“They can move the whole ship over the Route?”
“Sure. Don’t worry about that! You could move a sun over the Route except it’d nova before it got anywhere. If they get to us quick enough, that’ll be it.”
“The vatch..? “
“Looks to me,” Goth said, “like the vatch got the idea backwards. You said get the synergizer to the other Karres, to the witches that can use it. So instead it brought a Karres witch back to the synergizer.”
“The Leewit?” said the captain, astonished.
“Can’t figure that either yet!” Goth admitted. “Well, it’s a vatch-“
“What was the humming noise?”
“That’s the Route. Vatch punched it straight into the ship so it could drop the Leewit in with us.”
He grunted. “How did Toll do, uh, whatever she did?”
Goth said no one had realized a giant vatch was hanging around Karres-now until it scooped up the Leewit.
With all the klatha forces boiling on and about the planet at the moment, the area was swarming with lesser vatches, attracted to the commotion; among them the giant remained unnoticed. But when the Leewit disappeared, Toll spotted it and instantly went after it. She’d got a hook into the vatch and a line on her daughter and was rapidly overhauling the vatch when it managed to jerk free.
“I see,” nodded the captain. Another time might be better to inquire what esoteric processes were involved in getting a hook into a giant vatch and a line through time on one’s daughter.
“Toll didn’t have enough hold on the Leewit then to do much good right away,” Goth continued. “There was just time for the touch-talk before she got sucked back to Karres-now.”
“I suppose touch-talk’s a kind of thought swapping?”
“Sort of, but-“
The small blanket-wrapped form between them uttered a yowl that put the captain’s hair on end. The next moment he was jerked forward almost on his face as the Leewit doubled up sharply, and he nearly lost his grip on her ankles. Then he found himself on his side on the floor, hanging on to something which twisted, wrenched, kicked, and rotated with incredible rapidity and vigor. The vocal din bursting from the blankets was no less incredible. Goth, lying across the Leewit with her arms locked around her, was being dragged about on the deck.
Then the bundle suddenly went limp. There was still a good deal of noise coming from it; but those were the Leewit’s normal shrieks of wrath, much muffled now.
“Woo-ooof” gasped Goth, relaxing her hold somewhat… “Rough one! She’s all right now though, you can let go-“
“Hope she hasn’t hurt herself!” The captain was a little out of breath too, more with surprise and apprehension than because of the effort he’d put out.
Goth grinned. “Take more than that bit of bouncing around to hurt her, Captain!” She gave the blankets a big-sisterly hug, put her mouth down close to them, yelled “Quit your screeching, it’s me! I’m letting you out-“
The captain found Vezzarn and Hulik in the passenger lounge, spoke soothingly if vaguely of new developments which might get them all out of trouble shortly, and returned to the control section hoping he’d left the two with the impression that the Leewit’s mode of arrival and the subsequent uproar were events normal enough in his area of experience and nothing for them to worry about. They’d agreed very readily to remain in the lounge area for the time being.
Goth and Leewit were swapping recent experiences at a rapid-fire rate when he came back into the room. They still sat on the floor, surrounded by scattered blankets. “They got a klatha pool there now like you never saw before!” the Leewit was exclaiming. “They-“ She caught sight of the captain and abruptly checked herself.
“Don’t have to watch it with him any more!” Goth assured her. “Captain knows all about that stuff now. “
“Huh!” When they’d loosened the blankets and the Leewit came reeling out, red-faced and scowling, and discovered the captain there, her immediate inclination apparently had been to blame him for her experience, though she hadn’t been aware of Toll’s touch-talk conversation with Goth, in which Toll simply had used her as a handy medium, switching her on for the purpose about like switching on a ship intercom, the captain had gathered. The Leewit, in fact, remembered nothing clearly since the moment she’d relled a giant vatch and simultaneously felt the vast entity sweeping her away from Karres. She recalled, shudderingly, that she’d been over the Egger Route. She knew it had been a horrifying trip. But she could only guess uneasily now at what had made it so horrifying. That blurring of details was a frequent experience of those who came over the Route and one of its most disturbing features. Since it was the captain who’d directed the vatch’s attention to Karres in the first place, the Leewit wasn’t so far off, of course, in feeling he was responsible for her kidnapping. However, nobody mentioned that to her.
