Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (313 page)

“Sirian!” said the captain. “Can you understand them?” he asked Maleen.

She shook her head. “The Leewit can.”

The Leewit nodded, her gray eyes glistening.

“What are they saying?”

“They says you’re for stopping,” the Leewit translated rapidly, apparently retaining some of the original sentence-structure. “They says you’re for skinning alive…ha! They says you’re for stopping right now and for only hanging. They says—”

Maleen scuttled from the control room. The Leewit banged the communicator with one small fist.

“Beak-Wock!” she shrilled. It sounded that way, anyway. The loud voice paused a moment.

“BEAK-Wock?” it returned in an aggrieved, startled tone.

“Beak-Wock!” the Leewit affirmed with apparent delight. She rattled off a string of similar-sounding syllables. She paused.

A howl of inarticulate wrath responded.

The captain, in a whirl of outraged emotions, was yelling at the Leewit to shut up, at the Sirian to go to Great Patham’s Second Hell—the worst—and wrestling with the nova gun adjustors at the same time. He’d had about enough! He’d—

SSS-whoosh!

It was the Sheewash Drive.

* * * *

“A
nd where are we now?” the captain inquired, in a voice of unnatural calm.

“Same place, just about,” the Leewit told him. “Ship’s still on the screen. Way back though—take them an hour again to catch up.” She seemed disappointed; then brightened. “You got lots of time to get the guns ready!”

The captain didn’t answer. He was marching down the passage towards the rear of the Venture. He passed the captain’s cabin and noted the door was shut. He went on without pausing. He was mad clean through—he knew what had happened!

After all he’d told her, Goth had teleported again.

It was all there, in the storage. Items of up to a pound in weight seemed as much as she could handle. But amazing quantities of stuff had met that one requirement—bottles filled with what might be perfume or liquor or dope, expensive-looking garments and cloths in a shining variety of colors, small boxes, odds, ends, and, of course, jewelry!

He spent half an hour getting it loaded into a steel space crate. He wheeled the crate into the big storage lock, sealed the inside lock door and pulled the switch that activated the automatic launching device.

The outside lock clicked shut. He stalked back to the control room. The Leewit was still in charge, fiddling with the communicators.

“I could try a whistle over them,” she suggested, glancing up. She added, “But they’d bust somewheres, sure.”

“
Get them on again!
” the captain said.

“Yes, sir,” said the Leewit, surprised.

The roaring voice came back faintly.

“SHUT UP!” the captain shouted in Imperial Universum.

The voice shut up.

“Tell them they can pick up their stuff—it’s been dumped out in a crate,” the captain instructed the Leewit. “Tell them I’m proceeding on my course. Tell them if they follow me one light-minute beyond that crate, I’ll come back for them, shoot their front end off, shoot their rear end off, and ram ’em in the middle.”

“Yes, SIR!” the Leewit sparkled. They proceeded on their course.

Nobody followed.

“Now I want to speak to Goth,” the captain announced. He was still at a high boil. “Privately,” he added. “Back in the storage—”

Goth followed him expressionlessly into the storage. He closed the door to the passage. He’d broken off a two-foot length from the tip of one of Councilor Rapport’s overpriced tinklewood fishing poles. It made a fair switch.

But Goth looked terribly small just now! He cleared his throat. He wished for a moment he were back on Nikkeldepain.

“I warned you,” he said.

Goth didn’t move. Between one second and the next, however, she seemed to grow remarkably. Her brown eyes focused on the captain’s Adam’s apple; her lip lifted at one side. A slightly hungry look came into her face.

“Wouldn’t try that!” she murmured.

Mad again, the captain reached out quickly and got a handful of leathery cloth. There was a blur of motion, and what felt like a small explosion against his left kneecap. He grunted with anguished surprise and fell back on a bale of Councilor Rapport’s all-weather cloaks. But he had retained his grip—Goth fell half on top of him, and that was still a favorable position. Then her head snaked around, her neck seemed to extend itself, and her teeth snapped his wrist.

Weasels don’t let go—

* * * *

“D
idn’t think he’d have the nerve!” Goth’s voice came over the communicator. There was a note of grudging admiration in it. It seemed she was inspecting her bruises.

All tangled up in the job of bandaging his freely bleeding wrist, the captain hoped she’d find a good plenty to count. His knee felt the size of a sofa pillow and throbbed like a piston engine.

“The captain is a brave man,” Maleen was saying reproachfully. “You should have known better—”

“He’s not very
smart
, though!” the Leewit remarked suggestively.

There was a short silence.

“Is he? Goth? Eh?” the Leewit urged.

“Perhaps not very,” said Goth.

“You two lay off him!” Maleen ordered. “Unless,” she added meaningly, “you want to
swim
back to Karres—on the Egger Route!”

“Not me,” the Leewit said briefly.

