The Witches of Karres

interior! Oddest sort of children… But he ought to be able to get his expenses paid by their relatives. Something very profitable might even be made of this deal…

Have to watch the record entries though! Nikkeldepain’s laws were explicit about the penalties invoked by anything resembling the purchase and sale of slaves.

He’d thoughtfully left the intercom adjusted so he could listen in on their conversation in the captain’s cabin. However, there had been nothing for some time beyond frequent bursts of childish giggling. Then came a succession of piercing shrieks from the Leewit. It appeared she was being forcibly washed behind the ears by Maleen and obliged to brush her teeth, in preparation for bedtime.

It had been agreed that he was not to enter the cabin, because — for reasons not given — they couldn’t keep the Sheewash Drive on in his presence; and they wanted to have it ready, in case of an emergency. Piracy was rife beyond the Imperial borders, and the Venture would keep beyond the border for most of the trip, to avoid the more pressing danger of police pursuit instigated by Porlumma. The captain had explained the potentialities of the nova guns the Venture boasted, or tried to. Possibly they hadn’t understood. At any rate, they seemed unimpressed.

The Sheewash Drive! Boy, he thought in sudden excitement, if he could just get the principles of that. Maybe he would!

He raised his head suddenly. The Leewit’s voice had lifted clearly over the communicator.

“…not such a bad old dope!” the childish treble remarked. The captain blinked indignantly.

“He’s not so old,” Maleen’s soft voice returned. “And he’s certainly no dope!”

He smiled. Good kid, Maleen.

“Yeah, yeah!” squeaked the Leewit offensively. “Maleen’s sweet onthu — ulp!”

A vague commotion continued for a while, indicating, he hoped, that someone he could mention was being smothered under a pillow.

He drifted off to sleep before it was settled.

* * *

If you didn’t happen to be thinking of what they’d done, they seemed more or less like normal children. Right from the start they displayed a flattering interest in the captain and his background; and he told them all about everything and everybody in Nikkeldepain. Finally he even showed them his treasured pocket-sized picture of Illyla — the one with which he’d held many cozy conversations during the earlier part of his trip.

Almost at once, though, he realized that was a mistake. They studied it intently in silence, their heads crowded close together.

“Oh, brother!” the Leewit whispered then, with entirely the wrong kind of inflection.

“Just what did you mean by that?” the captain inquired coldly.

“Sweet!” murmured Goth. But it was the way she closed her eyes briefly, as though gripped by a light spasm of nausea.

“Shut up, Goth!” Maleen said sharply. “I think she’s very swee… I mean, she looks very nice!” she told the captain.

The captain was disgruntled. Silently, he retrieved the maligned Illyla and returned her to his breast pocket. Silently, he went off and left them standing there.

But afterwards, in private, he took it out again and studied it worriedly.

His Illyla! He shifted the picture back and forth under the light. It wasn’t really a very good picture of her, he decided. It had been bungled. From certain angles, one might even say that Illyla did look the least bit insipid.

What was he thinking, he thought, shocked.

He unlimbered the nova gun turrets next and got in a little firing practice. They had been sealed when he took over the Venture and weren’t supposed to be used, except in absolute emergencies. They were somewhat uncertain weapons, though very effective, and Nikkeldepain had turned to safer forms of armament many decades ago. But on the third day out from Nikkeldepain, the captain made a brief notation in his log:

“Attacked by two pirate craft. Unsealed nova guns. Destroyed one attacker; survivor fled…”

He was rather pleased by that crisp, hard-bitten description of desperate space adventure, and enjoyed rereading it occasionally. It wasn’t true, though. He had put in an interesting four hours at the time pursuing and annihilating large, craggy chunks of an asteroid swarm he found the Venture plowing through. Those nova guns were fascinating stuff! You’d sight the turrets on something; and so long as it didn’t move after that, it was all right. If it did move, it got it — unless you relented and deflected the turrets first. They were just the thing for arresting a pirate in mid-space.

The Venture dipped back into the Empire’s borders four days later and headed for the capital of the local province. Police ships challenged them twice on the way in; and the captain found considerable comfort in the awareness that his passengers forgathered silently in their cabin on these occasions. They didn’t tell him they were set to use the Sheewash Drive — somehow it had never been mentioned since that first day — but he knew the queer orange fire was circling over its skimpy framework of twisted wires there and ready to act.

However, the space police waved him on, satisfied with routine identification. Apparently the Venture had not become generally known as a criminal ship, to date.

Maleen accompanied him to the banking institution which was to return Wansing’s property to Porlumma. Her sisters, at the captain’s definite request, remained on the ship.

The transaction itself went off without a visible hitch. The jewels would reach their destination in Porlumma within a month. But he had to take out a staggering sum in insurance. “Piracy, thieves!” smiled the clerk. “Even summary capital punishment won’t keep the rats down!” And, of course, he had to register name, ship, home planet, and so on. But since they already had all that information on Porlumma, he gave it without hesitation.

On the way back to the spaceport, he sent off a sealed message by subradio to the bereaved jeweler, informing him of the action taken and regretting the misunderstanding.

He felt a little better after that, though the insurance payment had been a severe blow. If he didn’t manage to work out a decent profit on Karres somehow, the losses on the miffel farm would hardly be covered now…

Then he noticed Maleen was getting uneasy.

“We’d better hurry!” was all she would say, however. Her face turned pale.

The captain understood. She was having another premonition! The hitch to this premoting business was apparently that when something was brewing you were informed of the bare fact but had to guess at most of the details. They grabbed an aircab and raced back to the spaceport.

They had just been cleared there when he spotted a group of uniformed men coming along the dock on the double. They stopped short and scattered as the Venture lurched drunkenly sideways into the air. Everyone else in sight was scattering, too.

That was a very bad take-off — one of the captain’s worst. Once afloat, however, he ran the ship promptly into the nightside of the planet and turned her nose towards the border. The old pirate-chaser had plenty of speed when you gave her the reins; and throughout the entire next sleep period he let her use it all.

The Sheewash Drive was not required that time.

* * *

Next day he had a lengthy private talk with Goth on the Golden Rule and the Law, with particular reference to individual property rights. If Councilor Onswud had been monitoring the sentiments expressed by the captain, he could not have failed to rumble surprised approval. The delinquent herself listened impassively, but the captain fancied she showed distinct signs of being impressed by his earnestness.

It was two days after that — well beyond the borders again — when they were obliged to make an unscheduled stop at a mining moon. For the captain discovered he had badly miscalculated the extent to which the prolonged run on overdrive after leaving the capital was going to deplete the Venture’s reserves. They would have to juice up…

A large, extremely handsome Sirian freighter lay beside them at the moon station. It was half a battlecraft really, since it dealt regularly beyond the borders. They had to wait while it was being serviced; and it took a long