“I see,” nodded the captain. “Well, Mr. Yango, I feel you owe Miss do Eldel an explanation and an apology for the fright you gave her. After that’s done, I’ll bring the ship’s crane up here and we’ll move the robot’s case into the storage vault. It should have had all the exercise it needs on this trip, and it will be safe enough there to satisfy you…”
Hulik do Eldel had to see the robot before she would believe what the two men were telling her. However, one glance at the great fanged head in the case was enough. “That’s it!” she agreed, paling. She shuddered delicately. “Close it up again, please — quickly!”
When the case was locked, Laes Yango offered his apologies. Hulik looked at him a moment.
“I pride myself on being a lady,” she said evenly then, “so I accept the apology, Mr. Yango. I will also blow your head off if you try another trick of any kind before we reach Emris!”
Bad blood among the passengers couldn’t ordinarily be considered one of the more auspicious conditions for a space voyage. In this instance though, the captain reflected, some feuding between Laes Yango and the do Eldel might do no harm. It could help keep both of them out of his hair and generally hamper whatever sneaky maneuverings they’d be up to individually. He wondered whether Hulik would carry out her threat to blow off Laes Yango’s head, if things came to that point. She might, he decided. Yango, according to the reports he’d had from Goth, was prudently keeping to his stateroom most of the time now. Of course, the big trader was at a disadvantage… the captain had retained custody of his gun, on general suspicion.
Neither Goth nor Vezzarn ever had heard anything at all of the antique Sheem Robots. Perhaps Yango’s hyperelectronic spider monster was as harmless as he claimed, but it was staying right there in its locked-up crate in the vault until the Venture was ready to discharge her cargo in port There’d been robots built that were far from harmless…
About time for Hulik to create a tense situation on the ship next!
Well, the trip to Emris wouldn’t take forever! They were nearly halfway through the Chaladoor by now -
SMALL PERSON, said the vatch, YOU ARE MOST DIVERTING! I AM INCREASINGLY PLEASED TO HAVE FOUND YOU AMONG MY THOUGHTS.
Eh? What was that? Surprised, the captain groped around mentally, paused. Out of nowhere that vast voice came booming and whirling about him again, like great, formlessly shifting gusts of wind.
WHAT TROUBLES! WHAT PROBLEMS! exclaimed the vatch. HOW COMICALLY YOU STRUGGLE AMONG YOUR FELLOW-PHANTOMS! TINY CREATURE OF MY MIND, ARE YOU WORTHY OF CLOSER ATTENTION?
Impression, suddenly, of a mountain of wavy, unstable blackness before him. From some point near its peak, two huge, green, slitted eyes stared down.
SHALL WE MAKE THE GAME MORE INTERESTING, SMALL PERSON? SHOULD YOU BE TESTED FOR A GREATER ROLE? PERHAPS YOU WILL!… PERHAPS YOU WILL -
The captain jerked upright, found himself sitting in the control chair. There was only the familiar room and its equipment about, with the Chaladoor gazing in through the viewscreens.
Fallen asleep, he thought. Fallen asleep to dream of a preposterous vatch-thing, which had the notion it was dreaming him! His eyes went guiltily to the console chronometer. He’d nodded off for only a minute or two, apparently. But that was bad! It was still the early part of his watch.
He got coffee, lit a cigarette, sat down again and sighed heavily. It had occurred to him that he might ask Miss do Eldel if she could spare some of her stay-awake pills, but he’d given up the thought at once. Accepting drugs of any kind from a suspected spy wouldn’t be the cleverest thing to do. He’d use all his next scheduled sleep period for sleep and nothing else, he promised himself. Standing watch half the time wasn’t the problem — if Goth could do it with no indications of droopiness, he could. But the complications created by the others, and the need to be alert for more trouble from them, had cut heavily into the time he should have kept free for rest. The sensible move might be to lock all three of them up in their respective cabins.
And if there were any renewed indications of mischief, he decided, he’d do just that…
Chapter EIGHT
For a while, the passengers and the one-man crew seemed to be on their best behavior. The Chaladoor, however, was not. There were several abrupt alerts, and one hard run from something which blurred the detectors and appeared in the viewscreens’ visual magnification as a cloud of brown dust. It displayed extraordinary mobility for a dust cloud. An electric-blue charge crackled and snapped about the Venture’s hull for minutes as they raced ahead of it; then, gradually, they’d pulled away. Another encounter — when a great pale sphere of a ship came edging in swiftly on their course — was averted by warning snarls from the nova guns. The sphere remained parallel for a time, well beyond range, then swung off and departed.
And finally there was Worm Weather in the viewscreens again…
It was nothing like the previous occasion. One had to be alertly observant to catch them; and hours might pass without any sign at all. Then a tiny hazy glow would be there for a minute or two, moving distantly among the stars, and disappearing in the unexplained fashion of the Nuri globes. The lounge screens remained off — the captain had let it be known that the temporary malfunction was now permanent — so neither Vezzarn nor the passengers became aware of that particular phenomenon. But for the two responsible for the Venture’s safety, and for matters which might be unthinkably more important, it was a nerve-stretching thing. Sleep periods were cut short again.
The captain, therefore, wasn’t too surprised when he discovered himself waking up in the control chair during a watch period once more. Nor — at the moment — was he too concerned. He’d rigged up a private alarm device guaranteed to jar him out of deepest slumber, which he left standing on the desk throughout his watches. It had to be reset manually every three minutes to keep it silent, and, even in the Chaladoor, there were few stretches where anything very serious was likely to develop without previous warning in three minutes. At the first suggestion of drowsiness he turned it on.
But then came a disturbing recollection. This time he had not turned it on. He remembered a wave of heavy sleepiness, which had seemed to roll down on him suddenly, and must have literally blanked him out in an instant. It had been preceded by a momentary sense of something changing, something subtly wrong on the ship. He hadn’t had time to analyze that…
For an instant, his thoughts stopped in shock. Automatically, as he grew aware there’d been a lapse in wakefulness, he’d glanced over the detector system, found it inert, shifted attention to the ship’s screens.
There was something very wrong there!
The appearance of the route pattern ahead of the Venture had changed completely. Off to the left by a few degrees, hung a blue-white sundisk the size of his thumb nail, a patch of furious incandescence which certainly hadn’t been in view before! How long had he -
Three hours plus, the console chronometer told him silently. A good three hours and twenty minutes! He flicked on Goth’s intercom buzzer, held it down, eyes still rapidly searching the screens for anything of significance the detectors had left unregistered. A dozen times over, in those three hours, some Chaladoor raider could have swept down on them and knocked them out of space… “Goth?”