The look she gave him as he squatted down on his heels beside the sisters might have been short of full approval, but she remarked only, “Learned mighty quick if you know all about it!”
“Not all about it, midget,” the captain said soothingly. “But it looks like I’ve started to learn. One thing I can’t figure at the moment is that vatch…”
“What about the vatch?” asked Goth.
“Well, I had the impression that after it dropped the Leewit here, it took off at top speed, as if it were scared Toll might catch up with it.”
The Leewit gave him a surprised stare.
“It was scared Toll would catch up with it!” she said.
“But it’s a giant vatch!” said the captain.
The Leewit appeared puzzled. Goth rubbed the tip of her nose and remarked, “Captain, if I were a giant vatch and Toll got mad at me, I’d be going somewhere fast, too!”
“Sure would!” the Leewit agreed. “No telling what’d happen! She’d short out its innards, likely!”
“Pull it inside out by chunks!” added Goth.
“Oh?” said the captain startled. “I didn’t realize that, uh, sort of thing could be done.”
“Well, not by many,” Goth acknowledged. “Toll sure can do it!”
“Got a fast way with vatches when her temper’s up!” the Leewit nodded.
“Hmm,” said the captain. He reflected. “Then maybe we’re rid of the thing, eh?”
Goth looked doubtful. “Wouldn’t say that, Captain. They’re mighty stubborn. Likely it’ll come, sneaking back pretty soon to see if Toll’s still around. Could be too nervous about it to do much for a while though…” She regarded the Leewit’s snarled blond mop critically. “Let’s go get your hair combed out,” she said. “You’re kind of a mess!”
They went into Goth’s cabin. The captain wandered back towards the screens, settled into the control chair, rubbed his jaw, relled experimentally. Nothing in range, but they probably hadn’t lost the vatch yet. He’d been wondering about the urgent haste with which it had seemed to pass here when pursued by only one angry witch mother. Klatha hooks … shorting out vatch innards… He shook his head. Well, Toll was a redoubtable sorceress even among her peers, from all he’d heard.
Klatha hooks-
The captain knuckled his jaw some more. No way of knowing when the Egger Route would come droning awesomely up again, this time bringing a troop of witches to transport the Manaret synergizer, the Venture and themselves to the embattled Karres of more than three hundred thousand years in the future. It might be minutes, hours, or days, apparently. There was no way of knowing either when the vatch would start to get over being nervous and discover there was no hot-tempered witch mother around at present.
The captain grunted, shifted attention mentally down to the Venture’s engine room, to the thrust generators. Almost immediately an awareness came of the tiny, swirling speck of blackness there which couldn’t be seen with physical eyes … the minute scrap of vatch stuff that carried enough energy in itself to hold the ship’s drives paralyzed.
What immaterial manner of thing, he thought, would be a klatha hook shaped to snag that immaterial fragment of vatch?
Brief wash of heat… The speck jumped, stood still again, its insides whirling agitatedly. The captain pulled in some fashion, felt something tighten between them like the finest of threads, grow taut.
So that was a klatha hook! … He let out his breath, drew on the hook, brought the speck in steadily with it until it was swirling above the control desk a few feet away from him.
Stay there, he thought, and released the hook. The speck stayed where it was. As close to it as this, he could rell its vatch essence, though faintly. He flicked another klatha snag to it, drew it closer, released it again…
Hooks, it seemed, he could do. He might also find he was able to short out the speck’s innards if he made the attempt. But there was no immediate point in that. The speck was a tool with powers and limitations, a working device, a miniature vatch machine. He’d already discovered some of the ways such a machine could be made to operate. What else could it do that might be useful to know … perhaps might become very necessary to know about?