Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (316 page)

He sat a moment, reflecting. The revolt ships went by once more. The captain punched in the
Venture’s
secondary drives, turned her nose towards the planet, and let her go. There were some scattered white puffs around as he cut through the revolt ships’ plane of flight. Then he was below them, and the
Venture
groaned as he took her out of the dive.

The revolt ships were already scattering and nosing over for a countermaneuver. He picked the nearest one and swung the nova guns toward it.

“—and ram them in the middle!” he muttered between his teeth.

SSS-whoosh!

It was the Sheewash Drive—but like a nightmare now, it kept on and on!

VI.

“M
aleen!” the captain bawled, pounding at the locked door of the captain’s cabin. “Maleen, shut it off! Cut it off! You’ll kill yourself. Maleen!”

The
Venture
quivered suddenly throughout her length, then shuddered more violently, jumped and coughed; and commenced sailing along on her secondary drives again. He wondered how many light-years from everything they were by now. It didn’t matter!

“Maleen!” he yelled, “Are you all right?”

There was a faint
thump-thump
inside the cabin, and silence. He lost almost a minute finding the right cutting tool in the storage. A few seconds later a section of steel door panel sagged inwards; he caught it by one edge and came tumbling into the cabin with it.

He had the briefest glimpse of a ball of orange-colored fire swirling uncertainly over a cone of oddly bent wires. Then the fire vanished and the wires collapsed with a loose rattling to the table top.

The crumpled small shape lay behind the table, which was why he didn’t discover it at once. He sagged to the floor beside it, all the strength running out of his knees.

Brown eyes opened and blinked at him blearily.

“Sure takes it out of you!” Goth muttered. “Am I hungry!”

“I’ll whale the holy howling tar out of you again,” the captain roared, “if you ever—”

“Quit your bawling!” snarled Goth. “I got to eat.”

She ate for fifteen minutes straight before she sank back in her chair, and sighed.

“Have some more Wintenberry jelly,” the captain offered anxiously. She looked pretty pale.

Goth shook her head. “Couldn’t…and that’s about the first thing you’ve said since you fell through the door, howling for Maleen. Ha-ha! Maleen’s
got
a boy friend!”

“Button your lip, child,” the captain said. “I was thinking.” He added, after a moment, “Has she really?”

“Picked him out last year.” Goth nodded. “Nice boy from the town—they get married as soon as she’s marriageable. She just told you to come back because she was upset about you. Maleen had a premonition you were headed for awful trouble!”

“She was quite right, little chum,” the captain said nastily.

“What were you thinking about?” Goth inquired.

“I was thinking,” said the captain, “that as soon as we’re sure you’re going to be all right, I’m taking you straight back to Karres.”

“I’ll be all right now,” Goth said. “Except, likely, for a stomach-ache. But you can’t take me back to Karres.”

“Who will stop me, may I ask?” the captain asked.

“Karres is gone,” Goth said.

“Gone?” the captain repeated blankly, with a sensation of not quite definable horror bubbling up in him.

“Not blown up or anything,” Goth reassured him. “They just moved it! The Imperialists got their hair up about us again. But this time, they were sending a fleet with the big bombs and stuff, so everybody was called home. But they had to wait then till they found out where we were—me and Maleen and the Leewit. Then you brought us in; and they had to wait again, and decide about you. But right after you’d left…
we’d
left, I mean…they moved it.”

“Where?”

“Great Patham!” Goth shrugged. “How’d I know? There’s lots of places!”

* * * *

T
here probably were, the captain agreed silently. A scene came suddenly before his eyes—that lime-white, arenalike bowl in the valley, with the steep tiers of seats around it, just before they’d reached the town of Karres—“the Theater where—”

But now there was unnatural night-darkness all over and about that world; and the eight-thousand-some witches of Karres sat in circles around the Theater, their heads turned towards one point in the center where orange fire washed hugely about the peak of a cone of curiously twisted girders.

And a world went racing off at the speeds of the Sheewash Drive! There’d be lots of places, all right. What peculiar people!

“Anyway,” he sighed, “if I’ve got to start raising you—don’t say ‘Great Patham’ any more. That’s a cuss word!”

“I learned it from you!” Goth pointed out.

“So you did, I guess,” the captain acknowledged. “I won’t say it either. Aren’t they going to be worried about you?”

“Not very much,” said Goth. “We don’t get hurt often—especially when we’re young. That’s when we can do all the stuff like teleporting, and whistling, like the Leewit. We lose it mostly when we get older—they’re working on that now so we won’t. About all Maleen can do right now is premote!”

“She premotes just dandy, though,” the captain said. “The Sheewash Drive—they can all do that, can’t they?”

“Uh huh!” Goth nodded. “But that’s learned stuff. That’s one of the things they already studied out.” She added, a trace uncomfortably: “I can’t tell you about that till you’re one yourself.”

“Till I’m what myself?” the captain asked, becoming puzzled again.

“A witch like us,” said Goth. “We got our rules. And that won’t be for four years, Karres time.”

“It won’t, eh?” said the captain. “What happens then?”

