexhaustible bank of rain clouds the vatch had produced for them stayed centered directly overhead…

The vatchy speck of blackness had begun to seem connected with that. The captain laid the cigarette aside, shifted the overhead screen to a point a little above the cloud level… Around here?

And there it was, he thought. Something he was neither seeing — it couldn’t be seen — nor imagining, because it was there and quite real. It came closest to being a visual impression of a patch of blackness, irregular in outline and inwardly a swirling rush of multitudinous motion.

Vatch stuff, left planted in the Karres sky after the vatch itself had gone. Not enough of it to excite the relling sensation. And what it was doing up there, of course, was to keep the rain clouds massed above the drenched Venture… The captain found himself reaching towards it.

That again seemed the only description for a basically indescribable action. It was a reaching-towards in which nothing moved. He stopped short of touching it. A sense of furious heat came from the swirling blackness. Power, he thought. Vatch power; plenty of it. Living klatha…

He put pressure against the side of the living klatha. Move, he thought.

It began to move sideways, gliding ahead of the pressure. The pressure kept up with it -

The captain licked his lips, turned the horizontal screens back to close focus around the ship, picked up the cigarette and settled back in the chair, watching the steady, dark, downward rush of rain about them in the screens. The vatch device continued moving southwards. Now and then the captain glanced at the chronometer. After some nine minutes the rain suddenly lessened. Then it stopped. The night was clear and cloudless above the ship. But a quarter-mile away to the south, rain still poured on the slopes.

He put out the cigarette and eased off the pressure on the vatch device. Stop there, he thought… While it was drifting away from the ship he’d become aware of a second one around. There would be, of course. A much smaller one… it would be that, too, for the comparatively minor purpose it was serving -

It took a couple of minutes to get it pinpointed — down in the Venture’s engine room, a speck of unseeable blackness swirling silently and energetically above the thrust generators, ready to make sure that the Venture didn’t go anywhere at present.

* * *

A rock hung suspended in the clear night air of Karres, spinning and wobbling slowly like a top running down. It was a sizable rock — the Venture could have been fitted comfortably into the hole it had left in the planet’s surface when it soared up from it a minute or two before. And it was a sizable distance above that surface. About a mile and a half, the captain calculated, watching it in the screen.

He let it turn end for end twice, bob up and down a little, then leap up another instant half-mile.

There was a soft hiss of surprise from behind his shoulder.

“What you doing?” Goth whispered.

“Using some loose vatch energy I found hanging around,” the captain said negligently. “The, vatch left it here to keep us pinned under that rainstorm…” He added, “Don’t know how I’m doing it, but it works just fine! Like the rock to try anything in particular?”

“Loop the loop,” suggested Goth, staring fascinatedly into the screen.

The rock flashed up and around in a smooth, majestic three-mile loop and stood steady in midair again — steady as a rock.

“Anything else?” he offered.

“Can you do anything with it?”

“Anything I’ve tried so far. Ask for a tough one!”

Goth considered, glanced up at the little moon, high in the northern sky by now. “How about putting it on the other side of the moon?”

“All right,” said the captain. He clicked his tongue. “Wait a minute. We’d better not try that!”

“Why not?”

He glanced at her. “Because we don’t know just what the vatch stuff can do — and because the moon’s scheduled to come crashing down on the pole some time in the future here. I’d hate to have it turn out that we were the ones who accidentally knocked it down!”

“Patham!” exclaimed Goth, startled. “You’re right! Give the rock a boost straight out into space then!”

And the rock simply disappeared. “Guess it’s out there and traveling,” the captain said after a few seconds. “Plenty of power there, all right!” He chewed his lip, frowning. “Now I’ll try something else…”

Goth didn’t inquire what. She looked on, eyes watchful, as he shifted the view back to the area immediately about the ship. A big tree stood on the rim of the rise to the north. He brought it into as sharp a focus as he could, sensed the vatch device move close to the tree as he did it. The device remained poised there, ready to act.

He gave it a silent command, waited.

But nothing happened. After half a minute he turned his attention to a small shrub not far from the tree. The patch of blackness slid promptly over to the shrub. As he began to repeat the command, the shrub vanished.

Goth made a small exclamation beside him. “Time move?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the captain, not at all surprised she’d guessed his intention. He cleared his throat. “I’m very much afraid that won’t do us any good, though.”

“Why not? Patham, if—”

“Tried to move the big tree into the future first, and it didn’t go. Just not enough power for that, I guess… Let’s try that medium-sized one nearer to us—”

There wasn’t enough vatch power around to move the medium-sized tree into the future either. The black patch did what it could. As the captain formulated the mental command, the tree was ripped from the ground. As it toppled over then, they could see the upper third of its crown had disappeared.

The vatch device was of no use to them that way. Adding the speck on guard in the engine room to it would make no significant difference — apparently shifting objects through time required vastly more power than moving the same objects about in space. What level of energy it would take to carry the Venture and her crew back to their own time was difficult to imagine…

“Something might have gone wrong anyway,” the captain said, not quite able to keep disappointment out of his voice. “We don’t know enough about those things… Better quit playing around now. I want to have everything back as it was before the vatch shows up again.”