He let it turn end for end twice, bob up and down a little, then leap up another instant half-mile.
There was a soft hiss of surprise from behind his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Goth whispered.
“Using some loose vatch energy I found hanging around,” the captain said negligently. “The vatch left it here to keep us pinned under that rainstorm… “ He added, “Don’t know how I’m doing it, but it works just fine! Like the rock to try anything in particular?”
“Loop the loop,” suggested Goth, staring fascinatedly into the screen.
The rock flashed up and around in a smooth, majestic three-mile loop and stood steady in midair again, steady as a rock.
“Anything else?” he offered.
“Can you do anything with it?”
“Anything I’ve tried so far. Ask for a tough one!”
Goth considered, glanced up at the little moon, high in the northern sky by now. “How about putting it on the other side of the moon?”
“All right,” said the captain. He clicked his tongue. “Wait a minute. We’d better not try that!”
“Why not?”
He glanced at her. “Because we don’t know just what the vatch stuff can do… and because the moon’s scheduled to come crashing down on the pole some time in the future here. I’d hate to have it turn out that we were the ones who accidentally knocked it down!”
“Patham!” exclaimed Goth, startled. “You’re right! Give the rock a boost straight out into space then!” And the rock simply disappeared.
“Guess it’s out there and traveling,” the captain said after a few seconds.
“Plenty of power there, all right!” He chewed his lip, frowning. “Now I’ll try something else…”
Goth didn’t inquire what. She looked on, eyes watchful, as he shifted the view back to the area immediately about the ship. A big tree stood on the rim of the rise to the north. He brought it into as sharp a focus as he could, sensed the vatch device move close to the tree as he did it. The device remained poised there, ready to act.
He gave it a silent command, waited.
But nothing happened. After half a minute he turned his attention to a small shrub not far from the tree. The patch of blackness slid promptly over to the shrub. As he began to repeat the command, the shrub vanished. Goth made a small exclamation beside him. “Time move?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the captain, not at all surprised she’d guessed his intention. He cleared his throat. “I’m very much afraid that won’t do us any good, though.”
“Why not? Patham, if-“
“Tried to move the big tree into the future first, and it didn’t go. Just not enough power for that, I guess…Let’s try that medium-sized one nearer to us…”
There wasn’t enough vatch power around to move the medium-sized tree into the future either. The black patch did what it could. As the captain formulated the mental command, the tree was ripped from the ground. As it toppled over then, they could see the upper third of its crown had disappeared.
The vatch device was of no use to them that way. Adding the speck on guard in the engine room to it would make no significant difference, apparently shifting objects through time required vastly more power than moving the same objects about in space. What level of energy it would take to carry the Venture and her crew back to their own time was difficult to imagine…
“Something might have gone wrong anyway,” the captain said, not quite able to keep disappointment out of his voice. “We don’t know enough about those things… Better quit playing around now. I want to have everything back as it was before the vatch shows up again.”
He brought the unit of vatch energy as close to the ship as the viewscreens permitted first. At that distance both of them relled it. Goth’s face became very intent for perhaps half a minute; he guessed she had all her klatha antennae out, probing for other indications. Then she shook her head. “Can’t spot it!” she said. “Know it’s there because it rells, that’s all.”
Neither was there anything in her current equipment which would let her direct the energy about as the captain had been doing. That might require the ability to recognize it clearly as a prior condition. She hadn’t heard of witches who did either, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any.
The captain described its pseudo-appearance. Goth said the vatches themselves were supposed to be put together in much the same way. “Thought of anything else you can do with it yet?”
He hadn’t. “Somewhere along the line it might come in handy to know the stuff can be manipulated,” he said. “Especially if the vatch doesn’t suspect it.” He shifted the screen, added, “Right now we’d better use it to get that cloud pack back before it drifts apart!”
The thunderstorm, left to itself, had turned gradually on an easterly course; but the vatch device checked it and drew it back towards the Venture. Some minutes later they saw the wall of rain advancing on them in the viewscreen and shortly the ship was again enveloped in a steady downpour.
It was an hour or so before dawn when the captain was aroused from an uneasy half-sleep on the couch by Goth’s buzzer signaling an alert from the control desk. He relled vatch at once, glanced over at the open door to her cabin and coughed meaningfully. The buzzer sound stopped. He laid his head back on the cushions and tried to relax. It wasn’t too easy. The vatch indications weren’t strong, but the next moments might bring some unpredictable new shift in their situation.
However, nothing happened immediately. The impressions remained faint, seemed to strengthen a trifle, then faded almost to the limits of perceptibility. Goth stayed quiet. The captain began to wonder whether he was still sensing the creature at all. Then suddenly it came close, seemed to move in a circle about them, and drew away again. There was a brief, distant rumble of the wind-voice.
It went on a while. The klatha entity hung around, moved off, returned again. The captain waited, puzzled and speculating. There was something undecided in its behavior, he thought presently. And perhaps a suggestion of querulous dissatisfaction in the occasional mutterings he picked up.
He cleared his throat cautiously. The vatch hadn’t addressed him directly since it realized something was preventing it from sensing his thoughts. It might suspect it was something he had done or assume there was a block of unknown type between them which also would keep him from understanding it. Possibly, if it hadn’t been able to work out a solution to the Worm World problem, which seemed indicated by the way it was acting, it would be useful to reopen communication with it. But he’d have to try to avoid offending the monster, which apparently was easy enough to do with vatches. Under the circumstances, that probably would be disastrous now.
H e cleared his throat again. It seemed fairly close at the moment.
“Vatch?” he said aloud.
He had an impression that the vatch paused.
“Vatch, can you hear me?”
A vague faint rumble which might have been surprise or suspicion rather than a response to the question.
Then gradually the vatch grew closer … very close, so that it seemed to loom like a mountain of formless blackness in the night above the ship, the rain washing through it. Once again the captain had the impression that from some point near the peak of that mountain two great, green, slitted eyes stared at him. And he became aware of something else … Goth’s comment about the probable makeup of vatches was true. This gigantic thing seemed to consist of swirling torrents of black energy, pouring up and down through it, curved and intermingled as they slid past and about each other in tight patterns of endlessly changing intricacy. The scraps of vatch power it had left here on Karres to hold them secure during its absence might have been simply flecks of itself.
“There is a way Moander can be destroyed,” the captain told the looming blackness.
The rumbling came again, perhaps a stirring of annoyance, perhaps a muttered question.
“You need only take us and this ship and the synergizer to the other Karres,” the captain said. “To the Karres of Moander’s time…”
The vatch was silent now, staring. He went on. The witches on the other Karres had a way to break the power of the Worm World’s ruler if they were given the synergizer. They had abilities and knowledge neither he nor anyone else on the ship at present possessed and that was what was required to beat Moander. Transferring them to that Karres would be the winning move, the way to end the long game-
The blackness stirred. Vatch laughter exploded deafeningly about the captain, rolled and pealed. The ship shook with it. Then a great wind-rush, fading swiftly. The vatch was gone…