The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (55 page)

"Beak-Wock?" it returned in an aggrieved,
demanding roar.

"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.

"And where are we now?" the captain inquired, in a
voice of unnatural calm.

"Same place, just about," said the Leewit.
"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 hall
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 half a pound in
weight seemed to be 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 rear lock, sealed the inside lock 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 told 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 hall. 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—

"Didn'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 that 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 still 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.

They 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. Ma-leen had cooked up a
poultice which did wonders for his knee. With the end of the trip in sight, all
tensions had 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 visible interest. No communicator signals reached them; and no
other ships showed up to look them over. Karres, in fact, had all the appearance
of a completely uninhabited world. There were a larger 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 that 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 resurgence 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 got 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 his shoulder. "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 up 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.

The town of Karres was a surprise to him in a good many
ways. For one thing, there was much more of it than you 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 rest 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 to 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'd lost his way
hopelessly within minutes, and had to be guided back out of the forest.

But the most hidden of all were the people! About four
thousand of them were supposed to live in the town, with as many more scattered
about the planet. But you never got to see more than three or four at any one
time—except when now and then a pack of children, who seemed to the captain to
be uniformly of the Leewit's size, would burst suddenly out of the undergrowth
across a path before you, and vanish again.

As for the others, you did hear someone singing
occasionally; or there might be a whole muted concert going on all about, on a
large variety of wooden musical instruments which they seemed to enjoy tootling
with, gently.

But it wasn't a real town at all, the captain thought. They
didn't live like people, these Witches of Karres—it was more like a flock of
strange forest birds that happened to be nesting in the same general area.
Another thing: they appeared to be busy enough—but what was their business?

He discovered he was reluctant to ask Toll too many
questions about it. Toll was the mother of his three witches; but only Goth
really resembled her. It was difficult to picture Goth becoming smoothly
matured and pleasantly rounded; but that was Toll. She had the same murmuring
voice, the same air of sideways observation and secret reflection. And she
answered all the captain's questions with apparent frankness; but he never
seemed to get much real information out of what she said.

It was odd, too! Because he was spending several hours a day
in her company, or in one of the next rooms at any rate, while she went about
her housework. Toll's daughters had taken him home when they landed; and he was
installed in the room that belonged to their father—busy just now, the captain
gathered, with some sort of research of a geological nature elsewhere on
Karres. The arrangement worried him a little at first, particularly since Toll
and he were mostly alone in the house. Maleen was going to some kind of school;
she left early in the morning and came back late in the afternoon; and Goth and
the Leewit were just plain running wild! They usually got in long after the
captain had gone to bed and were off again before he turned out for breakfast.

It hardly seemed like the right way to raise them! One
afternoon, he found the Leewit curled up and asleep in the chair he usually
occupied on the porch before the house. She slept there for four solid hours,
while the captain sat nearby and leafed gradually through a thick book with
illuminated pictures called "Histories of Ancient Yarthe." Now and
then, he sipped at a cool, green, faintly intoxicating drink Toll had placed
quietly beside him some while before, or sucked an aromatic smoke from the
enormous pipe with a floor rest, which he understood was a favorite of Toll's
husband.

Then the Leewit woke up suddenly, uncoiled, gave him a look
between a scowl and a friendly grin, slipped off the porch and vanished among
the trees.

He couldn't quite figure that look! It might have meant
nothing at all in particular, but—

The captain laid down his book then and worried a little
more. It was true, of course, that nobody seemed in the least concerned about his
presence. All of Karres appeared to know about him, and he'd met quite a number
of people by now in a casual way. But nobody came around to interview him or so
much as dropped in for a visit. However, Toll's husband presumably would be
returning presently, and—