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  “Oh, that—” said the captain. He deflected the turrets a trifle. “They won’t go off now. Scram!”

  The police boat vanished.

  There was other company coming, though. Far below him but climbing steadily, a trio of revolt ships darted past on the screen, swung around and came back for the next turn of their spiral. They’d have to get a good deal closer before they started shooting; but they’d try to stay under him so as not to knock any stray chunks out of Nikkeldepain.

  Fie sat a moment, reflecting. The revolt ships went by once more. The captain punched in the Venture’s secondary drives, turned her nose towards the planet and let her go. There were some scattered white puffs around as he cut through the revolt ships’ plane of flight. Then he was below them, and the Venture groaned as he took her out of the dive.

  The revolt ships were already scattering and nosing over for a countermaneuver. He picked the nearest one and swung the nova guns towards it.

  “—and ram them in the middle!” he muttered between his teeth.

  SSS-whoosh!

  It was the Sheewash Drive—but, like a nightmare now, it kept on and on!

  VI.

  “Maleen!” the captain bawled, pounding at the locked door of the captain’s cabin. “Maleen—shut it off! Cut it off! You’ll kill yourself. Maleen!”

  The Venture quivered suddenly throughout her length, then shuddered more violently, jumped and coughed; and commenced sailing along on her secondary drives again. He wondered how many light-years from everything they were by now. It didn’t matter!

  “Maleen!” he yelled. “Are you all right?”

  There was a faint thump-thump inside the cabin, and silence. He lost almost a minute finding the right cutting tool in the storage. A few seconds later, a section of door panel sagged inwards; he caught it by one edge and came tumbling into the cabin with it.

  He had the briefest glimpse of a ball of orange-colored fire swirling uncertainly over a cone of oddly bent wires. Then the fire vanished, and the wires collapsed with a loose rattling to the table top.

  The crumpled small shape lay behind the table, which was why he didn’t discover it at once. He sagged to the floor beside it, all the strength running out of his knees.

  Brown eyes opened and blinked at him blearily.

  “Sure takes it out of you!” Goth grunted. “Am I hungry!”

  “I’ll whale the holy, howling tar out of you again,” the captain roared, “if you ever—”

  “Quit your bawling!” snarled Goth. “I got to eat.”

  She ate for fifteen minutes straight, before she sank back in her chair, and sighed.

  “Have some more Wintenberry jelly,” the captain offered anxiously. She looked pretty pale.

  Goth shook her head. “Couldn’t—and that’s about the first thing you’ve said since you fell through the door, howling for Maleen. Ha-ha! Maleen’s got a boy friend!”

  “Button your lip, child,” the captain said. “I was thinking.” He added, after a moment: “Has she really?”

  “Picked him out last year,” Goth nodded. “Nice boy from town—they get married as soon as she’s marriageable. She just told you to come hack because she was upset about you. Maleen had a premonition you were headed for awful trouble!”

  “She was quite right, little chum,” the captain said nastily.

  “What were you thinking about?” Goth inquired.

  “I was thinking,” said the captain, “that as soon as we’re sure you’re going to be all right, I’m taking you straight back to Karres!”

  “I’ll be all right now,” Goth said. “Except, likely, for a stomach-ache. But you can’t take me back to Karres.”

  “Who will stop me, may I ask?” the captain asked.

  “Karres is gone,” Goth said.

  “Gone?” the captain repeated blankly, with a sensation of not quite definable horror bubbling up in him.

  “Not blown up or anything,” Goth reassured him. “They just moved it! The Imperials got their hair up about us again. But this time, they were sending a fleet with the big bombs and stuff, so everybody was called home. But they had to wait then till they found out where we were—me and Maleen and the Leewit. Then you brought us in; and they had to wait again, and decide about you. But right after you’d left . . . we’d left, I mean . . . they moved it.”

  “Where?”

  “Great Patham!” Goth shrugged. “How’d I know? There’s lots of places!”

