Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 14

“That’s right,” said the Leewit. She smiled.

  “And what does little Goth do?” the captain addressed the third witch.

  Little Goth appeared pained. Maleen answered for her.

  “Goth teleports mostly,” she said.

  “Oh, she does?” said the captain. “I’ve heard about that trick, too,” he added lamely.

  “Just small stuff really!” Goth said abruptly. She reached into the top of her jacket and pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle the size of the captain’s two fists. The four ends of the cloth were knotted together. Goth undid the knot. “Like this,” she said and poured out the contents on the rug between them. There was a sound like a big bagful of marbles being spilled.

  “Great Patham!” the captain swore, staring down at what was a cool quarter-million in jewel stones, or he was still a miffel-farmer.

  “Good gosh,” said the Leewit, bouncing to her feet. “Maleen, we better get at it right away!”

  The two blondes darted from the room. The captain hardly noticed their going. He was staring at Goth.

  “Child,” he said, “don’t you realize they hang you without trial on places like Porlumma, if you’re caught with stolen goods?”

  “We’re not on Porlumma,” said Goth. She looked slightly annoyed. “They’re for you. You spent money on us, didn’t you?”

  “Not that kind of money,” said the captain. “If Wansing noticed—They’re Wansing’s, I suppose?”

  “Sure!” said Goth. “Pulled them in just before take-off!”

  “If he reported, there’ll be police ships on our tail any—”

  “Goth!” Maleen shrilled.

  Goth’s head came around and she rolled up on her feet in one motion. “Coming,” she shouted. “Excuse me,” she murmured to the captain. Then she, too, was out of the room.

  But again, the captain scarcely noticed her departure. He had rushed to the control desk with a sudden awful certainty and switched on all screens.

  There they were! Two sleek, black ships coming up fast from behind, and already almost in gun-range! They weren’t regular police boats, the captain recognized, but auxiliary craft of the Empire’s frontier fleets. He rammed the Venture’s drives full on. Immediately, red-arid-black fire blossoms began to sprout in space behind him—then a finger of flame stabbed briefly past, not a hundred yards to the right of the ship.

  But the communicator stayed dead. Porlumma preferred risking the sacrifice of Wansing’s jewels to giving them a chance to surrender! To do the captain justice, his horror was due much more to the fate awaiting his three misguided charges than to the fact that he was going to share it.

  He was putting the Venture through a wildly erratic and, be hoped, aim-destroying series of sideways hops and forward lunges wit it one hand, and trying to unlimber the turrets of the nova guns with the other, when suddenly—!

  No, he decided at once, there was no use trying to understand it—There were just no more Empire ships around. The screens all blurred and darkened simultaneously ; and, for a short while, a darkness went flowing and coiling lazily past the Venture. Light jumped out of it at him once, in a cold, ugly glare, and receded again in a twisting, unnatural fashion. The Venture’s drives seemed dead.

  Then, just as suddenly, the old ship jerked, shivered, roared aggrievedly, and was hurling herself along on her own power again!

  But Porlumma’s sun was no longer in evidence. Stars gleamed and shifted distantly against the blackness of deep space all about. The patterns seemed familiar, but he wasn’t a good enough navigator to be sure.

  The captain stood up stiffly, feeling heavy and cold. And at that moment, with a wild, hilarious clacking like a metallic hen, the electric butler delivered four breakfasts, hot, one after the other, right onto the center of the control room floor.

  The first voice said distinctly: “Shall we just leave it on?”

  A second voice, considerably more muffled, replied: “Yes, let’s! You never know when you need it—”

  The third voice, tucked somewhere in between them, said simply: “Whew!”

  Peering about the dark room in bewilderment, the captain realized suddenly that the voices had come from the speaker of an intership communicator, leading to what had once been the Venture’s captain’s cabin.

  He listened; but only a dim murmuring came from it now, and then nothing at all. He started towards the hall, then returned and softly switched off the communicator. He went quietly down the hall until he came to the captain’s cabin. Its door was closed.

  He listened a moment, and opened it suddenly.

  There was a trio of squeals:

  “Oh, don’t! You spoiled it!”

  The captain stood motionless. Just one glimpse had been given him of what seemed to be a bundle of twisted black wires arranged loosely like the frame of a truncated cone on—or was it just above?—a table in the center of the cabin. Where, the tip of the cone should have been burned a round, swirling, orange fire. About it, their faces reflecting its glow, stood the three witches.

  Then the fire vanished; the wires collapsed. There was only ordinary light in the room. They were looking up at him variously—Maleen with smiling regret, the Leewit in frank annoyance, Goth with no expression at all.

  “What out of Great Patham’s Seventh Hell was that?” inquired the captain, his hair bristling slowly.

