The vatch was intrigued by the situation and had watched the captain become involved in the game against the Worm World. It thought now he could be developed into the player who would bring about Moander’s downfall.
What could he do, the captain asked.
Information was needed first, the vatch-voice told him. The means to act against the monster might be at hand, if they understood how to use it. And information could be obtained best from those who had most to tell about Moander-the Lyrd-Hyrier confined in Manaret. The vatch could not reach them, and nothing material could be sent through the barriers maintained by Moander. But in his present form the captain lacked all material substance and could be projected directly into the one section of Manaret still held and defended by the Lyrd-Hyrier. There, by following the vatch’s instructions, he would learn what he needed to know….
There were advantages to being a ghost, a temporary ghost, the captain hoped.
Fire from concealed energy guns had blazed through and about him the instant he arrived in the private chamber of the Lord Cheel, Prince of the Lyrd-Hyrier, the Great People, in a central section of Manaret. The guns hadn’t caused the captain any discomfort. When, at some unseen signal, the firing ended, he was still there, insubstantial but intact. The hostile reception was no surprise. Knowing nothing of vatch powers, the Lyrd-Hyrier would regard any intrusion here as being an attempted attack by Moander.
So the captain was thinking expressions of polite greeting and friendly purpose at the Lord Cheel as he drifted down closer-towards him. This was in line with the vatch’s instructions.
There was no immediate response to his greetings from Cheel, who was sitting up in a nest of rich robes on a wide couch near the center of the chamber, watching the approach of the wraith which had invaded his privacy, and apparently disturbed his slumber, with large, unblinking golden-green eyes. The vatch had told the captain that the Lyrd-Hyrier lord had a mind of great power and that if he formulated his thoughts carefully and clearly, Cheel would understand them and think back at him. The captain began to wonder how well the plan was going to work. What the robes allowed to be seen of Cheel’s person might have been sections of a purple-scaled reptile cast into very tall, attenuated human form. The neck was snaky. But the large round head at the end of it did suggest that it bulged with capable brains; and Cheel’s whole attitude, at a moment, which must have been rather startling to him, was that of a bold, arrogant, and resourceful being.
About a third of the way down to the couch, the chamber had the dimensions of a spaceship hangar and the jeweled magnificence of a royal audience room; the captain encountered a highly charged force field. He realized what it was; any material object or inimical energy encountering that barrier should have been spattered against the walls. But the only feeling he had was one of moving, for a moment, through something rather sticky and resistive. Then he was past the force field. Cheel gave up on defensive measures. His long purple arm moved under the robes; and his thoughts now touched the captain’s mind.
“The inner barriers are turned off,” they said. “It appears you are not Moander’s tool. Are you then one of the friendly witch people?”
The captain formulated the thought that he was an associate of the witch people and Moander’s foe as they were, that he might be in a position to give assistance against the machine, and that he was in need of information to show him what he could do. Cheel seemed to understand all this well enough. “Ask your questions!” he responded. “Without aid, our situation here will soon be hopeless-“
The exchange continued with only occasional difficulties. Manaret, at the time it appeared in the home-universe of humanity, had been under the control of a director machine called a synergizer, an all-important instrument unit which actuated and coordinated the many independent power systems required to maintain and drive the ship. The same near-disaster which hurled Manaret and the Lyrd-Hyrier out of their dimensional pattern of existence into this one also had temporarily incapacitated the synergizer. Moander, an emergency director of comparatively limited function, had become active in the synergizer’s stead, as it was designed to do. Manaret was an experiment, a new type of Lyrd-Hyrier warship. There had been no previous opportunity to test out Moander under actual emergency conditions.
Now it appeared there had been mistakes made in planning it. Alerted to substitute for the synergizer only until the unit resumed functioning, the emergency director had taken action to perpetuate the emergency which left it in charge. The synergizer was very nearly indestructible. But Moander had placed it in a torpedo-like vehicle and set the vehicle on a course which should plunge it into a great star near the point where the giant ship had emerged here. Free of its more powerful rival, Moander could not be controlled by any method available to the Lyrd-Hyrier.
“We know the synergizer was not destroyed at that time,” Cheel’s thoughts told the captain. “Apparently the vehicle was deflected from its course towards the star, presumably by the synergizer’s own action. But it has not returned and we have never found out where it went. Recently, there was a report-“
The thought halted. The captain was producing a mental image of Olimy’s mysterious crystalloid…. “That is it!” Cheel’s recognition of the object came almost as a shriek. “Where have you seen it?”
His excitement jumbled communication briefly; then he steadied. The Lyrd-Hyrier had received reports through a spy system they’d been able to maintain in various sections of Manaret that Moander’s Nuris had picked up the long-lost trail of the synergizer. Only hours old was the information that a witch ship transporting the instrument had eluded an attempt to force it and its cargo into a sun, and had disappeared.
The captain acknowledged the ship was his own. Temporarily the synergizer was safe.
The alien golden-green eyes were smoky with agitation. A view of a great dim hall, walls tapestried with massed instrument banks, appeared in the captain’s mind.” The central instrument room; it is under our control still. Once there, in its own place, the synergizer is all-powerful! Away from it, it can do little.
The picture flicked out. Cheel’s thoughts hurried on. A long time ago they had picked up fragmentary messages directed at Manaret by others of their kind from the dimensions of reality out of which they had been thrown. A vast machinery had been constructed there which would pluck the giant ship back from wherever it had gone the instant it was restored to operational condition under the synergizer’s direction. All problems would be solved in that moment!
But there was no method known to the Lyrd-Hyrier, Cheel admitted, of bringing a material object through Moander’s outer defenses of Manaret. The synergizer was many things more than it appeared to be, but it was in part material. And Manaret’s defenses were being strengthened constantly. “The Nuris again are weaving new patterns of energy among the dead suns which surround us here on all sides….” Of late, Moander evidently had found means of disrupting mental exchanges between the Lyrd-Hyrier and some telepathic witches of Karres. They had recently become unable to establish contact with Karres.
It seemed a large “But. “Any chance your friends eventually might send something like a relief ship here which could handle Moander?” the captain inquired.
“Impossible!” View of madly spinning blurs of energies, knotting and exploding … “There is no dimensional interface between us, there is a twisting plunge through chaos! We were there; we were here. In a million lifetimes that precise moment of whirling shift could not be deliberately duplicated. They cannot come here! They must draw the ship back there … and they can do that only when its total pattern of forces is intact and matches the pattern they have powered to attract it.”
Which required the synergizer … If they could get it to Karres-
“How vulnerable is Moander to an outside attack?”
“Its defenses are those of Manaret.” Cheel, formidable individual though he appeared to be, was allowing discouragement to tinge his thoughts, now that his excitement had abated somewhat. “Additionally … “ View of a massive structure with down-sloping sides affixed to a flat surface of similarly massive look.
“Moander’s stronghold on the outer shell of Manaret,” Cheel’s thought said. “Every defense known both to the science of the Great People and to the science of your kind on the worlds the Nuris have studied appears incorporated in it. And deep within it is Moander. The monster, for all its powers, is wary. All active operating controls of the ship are linked through the stronghold, and from it Moander scans your universe through its Nuris.