He glanced at Goth. She lifted her shoulders. “Doesn’t look like much of anything!” he remarked. He peeled the plastic back farther until some two feet of the thing were exposed. It could be a mass of worn crystal, lumpish and shapeless as it had appeared under its wrapping.
Shapeless?
Studying it, the captain began to wonder. There were a multitude of tiny ridged whorls and knobby protrusions on its surface, and the longer he gazed at them the more he felt they weren’t there by chance, but for a purpose, had been formed deliberately… that this was, in fact, some very curious sculptured pattern -
Within the cloudy gray of the crystal was a momentary flickering light, a shivering thread of fire, which seemed somehow immensely far away. He caught it again, again had a sense of enormous distances. And now came a feeling that the surface of the crystal was changing, flowing, expanding — that he was about to drop through, to be lost forever in the dim, fire-laced hugeness that was its other side. Terror surged up; for an instant he was paralyzed. Then he felt himself moving, pulling the plastic wrappings frantically back across its surface, Goth’s hands helping him. He twisted the ends together, tightly, as they had been before.
Terror lost its edge in the same moment. It was as if something which had attacked them from without were now simply fading away. But he still felt uncomfortable enough.
He looked at Goth, drew in a long breath.
“Whew!” he said, shaken. “Was that klatha stuff?”
“Not klatha!” said Goth, face pale, eyes sharp and alert. “Don’t know what it was! Never felt anything like it.”
She broke off.
Inside the captain’s head there was a tiny, purposeful click. Not quite audible. As if something had locked shut.
“Worm Worlders!” hissed Goth. They turned to the viewscreens together.
A pale-yellow stain moved in the eastern sky above the wintry plain outside, spread as it drifted swiftly up overhead, then faded in a sudden rush to the west.
“If we hadn’t put it back when we did—” the captain said.
Some minutes had passed. Worm Weather hadn’t reappeared above the plain, and now Goth reported that the klatha locks which had blocked the Nuri probes from their minds were relaxing. The yellow glow was a long distance away from them again.
“They’d have come here, all right!” Goth had her color back. He wasn’t sure he had yet. That was a very special plastic Olimy had enclosed the lumpish crystal in! A wrapping which deflected the Worm World’s sensor devices from what it covered -
But Manaret wanted the crystal. And Karres apparently wanted it as badly. Olimy had been carrying it in his ship, and for all his witch’s tricks, he’d been harried by the Nuris into disminding himself to escape them. Since then Worm Weather had hung about Uldune, turning up here and there, searching… suspecting the crystal had reached the planet, but unable to locate it… He said, “You’d think Sedmon would blow up half the countryside around here to get rid of that thing! It’s what keeps the Nuris near Uldune.”
Goth shook her head. “They’d come back sometime. Sedmon knows a lot! He doesn’t have that cap of his just because of witches. He’s scared of the Worm World. So he wants Karres to get that crystal thing.”
“Should help against Manaret, eh?”
“Looks like Manaret thinks so!” Goth pointed out reasonably.
“Yes, it does…” As important as that, then! The misty screen concealing the Daal’s aircar on the plain was still there. The men inside it had seen the Worm Weather, too, had known better than to try to take off. The car would be buttoned tight now, armor plates snapped shut over the windows, doors locked, as it crouched like a frightened bird on the empty slope. But in spite of his fears, Sedmon had come here with them today because he wanted Karres to get the crystal…
The captain said, “If we can take it as far as Emris—”
Goth nodded. “Always somebody on Emris.”
“They’d do the rest, eh?” He paused. “Well, no reason we can’t. If we just take care it stays wrapped up in that stuff.”
“Maybe we can,” Goth said slowly. She didn’t sound too sure of it.
“The Daal thinks we can make it,” the captain told her, “or he wouldn’t have showed it to us. And, as you say, he’s a pretty knowing old bird!”
A grin flickered on her mouth. “Well, that’s something else, Captain!”
“What is?”
“You look a lot like Threbus.”
“I do?”
“Only younger,” Goth said. “And I look a lot like Toll, only younger. Sedmon knows Threbus and Toll — and we got him thinking that’s who we are. He figures we’ve done an age-shift.”
“Age-shift?”
“Get younger, get older,” explained Goth. “Either way. Some witches can. Threbus and Toll could, I guess.”
“I see. Uh, well, still—”
“And Threbus and Toll,” Goth concluded in a rather small voice, “are an almighty good pair of witches!”
For an instant, the barest instant then, and for the first time since he’d known her, Goth seemed a tiny, uncertain figure standing alone in a great and terrible universe.
Well, not exactly alone, the captain thought.
“Well,” he said heartily, “I guess that means we’re going to have to be an almighty good pair of witches now, too!”
She smiled up at him. “Guess we’d maybe better be, Captain!”
Chapter SIX
It was supposed to be Vezzarn’s sleep period, but for the past two hours he’d been sitting in his locked cabin on the Evening Bird, brooding. On this, the third ship day after their lift-off from Port Zergandol, Vezzarn had a number of things to brood about.
Working as undercover operator, for an employer known only as a colorless, quiet voice on a communicator, had its nervous moments; but over the years it had paid off for Vezzarn. There was a very nice sum of money tucked away under a code number in the Daal’s Bank in Zergandol, money which was all his.
He hadn’t liked various aspects of the Chaladoor assignment too well. Who would? But the bonus guaranteed him if he found what he was supposed to find on Captain Aron’s ship was fantastic. He’d risked hide and sanity in the Chaladoor for a fraction of that before…
Then, ten days before they were to take off, the colorless voice told him the assignment was canceled — in part. Vezzarn was to forget what he had been set to find, forget it completely. But he still was to accompany Captain Aron through the Chaladoor, use the experience he had gained on his previous runs through the area to help see the Evening Bird arrive safely at Emris.
And what would he get for it?
“I’ll throw in a reasonable risk bonus,” the communicator told him. “You’re drawing risk pay from your skipper and your regular pay from me. That’s it. Don’t be a pig, Vezzarn.”
Vezzarn had no wish to anger the voice. But straight risk money, even collected simultaneously from two employers, wasn’t enough to make him want to buck the Chaladoor again. Not at his age. He mentioned the age factor, suggested a younger spacer with comparable experience but better reflexes might be of more value to Captain Aron on this trip.
The voice said it didn’t agree. It was all it needed to say. Remembering things it had tonelessly ordered done on other occasions, Vezzarn shuddered. “If that’s how you feel, sir,” he said, “I’ll be on board.”
“That’s sensible of you, Vezzarn,” the communicator told him and went dead.
He smoldered for hours. Then the thought came that there was no reason why he shouldn’t work for himself in this affair. The voice had connections beyond the Chaladoor, but it would be a while before word about Vezzarn arrived there. And if he’d got his hands on the secret superdrive Captain Aron was suspected of using occasionally, Vezzarn could be a long way off and a very rich man by then.