  The Leewit looked at Goth; Goth looked at Maleen. Maleen said doubtfully: “We can just tell you its name—”

  “That was the Sheewash Drive,” said Goth.

  “The what-drive?” asked the captain.

  “Sheewash,” repeated Maleen.

  “The one you have to do it with yourself,” the Leewit said helpfully.

  “Shut up,” said Maleen.

  There was a long pause. The captain looked down at the handful of thin, black, twelve-inch wires scattered about the table top. He touched one of them. It was dead-cold.

  “I see,” he said. “I guess we’re all going to have a long talk.” Another pause. “Where are we now?”

  “About three light-years down the way you were going,” said Goth. “We only worked it thirty seconds.”

  “Twenty-eight!” corrected Maleen, with the authority of her years. “The Leewit was getting tired.”

  “I see,” said Captain Pausert carefully. “Well, let’s go have some breakfast.”

  III.

  They ate with a silent voraciousness, dainty Maleen, the exquisite Leewit, supple Goth, all alike. The captain, long finished, watched them with amazement and—now at last—with something like awe.

  “It’s the Sheewash Drive,” explained Maleen finally, catching his expression.

  “Takes it out of you!” said Goth.

  The Leewit grunted affirmatively and stuffed on.

  “Can’t do too much of it,” said Maleen. “Or too often. It kills you sure!”

  “What,” said the captain, “is the Sheewash Drive?”

  They became reticent. People did it on Karres, said Maleen, when they had to go somewhere else fast. Everybody knew how there.

  “But of course,” she added, “we’re pretty young to do it right!”

  “We did it pretty good!” the Leewit contradicted positively. She seemed to be finished at last.

  “But how?” said the captain.

  Reticence thickened almost visibly. If you couldn’t do it, said Maleen, you couldn’t understand it either.

  He gave it up, for the time being.

  “I guess I’ll have to take you home next,” he said; and they agreed.

  Karres, it developed, was in the Iverdahl System. He couldn’t find any planet of that designation listed in his maps of the area, but that meant nothing. The maps were old and often inaccurate, and local names changed a lot.

  Barring the use of weird and deadly miracle-drives, that detour was going to cost him almost a month in time—and a good chunk of his profits in power used up. The jewels Goth had illegally teleported must, of course, be returne
d to their owner, he explained. He’d intended to look severely at the culprit at that point; but she’d meant well, after all! They were extremely peculiar children, but still children—they couldn’t really understand.

  He would stop off en route to Karres at an Empire planet with banking facilities to take care of that matter, the captain added. A planet far enough off so the police wouldn’t be likely to take any particular interest in the Venture.

  A dead silence greeted this schedule. It appeared that the representatives of Karres did not think much of his logic.

  “Well,” Maleen sighed at last, “we’ll see you get your money back some other way then!”

  The junior witches nodded coldly.

  “How did you three happen to get into this fix?” the captain inquired, with the intention of changing the subject.

  They’d left Karres together on a jaunt of their own, they explained. No, they hadn’t run away—he got the impression that such trips were standard procedure for juveniles in that place. They were on another planet, a civilized one but beyond the borders and law of Empire, when the town they were in was raided by a small fleet of slavers. They were taken along with most of the local youngsters.

  “It’s a wonder,” the captain said reflectively, “you didn’t take over the ship.”

  “Oh, brother!” exclaimed the Lee wit.

  “Not that ship!” said Goth.

  “That was an Imperial Slaver!” Maleen informed him. “You behave yourself every second on those crates.”

  Just the same, the captain thought as he settled himself to rest in the control room on a couch he had set up there, it was no longer surprising that the Empire wanted no young slaves from Karres to be transported into the 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 intership communicator 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 a good part 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.

  “Ob, 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, be 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 substance of a meteorite-cloud 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 midspace.

  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 foregathered 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 that was to return Wansing’s property to Porlumma. Pier 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 Trad 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 in Porlumma, he gave it without hesitation.

  On the way back to the spaceport, he sent off a sealed message by radiorelay 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 that Maleen was getting uneasy.

  “We’d better hurry!” was all she would say, howev
er. Her face grew 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 air-cab and raced back to the spaceport.

  They had just been cleared there when he spotted a small group of uniformed men coming along the dock on the double. They stopped short and then 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 nigh! side 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 rather 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 capitol 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 time. The Sirians turned out to be as unpleasant as their ship was good-looking—a snooty, conceited, hairy lot who talked only their own dialect and pretended to be unfamiliar with Imperial Universum.

  The captain found himself getting irked by their bad manners—particularly when he discovered they were laughing over his argument with the service superintendent about the cost of repowering the Venture,