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 in the remoteness of space all about. Some of the patterns seemed familiar, but he wasn’t a good enough general 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, right on 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 in bewilderment, the captain realized suddenly that the voices had come from the speaker of the ship’s intercom connecting the control room with what had once been the Venture’s captain’s cabin.
He listened; but only a dim murmuring was audible now, and then nothing at all. He started towards the passage, returned and softly switched off the intercom. He went quietly down the passage 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. Above the wires, 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 added 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 two light-weeks 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.”
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. Karres people did it, said Maleen, when they had to go somewhere fast. Everybody knew how there. “But of course,” she added, “we’re pretty young to do it right.”
“We did it pretty clumping 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.
“We’ll have to figure out how 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 weren’t always accurate, 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 returned 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 unusual children, but still children — they couldn’t really understand.
He would stop off en route to Karres at an Empire planet with interstellar 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. He gathered 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 world, 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 Leewit.
“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 on a couch he had set up in the control room, it was no longer surprising that the Empire wanted no young slaves from Karres to be transported to 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 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.