“That’s when I’m marriageable age,” said Goth, frowning at the jar of Wintenberry jelly. She pulled it toward her and inspected it carefully. “I got it all fixed,” she told the jelly firmly, “as soon as they started saying they ought to pick out a wife for you on Karres, so you could stay. I said it was me, right away; and everyone else said finally that was all right then—even Maleen, because she had this boyfriend.”

“You mean,” said the captain, stunned, “this was all planned out on Karres?”

“Sure,” said Goth. She pushed the jelly back where it had been standing, and glanced up at him again. “For three weeks that’s about all everyone talked about in the town! It set a precedent—”

She paused doubtfully.

“That would explain it,” the captain admitted.

* * * *

“U
h-huh.” Goth nodded relieved, settling back in her chair. “But it was my father who told us how to do it so you’d break up with the people on Nikkeldepain. He said it was in the blood.”

“What was in the blood?” the captain asked patiently.

“That you’d break up with them. That’s Threbus, my father,” Goth informed him. “You met him a couple of times in the town. Big man with a blond beard—Maleen and the Leewit take after him.”

“You wouldn’t mean my great-uncle Threbus?” the captain inquired. He was in a state of strange calm by now.

“That’s right,” said Goth. “He liked you a lot.”

“It’s a small galaxy,” the captain said philosophically. “So that’s where Threbus wound up! I’d like to meet him again some day.”

“We’ll start after Karres four years from now, when you learn about those things,” Goth said. “We’ll catch up with them all right. That’s still thirteen hundred and seventy-two Old Sidereal days,” she added, “but there’s a lot to do in between. You want to pay the money you owe back to those people, don’t you? I got some ideas—”

“None of those teleporting tricks now!” the captain warned.

“Kid stuff!” Goth said scornfully. “I’m growing up. This’ll be fair swapping. But we’ll get rich.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” the captain admitted. He thought a moment. “Seeing we’ve turned out to be distant relatives, I suppose it is all right, too, if I adopt you meanwhile—”

“Sure,” said Goth. She stood up.

“Where you going?” the captain asked

“Bed,” said Goth. “I’m tired.” She stopped at the hall door. “About all I could tell you about us right now,” she said, “you can read in those Regulations, like the one man said—the one you kicked off the ship. There’s a lot about Karres in there. Lots of lies, too, though!”

“And when did you find out about the communicator between here and the captain’s cabin?” the captain inquired.

Goth grinned. “A while back. The others never noticed.”

“All right,” the captain said. “Good night, witch—if you get a stomach-ache, yell and I’ll bring the medicine.”

“Good night,” Goth yawned. “I will, I think.”

“And wash behind your ears!” the captain added, trying to remember the bedtime instructions he’d overheard Maleen giving the junior witches.

“All right,” said Goth sleepily. The passage door closed behind her—but half a minute later it was briskly opened again. The captain looked up startled from the voluminous stack of “General Instructions and Space Regulations of the Republic of Nikkeldepain” he’d just discovered in the back of one of the drawers of the control desk. Goth stood in the doorway, scowling and wide-awake.

“And you wash behind yours!” she said.

“Huh?” said the captain. He reflected a moment. “All right,” he said. “We both will, then.”

“Right,” said Goth, satisfied.

The door closed once more.

The captain began to run his finger down the lengthy index of K’s—could it be under W?

* * * *

Copyright © 1949 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

(1928–2005)

A terrific satirist and gifted humorist, Robert Sheckley had the ability to point out society’s absurdities and contradictions in funny and biting ways. This made him a popular SF writer, but was perhaps less useful in other areas (such as his long string of jobs and his five marriages).

Raised in New Jersey, Sheckley discovered SF while in high school. At eighteen, he hitchhiked across the country to California, where he supported himself with a variety of jobs, ranging from gardener to pretzel salesman to milkman to hand painting neckties. He spent two years in the Army, where he was sent to Korea and managed to add even more jobs, ranging from newspaper editor to payroll clerk to guitarist in an Army band. After leaving the service he returned to the Northeast to earn a degree at NYU, marry for the first time, and work as, among other things, an assistant metallurgist and an aircraft factory worker.

By this time he was writing prolifically. Sheckley’s first story was published in 1951, the same year he graduated NYU, and soon he was forced to use multiple pseudonyms because he was selling more stories than magazines could publish under one name (since they would only use one story under his name in a single issue). In addition to SF he wrote mysteries and suspense and TV episodes, and a number of novelizations of movies and TV shows. (A number of his own stories such as “Freejack” and “The Prize of Peril” were made into films as well.) He was briefly fiction editor of Omni but rarely settled in one place (or with one person) for too long, spending much of his time in Europe and various exotic locales before returning to the US in the 1990s.

Sheckley remained productive as a writer into his seventies, and was named Author Emeritus by SFWA in 2001. He fell seriously ill while attending a 2005 SF event in Ukraine, and never entirely recovered. Later that year he died of a brain aneurysm.

“The Prize of Peril” remains one of Sheckley’s most popular stories—all the more prescient for being written half a century before today’s reality TV craze.