“You could do it, I guess,” said Goth. She seemed to be reflecting. “All right—we’ll lay off him. It was a fair fight, anyway.”

IV.

T
hey raised Karres the sixteenth day after leaving Porlumma. There had been no more incidents; but then, neither had there been any more stops or other contacts with the defenseless Empire. Maleen had cooked up a poultice which did wonders for his knee. With the end of the trip in sight, all tensions relaxed; and Maleen, at least, seemed to grow hourly more regretful at the prospect of parting.

After a brief study Karres could be distinguished easily enough by the fact that it moved counterclockwise to all the other planets of the Iverdahl System.

Well, it would, the captain thought.

They came soaring into its atmosphere on the dayside without arousing any detectable interest. No communicator signals reached them, and no other ships showed up to look them over. Karres, in fact, had the appearance of a completely uninhabited world. There were a large number of seas, too big to be called lakes and too small to be oceans, scattered over its surface. There was one enormously towering ridge of mountains which ran from pole to pole, and any number of lesser chains. There were two good-sized ice caps; and the southern section of the planet was speckled with intermittent stretches of snow. Almost all of it seemed to be dense forest.

It was a handsome place, in a wild, somber way.

They went gliding over it, from noon through morning and into the dawn fringe—the captain at the controls, Goth and the Leewit flanking him at the screens, and Maleen behind him to do the directing. After a few initial squeals the Leewit became oddly silent. Suddenly the captain realized she was blubbering.

Somehow it startled him to discover that her homecoming had affected the Leewit to that extent. He felt Goth reach out behind him and put her hand on the Leewit’s shoulder. The smallest witch sniffled happily.

“ ’S beautiful!” she growled.

He felt a resurge of the wondering, protective friendliness they had aroused in him at first. They must have been having a rough time of it, at that. He sighed; it seemed a pity they hadn’t gotten along a little better!

“Where’s everyone hiding?” he inquired, to break up the mood. So far there hadn’t been a sign of human habitation.

“There aren’t many people on Karres,” Maleen said from behind him. “But we’re going to the town—you’ll meet about half of them there.”

“What’s that place down there?” the captain asked with sudden interest. Something like an enormous lime-white bowl seemed to have been set flush into the floor of the wide valley up which they were moving.

“That’s the Theater where…
ouch!
” the Leewit said. She fell silent then but turned to give Maleen a resentful look.

“Something strangers shouldn’t be told about, eh?” the captain said tolerantly. Goth glanced at him from the side.

“We’ve got rules,” she said.

He let the ship down a little as they passed over “the Theater where—” It was a sort of large, circular arena with numerous steep tiers of seats running up around it. But all was bare and deserted now.

On Maleen’s direction, they took the next valley fork to the right and dropped lower still. He had his first look at Karres’ animal life then. A flock of large, creamy-white birds, remarkably terrestrial in appearance, flapped by just below them, apparently unconcerned about the ship. The forest underneath had opened out into a long stretch of lush meadow land, with small creeks winding down into its center. Here a herd of several hundred head of beasts was grazing—beasts of mastodonic size and build, with hairless, shiny black hides. The mouths of their long, heavy heads were twisted into sardonic crocodilian grins as they blinked up at the passing
Venture
.

“Black Bollems,” said Goth, apparently enjoying the captain’s expression. “Lots of them around; they’re tame. But the gray mountain ones are good hunting.”

“Good eating, too!” the Leewit said. She licked her lips daintily. “Breakfast—!” she sighed, her thoughts diverted to a familiar track. “And we ought to be just in time!”

“There’s the field!” Maleen cried, pointing. “Set her down there, Captain!”

The “field” was simply a flat meadow of close-trimmed grass running smack against the mountainside to their left. One small vehicle, bright blue in color, was parked on it; and it was bordered on two sides by very tall blue-black trees.

That was all.

The captain shook his head. Then he set her down.

* * * *

T
he town of Karres was a surprise to him in a good many ways. For one thing there was much more of it than one would have thought possible after flying over the area. It stretched for miles through the forest, up the flanks of the mountain and across the valley—little clusters of houses or individual ones, each group screened from all the others and from the sky overhead by the trees.

They liked color on Karres; but then they hid it away! The houses were bright as flowers, red and white, apple-green, golden brown—all spick and span, scrubbed and polished and aired with that brisk green forest-smell. At various times of the day there was also the smell of remarkably good things to eat. There were brooks and pools and a great number of shaded vegetable gardens in the town. There were risky-looking treetop playgrounds, and treetop platforms and galleries which seemed to have no particular purpose. On the ground was mainly an enormously confusing maze of paths—narrow trails of sandy soil snaking about among great brown tree roots and chunks of gray mountain rock, and half covered with fallen needle leaves. The first six times the captain set out unaccompanied, he lost his way hopelessly within minutes and had to be guided back out of the forest.