The Witches of Karres

produced by the vatch-speck immediately before him. The entity had returned, might be prowling around cautiously as Goth had expected, to avoid another encounter with Toll and with klatha hooks of an order to match its own hugeness. But he had been careless — it wouldn’t do at all to have the vatch surprise him while he was tinkering with the devices it had stationed here.

It drew closer gradually. The witch sisters remained silent. So did the captain. He began to get impressions of vatch-muttering, indistinct and intermittent. It did seem to be trying to size up the situation here now, might grow bolder as it became convinced it had lost its pursuer -

Why had it brought the Leewit through time to the Venture? She was a capable witch-moppet when it came to producing whistles that shattered shatterable objects to instant dust. From what Goth had said, she also had blasts in her armory with an effect approximating a knock-out punch delivered by a mighty fist. Neither, however, seemed very useful in getting the Manaret synergizer back to Manaret, past Moander, the Nuris, and the dense tangles of energy barriers that guarded the Worm World.

The Leewit’s other main talent then was a linguistic one, as the witches understood linguistics — a built-in klatha ability to comprehend any spoken language she heard and translate and use it without effort or thought. And Moander, the monster-god of the Worm World legends, who was really a great robot, reputedly “spoke in a thousand tongues.” Nobody seemed to know just what that meant; but conceivably the vatch knew. So conceivably the Leewit’s linguistic talent was the vatch’s reason for deciding to fit her into its plans to overthrow Moander through the captain.

There was no way of trying to calculate the nature of those schemes or of the Leewit’s role in them more specifically. The manner in which the vatch played its games seemed to be to manipulate its players into a critical situation which they could solve with a winning move if they used their resources and made no serious mistakes… and weren’t too unlucky. But it gave them no clues to what must be done. If they failed, they were lost, and the vatch picked up other players. And since it was a capricious creature, one couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t on occasion deliberately maneuver players into a situation which couldn’t possibly be solved, enjoying the drama of their desperate efforts to escape a foreseeable doom.

The captain realized suddenly that he wasn’t relling the vatch any more — then that the control room was spinning slowly about him, turning misty and gray. He made an attempt to climb out of the chair and shout a warning to Goth; but by then the chair and the control room were no longer there and he was swirling away, faster and faster, turning and rolling helplessly through endless grayness, while rollicking vatch laughter seemed to echo distantly about him.

That faded, too, and for a while there was nothing -

* * *

“Try to listen carefully!” the closer and somewhat larger of the two creatures was telling him. There was sharp urgency in its tone. “We’ve dropped through a time warp together, so you’re feeling confused and you’ve forgotten everything! But I’ll tell you who you are and who we are — then you’ll remember it all again.”

The captain blinked down at it. He did feel a trifle confused at the moment. But that was simply because just now, with no warning at all, he’d suddenly found himself standing with these two unfamiliar-looking creatures inside something like a globular hollow in thick, shifting fog. His footing felt solid enough, but he saw nothing that looked solid below him. In the distance, off in the fog, there seemed to be considerable noisy shouting going on here and there, though he couldn’t make out any words.

But he didn’t feel so confused that he couldn’t remember who he was — or that, just a few moments ago, some vatch trick again had plucked him from the control room of the Venture, standing on a rainy, rocky slope of the Karres of over three hundred thousand years in the past.

Further, since the creature had addressed him in what was undisguisedly Goth’s voice, he could conclude without difficulty that it was, in fact, Goth who had pulled a shape-change on herself. It didn’t look at all like her; but then it wouldn’t. And, by deduction, while the smaller, chunky, dog-like creature standing silently on four legs just beyond her looked even less like the Leewit, it very probably was the Leewit.

However, Goth evidently had warned him he’d better act bewildered, and she must have a reason for it.

“Umm… yes!” the captain mumbled, lifting one hand and pressing his palm to his forehead. “I do feel rather… who… what… where am I? Who…” He’d noticed something dark wagging below his chin as he was speaking, and the arm he lifted seemed clothed in a rich-textured light blue sleeve he’d never seen before, with a pattern of small precious stones worked into it. When he glanced down along his nose at the dark thing, he glimpsed part of a gleaming black beard. So he, too, had been shape-changed!

“You,” the Goth-creature was saying hurriedly, “are Captain Mung of the Capital Guard of the Emperor Koloth the Great. My name’s Hantis. I’m a Nartheby Sprite and you’ve known me a long time. That” — it indicated the other creature — “is a grik-dog. It’s called Pul. It—”

“Grik-dogs,” interrupted the grik-dog grumpily in the Leewit’s voice, “can talk as good as anybody! Ought to tell him that so—”

“Yes,” Goth-Hantis cut in. “They can speak, of course — shut up, Pul. So you’d bought it for the Empress at the Emperor’s orders and we are taking it back to the capital when all this suddenly happened…”

He’d been staring at her while she spoke. Goth might have gone on practicing her shape-changing on the quiet because this was a perfect, first-class job! Even from a distance of less than three feet, he couldn’t detect the slightest indication that the Nartheby Sprite wasn’t the real thing. He remembered vaguely that galactic legend mentioned such creatures. It looked like a small, very slender, brown-skinned woman, no bigger than Goth, dressed skimpily in scattered patches of some green material. The cheekbones were set higher and the chin was more pointed than a human woman’s would have been; with the exception of the mouth, the rest of the face and head did not look human at all. The slender ridge of the nose was barely indicated on the skin but ended in a delicate tip and small, flaring nostrils. The eyes had grass green pupils which showed more white around them than human ones would; they seemed alert, wise eyes. The brows were broad tufts of soft red fur. A round, tousled mane of the same type of fur framed the face, and through it protruded pointed, mobile foxy ears. The grik-dog might be no less an achievement. The image was that of a solidly built, pale-yellow animal which would have been about the Leewit’s weight, with a large round head and a dark, pushed-in, truculent, slightly toothy face. The gray eyes could almost have been those of the Leewit; and they stared up at the captain with much of the coldly calculating expression which was the Leewit’s when things began to look a little tight.

“What, uh, did happen, Hantis?” the captain asked. “I seem almost to remember that I… but—”

The Sprite image shrugged.

“We’re not really sure, Captain Mung. One moment we were on your ship, the next we were in this place! It’s the place of a great being called Moander. We haven’t seen him but he’s talked to us. He’s upset because nothing was supposed to be able to get in here — and now we’ve come in, through time! It must have been a warp. But Moander won’t believe yet it was an accident.”

“He’d better believe it!” snorted the captain haughtily, playing his part. “When Koloth the Great learns how his couriers have been welcomed here—”

“Moander says, sir,” Goth-Hantis interrupted, “that in his time the Emperor Koloth the Great has been dead more’n three hundred years! Moander thinks we’re perhaps spies of his enemies. He’s setting this place up now so nobody else can get in the same way. Then we’ll go to his laboratory so he can talk to us. He—”

“GRAZEEM!” a great voice shouted deafeningly in the fog above them. “Grazeem! Grazeem!… Grazeem…” The word seemed to echo away into the distance. Then there was more shouting all around them by the same mighty voice.

“What’s the yelling about?” the captain asked in what he felt would be Captain Mung’s impatient manner.

“Moander talking to the other machines,” said the grik-dog. “Got a different language for each of them — don’t know why. It’s just a big, dumb machine, like they said.”

“Pul, you—”

“S’all right, Goth,” the grik-dog told the Sprite. “ ‘Grazeem’ means ‘all units.’ Moander’s talking to all of them now. Machine that was listening to us won’t till Moander stops again. You got something to say, better say it!”