“It has us in a death-grip, and is preparing to close its grip on your kind. If we, and you, are to escape, then haste is very necessary! For the Nuris have built new breeding vats and are entering them in great numbers. It is their time ….”
“Breeding vats?” interjected the captain.
The Nuris, pliable and expendable slaves of whoever or whatever was in a position to command them, were bred at long intervals in the quantities required by their masters. Such a period had begun, and it was evident that Moander planned now to multiply the Nuri hordes at his disposal a hundredfold.
“In themselves the Worm People are nothing,” said Cheel’s thought. “But they are Moander’s instruments. As the swarms grow, so grows the enemy’s power. If Moander is not defeated before the worms have bred, our defenses will be overwhelmed … and your worlds, too, will die in a great Nuri plague to come.
“Restore the synergizer to its place in the central instrument room, or break Moander’s stronghold and Moander, those are the only solutions now. And we cannot tell you how to do either-“
The thought-flow was cut off as Cheel and the great chamber suddenly blurred and vanished. The captain’s wraith-shape drifted again in featureless grayness.
He relled vatch, faintly at first, then definitely.
I HEARD ALL; the vatch voice came roaring about him out of the grayness. A MOST BEAUTIFUL PROBLEM! … WAIT HERE A LITTLE NOW, GREAT PLAYER OF GREAT GAMES!
Its presence faded. At least there was nothing to rell any more. The captain drifted, or the grayness drifted. A beautiful problem! Something new to entertain the vatch, from the vatch’s point of view… But a very terrible and urgent problem for everyone else concerned, if the Cheel creature had told the truth.
What could he do about it? Nothing, of course, until the vatch returned to get him out of this whatever-it-was, and back into his body and the rest of it.
And there probably would be very little he actually could do then, the captain thought. Because whatever he tried, the vatch would be looking over his shoulder, and the vatch definitely would want the game played its way. Which might happen to be a very bad way again for everyone else involved. There was no counting on the vatch.
How could you act independently of an entity which not only was able to turn you inside out when it felt like it but was also continuously reading your mind? He thought of the Nuri lock Goth had taught him to construct….
If there were something like a vatch lock now-
The thought checked. In the grayness before him there’d appeared a spark of bright fire. It stayed still for an instant, then quiveringly began to move, horizontally from left to right. It left a trail behind it; a twisted, flickering line of fire as bright as itself. It was-
Awful fright shot through him. Stop that! he thought.
The spark stopped. The line of fire remained where it was, quivering and brilliant. It looked very much like one of the linear sections of the patterns that had turned into the Nuri lock.
But this was a far heavier line, not a line at all really but a bar of living fire! Klatha fire, he thought… It had stopped where it was only because he’d checked it.
He hesitated then. If this, too, was part of a potential lock pattern, then that lock must be an enormously more powerful klatha device than the one which had shut the Nuris out of his mind!
Well-
“Are you certain,” something inside him seemed to ask very earnestly, “that you want to try it? “
He was, he decided. It seemed necessary.
He did something he couldn’t have described even to himself. It released the klatha spark. The line of fire marched on. From above, a second line came trickling down on it, a third zigzagged up from below.
It was awesomely hot stuff! There was a moment when the universe seemed to stretch very tight. But the fire lines crossed, meshed, froze; there was a flash of silent light, and that was it. The pattern had completed itself and instantly disappeared. The ominous tightness went with it.
It was not, the captain decided, the kind of pattern that needed to be practiced. It had to be done right once, or it would not be done at all. And it had been done right.
He waited. After a while he relled vatch. That strengthened presently, grew fainter again, almost faded away. Then suddenly it became very strong. Old Windy was with him, close by.
And silent for the moment! Possibly puzzled, the captain thought.
Then the wind voice spoke. But not in its usual tumultuous fashion and not addressing him. The vatch seemed to be muttering to itself. He made out some of it.
Hmmm? … BUT WHAT IS THIS? … MOST UNUSUAL … IT APPEARS UNDAMAGED, BUT- SMALL PERSON, the familiar bellowing came suddenly then, CAN YOU HEAR ME?
“Yes!” the captain thought at it.
Hmmm? … COMPLETE BLOCK? … BUT NO MATTER, the vatch decided. A MINOR HANDICAP!
LET THE GAME GO ON-
A momentary sense of tumbling through icy blackness, of vast distances collapsing to nothing ahead of him.
Then the captain found himself lying face down on something cool, hard, and prickly. He opened his eyes, lifted his head. He had eyes to open and a head to lift again! He had everything back! He rolled over on rocky ground, sat up in a patch of withered brown grass, looked around in bright sunlight. A general awareness of windy autumn scenery, timbered hills about and snow-capped mountain ranges beyond them, came with the much more important discovery of the Venture standing some four hundred feet away, bow slanted towards him, for- ward lock open and ramp out. He scrambled to his feet, started towards it.
“Captain!”
He swung about, saw Goth running down the slope of the shallow depression in which he and the ship stood, shouted something and ran to meet her, relief so huge he seemed to be soaring over dips in the ground. Goth took off in a jump from eight feet away and landed on his chest, growling. The captain hugged her, kissed her, rumpled her hair, set her on her feet and gave her a happy swat.
“Patham!” gasped Goth. “Am I glad to see you! Where you been?”
“Worm World,” said the captain, grinning fatuously down at her.
“Worm-HUH? “
“That’s right. Say, that crystal thing of Olimy’s, it’s still on the ship, isn’t it?”
“How’d I know?” Goth said. “Worm World!” She looked stunned. She shook her head, added, “Ship came just now, with you.”
“Just now?”
“Minute ago. I was headed back to camp-“
“Camp? Well, skip that. Hulik and Vezzarn are with you?”
“Both. Not Olimy. I relled a vatch. Giant vatch, you don’t do things small, Captain! I turned around, and there the Venture was. Then you stood up-“
“Come along,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure it’s on board! I know what it is now. Ever hear of a synergizer in connection with Manaret?”
“ Syner … no,” said Goth, trotting beside him. “Important, huh?”
“The most!” the captain assured her. “The most! Tell you later.”
They scrambled up the ramp and through the lock. The control section lighting was on, the heating system going full blast. The bulkheads felt icy to the touch. They took a moment to check the control desk, found everything but the general emergency switch and the automatic systems in off position, left things as they were and headed for the back of the ship. They paused briefly again at the first emergency wall. The Sheem Spider hadn’t exactly burned out a hole in it; it had cut out a section big enough to let it through endwise along with its master and knocked the loose chunk of battle-steel into the next compartment, shattering fifteen feet of deck. “One tough robot!” remarked Goth, impressed. “Kind of sorry I slept through all that!”
“So were we, child,” the captain told her. “Come on…. “
The lost synergizer of Manaret was in the strongbox in the vault, in its wrappings. They picked their way back out of the shattered vault, opened Olimy’s locked stateroom next and saw him imprisoned but safe in his eternal disminded moment there, locked up the room and left the ship by the ramp.
“Let’s sit,” said Goth. She settled down cross-legged in the grass. “The others are all right. What happened to you? How’d you get to the Worm World? What’s that synergizer thing?”
She listened without interrupting, face intent, as he related his experience up to the point where he’d decided to take a fling at constructing a vatch lock. For various reasons it didn’t seem advisable to mention that at the moment. “The vatch seemed to say something about going on with the game,” he concluded. “Next thing I knew I was here.”