  There probably were, the captain admitted silently. A scene came suddenly before his eyes—that lime-white, arenalike bowl in the valley, with the steep tiers of seats around it, just before they’d reached the town of Karres—“the Theater where—”

  But now there was unnatural night-darkness all over and about that world; and the eight thousand-some Witches of Karres sat in circles around the Theater, their heads bent towards one point in the center, where orange fire washed hugely about the peak of a cone of curiously twisted girders.

  And a world went racing off at the speeds of the Sheewash Drive! There’d be lots of places, all right. What peculiar people!

  “Anyway,” he sighed, “if I’ve got to start raising you—don’t say ‘Great Patham’ any more. That’s a cuss word!”

  “I learned it from you!” Goth pointed out.

  “So you did, I guess,” the captain acknowledged. “I won’t say it either. Aren’t they going to be worried about you?”

  “Not very much,” said Goth. “We don’t get hurt often—especially when we’re young. That’s when we can do all that stuff like teleporting, and whistling, like the Leewit. We lose it mostly when we get older—they’re working on that now so we won’t. About all Maleen can do right now is premote!”

  “She premoted just dandy, though,” the captain said. “The Sheewash Drive—they can all do that, can’t they?”

  “Uh-huh!” Goth nodded. “But that’s learned stuff. That’s one of the things they already studied out.” She added, a trace uncomfortably: “I can’t tell you about that till you’re one yourself.”

  “Till I’m what myself?” the captain asked, becoming puzzled again.

  “A witch, like us,” said Goth. “We got our rules. And that won’t be for four years, Karres time.”

  “It won’t, eh?” said the captain. “What happens then?”

  “That’s when I’m marriageable age,” said Goth, frowning at the jar of Wintenberry jelly. She pulled it towards her and inspected it carefully. “I got it all fixed,” she told the jelly firmly, “as soon as they started saying they ought to pick out a wife for you on Karres, so you could stay. I said it was me, right away; and everyone else said finally that was all right then—even Maleen, because she had this boy friend.”

  “You mean,” said the captain, stunned, “this was all planned out on Karres?”

  “Sure,” said Goth. She pushed the jelly back where it had been standing, and glanced up at him again. “For three weeks, that’s about all everyone talked about in the town! It set a perceedent—”

  She paused doubtfully.

  “That would explain it,” the captain admitted.

  “Uh-huh,” Goth nodded relieved, settling back in her chair. “But it was my father who told us how to do it so you’d break up with the people on Nikkeldepain. He said it was in the blood.”

  “What was in the blood?” the captain said patiently.

  “That you’d break up with them. That’s Threbus, my father,” Goth informed him. “You met him a couple of times in the town. Big man with a blond beard—Maleen and the Leewit take after him.”

  “You wouldn’t mean my great-uncle Threbus?” the captain inquired. He was in a state of strange calm by now.

  “That’s right,” said Goth. “He liked you a lot.”

  “It’s a small Galaxy,” said the captain philosophically. “So that’s where Threbus wound up! I’d like to meet him again some day.”

  “We’ll start after Karres four years from now, when you l
earn about those things,” Goth said. “We’ll catch up with them all right. That’s still thirteen hundred and seventy-two Old Sidereal days,” she added, “but there’s a lot to do in between. You want to pay the money you owe back to those people, don’t you? I got some ideas—”

  “None of those teleporting tricks now!” the captain warned.

  “Kid stuff!” Goth said scornfully. “I’m growing up. This’ll be fair swapping. But we’ll get rich.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the captain admitted. He thought a moment. “Seeing we’ve turned out to be distant relatives, I suppose it is all right, too, if I adopt you meanwhile—”

  “Sure,” said Goth. She stood up.

  “Where you going?” the captain asked.

