It seemed almost odd, a couple of minutes later, to be speaking to Toll by a method as unwitchy as ship-to-planet communicator contact. Hulik and Vezzarn had retired to the passenger section again when the captain told them there’d be Karres business coming up. The talk was brief. Toll had sheewashed to Emris from the Dead Suns Cluster just before their call came in, because someone she referred to as a probability calculator had decided the Venture and her crew should be showing up around there by about this time. Karres was still battling Nuri globes but winning handily in that conflict; and they’d realized something had happened to Manaret, but not what.
The captain explained as well as he could. Toll’s eyes were shining much as the Leewit’s as she blew him a kiss. “Now listen,” she said, “all three of you. There’s been more klatha simmering around the Venture lately than you’d normally find around Karres. Better let it cool off! We want to see you soonest but don’t use the Drive to get here. Don’t do anything but stay on course… Captain, a couple of escort ships will meet you in about an hour to pilot you in. Children, we’ll see you at the governor’s spacefield in Green Galaine — oh, yes, and tell the captain what the arrangement is on Emris… Now let’s cut this line before someone taps it who shouldn’t!”
“I just thought,” the captain said to Goth and the Leewit as he switched off the communicator, “we’d better go make sure Olimy’s all right! Come on… I’d like to hear about that Emris business then.”
Olimy, unsurprisingly, was still in his stateroom, aloof and unaffected by the events which had thundered about him. On the way back they stopped to tell Hulik and Vezzarn they’d be making landfall on Emris in a couple of hours, and to find out what the experience of the two had been when they found themselves alone on the Venture. “There was this noise—” Hulik said. She and Vezzarn agreed it was an indescribable noise, though not a very loud one. “It was alarming!” said Hulik. It had come from the control section. They hadn’t tried to investigate immediately, thinking it was some witch matter they shouldn’t be prying into; but when the noise was followed by a complete silence from the forward part of the ship, they’d first tried to get a response from the control section by intercom, and when that failed they’d gone up front together. Except for the fact that there was no one present nothing had changed… the viewscreens showed the familiar rocky slope about them and the rain still pelting down steadily on the Venture. Not knowing what else to do, they’d sat down in the control section to wait… and they hadn’t really known what they were waiting for.
“If you’ll excuse me for saying so, skipper,” said Vezzarn, “I wasn’t so sure you three hadn’t just gone off and left us for good! Miss do Eldel, she said, ‘No, they’ll be back.’ But I wasn’t so sure.” He shook his grizzled head. “That part was bad!”
The captain explained there’d been no chance to warn them — didn’t add there’d been a rather good chance, in fact, that no one ever would come back to the Venture again.
“Then the strongbox went!” reported Hulik. “I was looking at it, wondering what you had inside — and there was a puff of darkness about it, and that cleared, and the box was gone. Vezzarn hadn’t seen it and didn’t notice it, and I didn’t tell him.”
“If she’d told me, I’d’ve fainted dead!” Vezzarn muttered earnestly.
Then the blackness had come… Blackness about the ship and inside it and around them, lasting for perhaps a minute. When it cleared away suddenly, Goth and the Leewit were standing in the control room with them. Everyone had started looking around for the captain then until Goth suddenly announced his arrival from the control room a couple of minutes later…
“Well, I’m sorry you were put through all that,” the captain told the two. “It couldn’t be helped. But you’ll be safe down on Emris within another two hours… Happen to remember just when it was you heard that strange noise?”
The do Eldel checked her timepiece. “It seems like several lifetimes,” she said. “But as a matter of fact, it was an hour and fifteen minutes ago.”
Which, the captain calculated on the way back to the control section, left about forty minutes as the period within which Moander had been buried under his mighty citadel, the Worm World pitched into chaos, and a giant-vatch taught an overdue and lasting lesson in manners. A rather good job, he couldn’t help feeling, for that short a time!
The escort ships which hailed them something less than an hour later were patrol boats of the Emris navy. The purpose of the escort evidently was to whisk the Venture unchecked through the customary prelanding procedures here and guide her down directly to the private landing field of the governor of Green Galaine, one of the four major administrative provinces of Emris.
The captain wasn’t surprised. From what Goth and the Leewit had told him, the Karres witches were on excellent terms with the authorities of this world; and the governor of Green Galaine was an old friend of their parents. The patrol boats guided them in at a fast clip until they began to hit atmosphere, then braked. A great city, rolling up and down wooded hills, rose below; and he leveled the Venture out behind the naval vessels towards a small port lying within a magnificent cream-and-ivory building complex.
“Know this place?” he asked the Leewit, nodding at the semicircle of beautiful buildings.
“Governor’s palace,” she said. “Where we’ll stay…”
“Oh?” The captain studied the palace again. “Guess he’s got room enough for guests, at that!” he remarked.
“Sure — lots!” said the Leewit.
“The tests,” Threbus said, “show about what we expected. Of course, as I told you, these results reflect only your present extent of klatha control. They don’t indicate in any way what you may be doing six months or a year from now.”
“Yes, I understand that,” the captain said.
“Let me look this over once more, Pausert, to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Then I’ll sum it up for you.”
Threbus began to busy himself again with the notes he’d made on the klatha checks he’d been running the captain through, and the captain watched his great uncle silently. Threbus must be somewhere in his sixties if the captain’s recollection of family records was correct, but he looked like a man of around forty and in fine shape for his age. Klatha presumably had something to do with that. During the captain’s visit at Toll’s house on Karres, he’d encountered Threbus a few times in the area and chatted with him, unaware that this affable witch was the father of Goth and her sisters or his own long-vanished kinsman. At the time Threbus had worn a beard, which he’d since removed. The captain could see that, without the beard and allowing for the difference in age, there was, as Goth had told him, considerable similarity between the two of them.
This was the morning of the third day since the Venture had landed on Emris. The night before, Threbus had suggested that he and the captain go for an off-planet run today to see how the captain would make out on the sort of standard klatha tests given witches at various stages of development. Off-planet, because they already knew he still had a decidedly disturbing effect on the klatha activities of most adult witches, simply by being anywhere near them; and it could be expected the effect would be considerably more pronounced when he was deliberately attempting to manipulate klatha energies.
Threbus folded his notes together, dropped them into the disposal box of the little ship which had brought the two of them out from Emris, and adjusted the automatic controls. He then leaned back in his chair.