"What about the take-off?" Goth asked the captain. She seemed a little worried.
"Nothing to it!" the captain said stoutly, hardly bothering to wonder how she'd guessed the take-off was the one manoeuvre on which he and the old Venture consistently failed to cooperate.
"No," said Goth. "I meant, when?"
"Right now," said the captain. "They've already cleared us. We'll get the sign any second."
"Good," said Goth. She walked off slowly down the passage towards the central section of the ship.
The take-off was pretty bad, but the Venture made it again. Half an hour later, with Porlumma dwindling safely behind them, the captain switched to automatic and climbed out of his chair. After considerable experimentation he got the electric butler adjusted to four breakfasts, hot, with coffee. It was accomplished with a great deal of advice and attempted assistance from the Leewit, rather less from Maleen, and no comment from Goth.
"Everything will be coming along in a few minutes now!" he announced. Afterwards it struck him there had been a quality of grisly prophecy about the statement.
"If you'd listen to me," said the Leewit; "we'd have been done eating a quarter of an hour ago!" She was perspiring but triumphant; she had been right all along.
"Say, Maleen," she said suddenly, "you premoting again?"
Premoting? The captain looked at Maleen. She seemed pale and troubled.
"Spacesick?" he suggested. "I've got some pills..."
"No, she's premoting," the Leewit said, scowling. "What's up, Maleen?"
"Shut up," said Goth.
"All right," said the Leewit. She was silent a moment and then began to wriggle. "Maybe we'd better--"
"Shut up," said Maleen.
"It's all ready," said Goth.
"What's all ready?" asked the captain.
"All right," said the Leewit. She looked at the captain. "Nothing," she said.
He looked at them then, and they looked at him, one set each of grey eyes, and brown, and blue. They were all sitting around the control room floor in a circle, the fifth side of which was occupied by the electric butler.
What peculiar little waifs, the captain thought. He hadn't perhaps realized until now just how very peculiar. They were still staring at him.
"Well, well!" he said heartily. "So Maleen 'premotes' and gives people stomach-aches."
Maleen smiled dimly and smoothed back her yellow hair.
"They just thought they were getting them," she murmured.
"Mass history," explained the Leewit, offhandedly.
"Hysteria," said Goth. "The Imperials get their hair up about us every so often."
"I noticed that," the captain nodded. "And little Leewit here, she whistles and busts things."
"It's
the
Leewit," the Leewit said, frowning.
"Oh, I see," said the captain. Like the captain, eh?"
"That's right," said the Leewit. She smiled.
"And what does little Goth do?" the captain addressed the third witch.
Little Goth appeared pained. Maleen answered for her.
"Goth teleports mostly," she said.
"Oh, she does?" said the captain. "I've heard about that trick, too," he added lamely.
"Just small stuff really!" Goth said abruptly. She reached into the top of her jacket and pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle the size of the captain's two fists. The four ends of the cloth were knotted together. Goth undid the knot. "Like this," she said and poured out the contents on the rug between them. There was a sound like a big bagful of marbles being spilled.
"Great Patham!" the captain swore, staring down at what was a cool quarter-million in jewel stones, or he was still a miffel-farmer.
"Good gosh," said the Leewit, bouncing to her feet. "Maleen, we better get at it right away!"
The two blondes darted from the room. The captain hardly noticed their going. He was staring at Goth.
"Child," he said, "don't you realize they hang you without a trial on places like Porlumma if you're caught with stolen goods?"
"We're not on Porlumma, " said Goth. She looked slightly annoyed. "They're for you. You spent money on us, didn't you?"
"Not that kind of money," said the captain. "If Wansing noticed ... they're Wansing's, I suppose? "
"Sure," said Goth. "Pulled them in just before take-off. "
"If he reported, there'll be police ships on our tail any--"
"Goth!" Maleen shrilled.
Goth's head came around and she rolled up on her feet in one motion. "Coming," she shouted. "Excuse me," she murmured to the captain. Then she, too, was out of the room.
Again the captain scarcely noticed her departure. He had rushed to the control desk with a sudden awful certainty and switched on all screens.
There they were! Two needle-nosed dark ships coming up fast from behind and already almost in gun range! They weren't regular police boats, the captain realized, but auxiliary craft of the Empire's frontier fleets. He rammed the Venture's drives full on. Immediately, red-and-black fire blossoms began to sprout in space behind him, then a finger of flame stabbed briefly past, not a hundred yards to the right of the ship.
But the communicator stayed dead. Evidently, Porlumma preferred risking the sacrifice of Wansing's jewels to giving him and his misguided charges a chance to surrender...
He was putting the Venture through a wildly erratic and, he hoped, aim-destroying series of sideways hops and forward lunges with one hand, and trying to unlimber the turrets of the nova guns with the other, when suddenly--
No, he decided at once, there was no use trying to understand it. There were just no more Empire ships around. The screens all blurred and darkened simultaneously; and, for a short while, a darkness went flowing and coiling lazily past the Venture. Light jumped out of it at him once in a cold, ugly glare, and receded again in a twisting, unnatural fashion. The Venture's drives seemed dead.
Then, just as suddenly, the old ship jerked, shivered, roared aggrievedly, and was hurling herself along on her own power again.
But Porlumma's sun was no longer in evidence. Stars gleamed in the remoteness of space all about. Some of the patterns seemed familiar, but he wasn't a good enough general navigator to be sure.
The captain stood up stiffly, feeling heavy and cold. And at that moment, with a wild, hilarious clacking like a metallic hen, the electric butler delivered four breakfasts, hot, right on the center of the control room floor.
The first voice said distinctly, "Shall we just leave it on?"