  “Bed,” said Goth. “I’m tired.” She stopped at the hall door. “About all I can tell you about us till then,” she said, “you can read in those Regulations, like the one man said—the one you kicked off the ship. There’s a lot about us in there. Lots of lies, too, though!”

  “And when did you find out about the communicator between here and the captain’s cabin?” the captain inquired.

  Goth grinned. “A while back,” she admitted. “The others never noticed!”

  “All right,” the captain said. “Good night, witch—if you get a stomach-ache, yell and I’ll bring the medicine.”

  “Good night,” Goth yawned. “I will, I think.”

  “And wash behind your ears!” the captain added, trying to remember the bedtime instructions he’d overheard Maleen giving the junior witches.

  “All right,” said Goth sleepily. The hall door closed behind her—but half a minute later, it was briskly opened again. The captain looked up startled from the voluminous stack of “General Instructions and Space Regulations of the Republic of Nikkeldepain” he’d just discovered in one of the drawers of the control desk. Goth stood in the doorway, scowling and wide-awake.

  “And you wash behind yours!” she said.

  “Huh?” said the captain. He reflected a moment. “All right,” he said. “We both will, then.”

  “Right,” said Goth, satisfied.

  The door closed once more.

  The captain began to run his finger down the lengthy index of K’s—or could it be under W?

  THE END

  1950

  THE TRUTH ABOUT CUSHGAR

  Sometimes it isn’t good national policy to win too easily—and sometimes the most powerful weapon is the enemy’s conviction that he doesn’t understand . . .

  There was, for a time, a good deal of puzzled and uneasy speculation about the methods that had been employed by the Confederacy of Vega in the taming of Cushgar. The disturbing part of it was that nothing really seemed to have happened!

  First, the rumor was simply that the Confederacy was preparing to move into Cushgar—and then, suddenly, that it had moved in! This aroused surprised but pleased interest in a number of areas bordering the Confederacy. The Thousand Nations and a half-dozen similar organizations quietly flexed their military muscles, and prepared to land in the middle of the Confederacy’s back as soon as it became fairly engaged in its ambitious new project. For Cushgar and the Confederacy seemed about as evenly matched as any two powers could possibly be.

  But there was no engagement, then. There was not even anything resembling an official surrender. Star system by system, mighty Cushgar was accepting the governors installed by the Confederacy. Meekly, it coughed up “what was left of the captive peoples and the loot it had pirated for the past seven centuries. And, very simply and quietly then, under the eyes of a dumfounded galaxy, it settled down and began mending its manners.

  Then the rumors began! The wildest of them appeared to have originated in Cushgar itself, among its grim but superstitious inhabitants.

  The Thousand Nations and the other rival combines gradually relaxed their various preparations and settled back disappointedly. This certainly wasn’t the time to jump! The Confederacy had sneaked something over again; it was all done with by now.

  But what had they done to Cushgar—and how?

  In the Confederacy’s Council of Co-ordinators on Vega’s planet of Jeltad, the Third Co-ordinator, Chief of the Department of Galactic Zones, was being freely raked over the coals by his eminent colleagues.

  They, too, wanted to know about Cushgar; and he wasn’t telling.

  “Of course, we’re not actually accusing you of anything,” the Fifth Co-ordinator—Strategics—pointed out. “But you didn’t expect to advance the Council’s plans by sixty years or thereabouts without arousing a certain amount of curiosity, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t expect to do that,” the Third Co-ordinator admitted.

  “Come clean, Train!” said the First. Train was the name by which the Third Co-ordinator was known in this circle. “How did you do it?” Usually they were allies in these little arguments, but the First’s curiosity was also rampant.

  “Can’t tell you!” the Third Coordinator said flatly. “I made a report to the College, and they’ll dish out to your various departments whatever they ought to get.”

  He was within his rights in guarding his own department’s secrets, and they knew it. As for the College—that was the College of the Pleiades, metaphysically inclined body which was linked into the affairs of Confederacy government in a manner the College itself presumably could have defined exactly. Nobody else could. However, they were the final arbiters in a case of this kind.

