But he didn’t feel so confused that he couldn’t remember who he was — or that, just a few moments ago, some vatch trick again had plucked him from the control room of the Venture, standing on a rainy, rocky slope of the Karres of over three hundred thousand years in the past.
Further, since the creature had addressed him in what was undisguisedly Goth’s voice, he could conclude without difficulty that it was, in fact, Goth who had pulled a shape-change on herself. It didn’t look at all like her; but then it wouldn’t. And, by deduction, while the smaller, chunky, dog-like creature standing silently on four legs just beyond her looked even less like the Leewit, it very probably was the Leewit.
However, Goth evidently had warned him he’d better act bewildered, and she must have a reason for it.
“Umm… yes!” the captain mumbled, lifting one hand and pressing his palm to his forehead. “I do feel rather… who… what… where am I? Who…” He’d noticed something dark wagging below his chin as he was speaking, and the arm he lifted seemed clothed in a rich-textured light blue sleeve he’d never seen before, with a pattern of small precious stones worked into it. When he glanced down along his nose at the dark thing, he glimpsed part of a gleaming black beard. So he, too, had been shape-changed!
“You,” the Goth-creature was saying hurriedly, “are Captain Mung of the Capital Guard of the Emperor Koloth the Great. My name’s Hantis. I’m a Nartheby Sprite and you’ve known me a long time. That” — it indicated the other creature — “is a grik-dog. It’s called Pul. It—”
“Grik-dogs,” interrupted the grik-dog grumpily in the Leewit’s voice, “can talk as good as anybody! Ought to tell him that so—”
“Yes,” Goth-Hantis cut in. “They can speak, of course — shut up, Pul. So you’d bought it for the Empress at the Emperor’s orders and we are taking it back to the capital when all this suddenly happened…”
He’d been staring at her while she spoke. Goth might have gone on practicing her shape-changing on the quiet because this was a perfect, first-class job! Even from a distance of less than three feet, he couldn’t detect the slightest indication that the Nartheby Sprite wasn’t the real thing. He remembered vaguely that galactic legend mentioned such creatures. It looked like a small, very slender, brown-skinned woman, no bigger than Goth, dressed skimpily in scattered patches of some green material. The cheekbones were set higher and the chin was more pointed than a human woman’s would have been; with the exception of the mouth, the rest of the face and head did not look human at all. The slender ridge of the nose was barely indicated on the skin but ended in a delicate tip and small, flaring nostrils. The eyes had grass green pupils which showed more white around them than human ones would; they seemed alert, wise eyes. The brows were broad tufts of soft red fur. A round, tousled mane of the same type of fur framed the face, and through it protruded pointed, mobile foxy ears. The grik-dog might be no less an achievement. The image was that of a solidly built, pale-yellow animal which would have been about the Leewit’s weight, with a large round head and a dark, pushed-in, truculent, slightly toothy face. The gray eyes could almost have been those of the Leewit; and they stared up at the captain with much of the coldly calculating expression which was the Leewit’s when things began to look a little tight.
“What, uh, did happen, Hantis?” the captain asked. “I seem almost to remember that I… but—”
The Sprite image shrugged.
“We’re not really sure, Captain Mung. One moment we were on your ship, the next we were in this place! It’s the place of a great being called Moander. We haven’t seen him but he’s talked to us. He’s upset because nothing was supposed to be able to get in here — and now we’ve come in, through time! It must have been a warp. But Moander won’t believe yet it was an accident.”
“He’d better believe it!” snorted the captain haughtily, playing his part. “When Koloth the Great learns how his couriers have been welcomed here—”
“Moander says, sir,” Goth-Hantis interrupted, “that in his time the Emperor Koloth the Great has been dead more’n three hundred years! Moander thinks we’re perhaps spies of his enemies. He’s setting this place up now so nobody else can get in the same way. Then we’ll go to his laboratory so he can talk to us. He—”
“GRAZEEM!” a great voice shouted deafeningly in the fog above them. “Grazeem! Grazeem!… Grazeem…” The word seemed to echo away into the distance. Then there was more shouting all around them by the same mighty voice.
“What’s the yelling about?” the captain asked in what he felt would be Captain Mung’s impatient manner.
“Moander talking to the other machines,” said the grik-dog. “Got a different language for each of them — don’t know why. It’s just a big, dumb machine, like they said.”
“Pul, you—”
“S’all right, Goth,” the grik-dog told the Sprite. “ ‘Grazeem’ means ‘all units.’ Moander’s talking to all of them now. Machine that was listening to us won’t till Moander stops again. You got something to say, better say it!”
“Guess she’s right, Captain!” Goth-Hantis said hurriedly. “Vatch got us into Moander’s place on the Worm World, our time. Haven’t relled it, so it’s not here. Got any ideas?”
“Not yet. You?”
“Uh-uh. Just been here a few minutes.”
“The vatch figures there’s something we can do if we’re smart enough to spot it,” the captain said. “Keep your minds ticking! If somebody sees something and we can’t talk, say, uh—”
“Starkle?” suggested the grik-dog.
“Eh? All right, starkle. That will mean ‘attention!’ or ‘notice that!’ or ‘get ready!’ or ‘be careful!’ and…”
“Starkle!” said the grik-dog. “All-units talk’s stopping!”
The captain couldn’t tell much difference in the giant shouting, but again they probably could trust the Leewit in that. Whatever machine had been listening to them had begun to listen again. Goth-Hantis was glancing about, the image’s big, pointed, furry ears twitching realistically.
“Looks like we’ve started to move,” she announced. “Probably going to Moander’s laboratory, like he said…”
The fog substance enveloping the spherical hollow which contained them — and which must be the interior of a globular force field — was streaming past with increasing swiftness. There was no sensation of motion, but the appearance of it was that the globe was rushing on an upward slant through the gigantic structure on the surface of Manaret, Moander’s massive stronghold, which the captain had glimpsed in a screen view during his talk with Cheel the Lyrd-Hyrier. The fog darkened and lightened successively about them, giving the impression that they were being passed without pause through one section of the interior after another. Sounds came now and then, presumably those of working machine units; and mingling with them, now distant, now from somewhere nearby, the shouted commands of Moander resounded and dropped away behind them.
Then, suddenly, there was utter silence… the vast, empty, icy kind of silence an audio pickup brings in from space. There were blurs of shifting color in the fog substance ahead and on all sides; and the fog no longer was rushing past but clinging densely about the globe, barely stirring. Evidently they had hurtled out of the stronghold and were in space above Manaret — and if Moander chose to deactivate the field about them now, the captain thought, neither the vatch’s planning nor any witch tricks his companions knew could keep their lives from being torn from them by the unpleasantly abrupt violence of the void.