A second voice, considerably more muffled, replied, "Yes, let's! You never know when you need it--"
The third voice tucked somewhere in between them, said simply, "Whew!"
Peering about in bewilderment, the captain realized suddenly that the voices had come from the speaker of the ship's intercom connecting the control room with what had once been the Venture's captain's cabin.
He listened; but only a dim murmuring was audible now, and then nothing at all. He started towards the passage, returned and softly switched off the intercom. He went quietly down the passage until he came to the captain's cabin. Its door was closed.
He listened a moment, and opened it suddenly.
There was a trio of squeals:
"Oh, don't! You spoiled it!"
The captain stood motionless. Just one glimpse had been given him of what seemed to be a bundle of twisted black wires arranged loosely like the frame of a truncated cone on--or was it just above?--a table in the center of the cabin. Above it, their faces reflecting its glow, stood the three witches.
Then the fire vanished; the wires collapsed. There was only ordinary light in the room. They were looking up at him variously; Maleen with smiling regret, the Leewit in frank annoyance, Goth with no expression at all.
"What out of Great Patham's Seventh Hell was that?" inquired the captain, his hair bristling slowly.
The Leewit looked at Goth; Goth looked at Maleen.
Maleen said doubtfully, "We can just tell you its name…"
"That was the Sheewash Drive." said Goth.
"The what drive?" asked the captain.
"Sheewash," repeated Maleen.
"The one you have to do it with yourself," the Leewit added helpfully.
"Shut up," said Maleen.
There was a long pause. The captain looked down at the handful of thin, black, twelve-inch wires scattered about the tabletop. He touched one of them. It was dead cold.
"I see," he said. "I guess we're all going to have a long talk." Another pause. "Where are we now?"
"About two light weeks down the way you were going," said Goth. "We only worked it thirty seconds."
"Twenty-eight," corrected Maleen, with the authority of her years. "The Leewit was getting tired."
"I see," said Captain Pausert carefully. "Well, let's go have some breakfast."
They ate with a silent voraciousness, dainty Maleen, the exquisite Leewit, supple Goth, all alike. The captain, long finished, watched them with amazement and now at last with something like awe.
"It's the Sheewash Drive," explained Maleen finally, catching his expression.
"Takes it out of you!" said Goth.
The Leewit grunted affirmatively and stuffed on.
"'Can't do too much of it," said Maleen. "Or too often. It kills you sure!"
"What," said the captain, "is the Sheewash Drive?"
They became reticent. Karres people did it, said Maleen, when they had to go somewhere fast. Everybody knew how there. "But of course," she added, "we're pretty young to do it right."
"We did it pretty clumping good!" the Leewit contradicted positively. She seemed to be finished at last.
"But how?" said the captain.
Reticence thickened almost visibly. If you couldn't do it, said Maleen, you couldn't understand it either.
He gave it up, for the time being.
"We'll have to figure out how to take you home next," he said; and they agreed.
Karres, it developed, was in the Iverdahl System. He couldn't find any planet of that designation listed in his maps of the area, but that meant nothing. The maps weren't always accurate, and local names changed a lot.
Barring the use of weird and deadly miracle drives that detour was going to cost him almost a month in time and a good chunk of his profits in power used up. The jewels Goth had illegally teleported must, of course, be returned to their owner, he explained. He'd intended to look severely at the culprit at that point; but she'd meant well, after all. They were extremely unusual children, but still children, they couldn't really understand.
He would stop off en route to Karres at an Empire planet with interstellar banking facilities to take care of that matter, the captain added. A planet far enough off so the police wouldn't be likely to take any particular interest in the Venture.
A dead silence greeted this schedule. He gathered that the representatives of Karres did not think much of his logic.
"Well," Maleen sighed at last, "we'll see you get your money back some other way then!"
The junior witches nodded coldly.
"How did you three happen to get into this fix?" the captain inquired, with the intention of changing the subject.
They'd left Karres together on a jaunt of their own, they explained. No, they hadn't run away; he got the impression that such trips were standard procedure for juveniles in that place. They were on another world, a civilized one but beyond the borders and law of the Empire, when the town they were in was raided by a small fleet of slavers. They were taken along with most of the local youngsters.
"It's a wonder," the captain said reflectively, "you didn't take over the ship."
"Oh, brother!" exclaimed the Leewit.
"Not that ship!" said Goth.
"That was an Imperial Slaver!" Maleen informed him. "You behave yourself every second on those crates."
Just the same, the captain thought, as he settled himself to rest on a couch he had set up in the control room, it was no longer surprising that the Empire wanted no young slaves from Karres to be transported to the interior! Oddest sort of children... But he ought to be able to get his expenses paid by their relatives. Something very profitable might even be made of this deal...
Have to watch the record entries though! Nikkeldepain's laws were explicit about the penalties invoked by anything resembling the purchase and sale of slaves.
He'd thoughtfully left the intercom adjusted so he could listen in on their conversation in the captain's cabin. However, there had been nothing for some time beyond frequent bursts of childish giggling. Then came a succession of piercing shrieks from the Leewit. It appeared she was being forcibly washed behind the ears by Maleen and obliged to brush her teeth, in preparation for bedtime.
It had been agreed that he was not to enter the cabin, because, for reasons not given, they couldn't keep the Sheewash Drive on in his presence; and they wanted to have it ready, in case of an emergency. Piracy was rife beyond the Imperial borders, and the Venture would keep beyond the border for most of the trip, to avoid the more pressing danger of police pursuit instigated by Porlumma. The captain had explained the potentialities of the nova guns the Venture boasted, or tried to. Possibly they hadn't understood. At any rate, they seemed unimpressed.