  The Council meeting broke up a little later. The Third Co-ordinator left with Bropha, a handsome youngish man who had been listening in, in a liaison capacity for the College.

  “Let’s go off and have a drink somewhere,” Bropha suggested. “I’m curious myself.”

  The Co-ordinator growled softly. His gray hair was rumpled, and he looked exhausted.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you—”

  Bropha’s title was President of the College of the Pleiades. That was a good deal less important than it sounded, since he was only the executive scientist in charge of the College’s mundane affairs. However, he was also the Third Co-ordinator’s close personal friend and had been cleared for secrets of state of any kind whatsoever.

  They went off and had their drink.

  “You can’t blame them too much,” Bropha said soothingly. “After all, the conquest of Cushgar has been regarded pretty generally as the Confederacy’s principal and most dangerous undertaking in the century immediately ahead. When the Department of Galactic Zones pulls it off suddenly—apparently without preparation or losses—”

  “It wasn’t without losses,” the Coordinator said glumly.

  “Wasn’t it?” said Bropha.

  “It cost me,” said the Co-ordinator, “the best Zone Agent I ever had—or ever hope to have. Remember Zamm?”

  Bropha’s handsome face darkened.

  Yes, he remembered Zamm! There were even times when he wished he didn’t remember her quite so vividly.

  But two years would have been much too short an interval in any case to forget the name of the person who had saved your life—

  At the, time, the discovery that His Excellency the Illustrious Bropha was lost in space had sent a well-concealed ripple of dismay throughout the government of the Confederacy. For Bropha was destined in the Confederacy’s plans to become a political figure of the highest possible importance.

  Even the Third Co-ordinator’s habitual placidity vanished when the information first reached him. But he realized promptly that while a man lost in deep space was almost always lost for good, there were any number of mitigating factors involved in this particular case. The last report on Bropha had been received from his personal yacht, captained by his half brother Greemshard; and that ship was equipped with devices which would have tripped automatic alarms in monitor-stations thousands of light-years apart if it had been suddenly destroyed or incapacitated by any unforeseen accident or space attack.

  Since no such alarm was r
eceived, the yacht was still functioning undisturbed somewhere, though somebody on board her was keeping her whereabouts a secret.

  It all pointed, pretty definitely, at Greemshard!

  For its own reasons, the Department of Galactic Zones had assembled a dossier on Bropha’s half brother which was hardly less detailed than the information it had available concerning the illustrious scientist himself. It was no secret to its researchers that Greemshard was an ambitious, hard-driving man, who for years had chafed under the fact that the goal of his ambitions was always being reached first and without apparent effort by Bropha. The study of his personality had been quietly extended then to a point where it could be predicted with reasonable accuracy what he would do in any given set of circumstances; and with the department’s psychologists busily dissecting the circumstances which surrounded the disappearance of Bropha, it soon became apparent what Greemshard had done and what he intended to do next.

  A prompt check by local Zone Agents indicated that none of the powers who would be interested in getting Bropha into their hands had done so as yet, and insured, furthermore, that they could not do so now without leading the Confederacy’s searchers directly to him. Which left, as the most important remaining difficulty, the fact that the number of places where the vanished yacht could be kept unobtrusively concealed was enormously large.

  The number was a limited one, nevertheless—unless the ship was simply drifting about space somewhere, which was a risk no navigator of Greemshard’s experience would be willing to take. And through the facilities of its home offices and laboratories and its roving army of Agents, the Third Department was equipped, as perhaps no other human organization ever had been, to produce an exact chart of all those possible points of concealment and then to check them off in the shortest possible time.

  So the Co-ordinator was not in the least surprised when, on the eighth day of the search instigated by the department, a message from Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok was transferred to him, stating that Bropha had been found, alive and in reasonably good condition, and would be back in his home on Jeltad in another two weeks.