“And here comes you-know-who!” she added.
Yes, here came Big Wind-Voice, boiling up out of nothing as Manaret’s barrier systems wavered. A gamboling invisible blackness … peals of rolling vatch-laughter-
OH, BRAVE AND CLEVER PLAYER! NOW THE MIGHTY OPPONENT LIES STRICKEN! NOW YOU AND YOUR PHANTOM FRIENDS SHALL SEE WHAT REWARD YOU HAVE EARNED!
This time there was no blurring, no tumbling through grayness. The captain simply discovered he stood in a vast dim hall, with Goth and the Leewit standing on his right. The transition had been instantaneous. Row on row of instruments, lined the walls to either side, rising from the blank black floor to a barely discernible arched ceiling. He had looked at that scene only once before and then as a picture projected briefly into his mind by Cheel, the Lyrd-Hyrier prince, but he recognized it immediately. It was the central instrument room of Manaret, the working quarters of the lost synergizer.
And it was clear that all was not well here. The instrument room was a bedlam of mechanical discord, a mounting, jarring confusion. The controls of Manaret’s operating system had been centered by Moander in his fortress; and with the fall of that fortress the pattern was disrupted. But the Lyrd-Hyrier must have been prepared long since to handle this situation whenever it should arise-
They relled the vatch; it was not far away. Otherwise, except for the raving instruments, the three of them seemed alone in this place for several seconds following their arrival. Then suddenly they had company.
A globe of cold gray brilliance appeared above and to the left of them some thirty feet away. Fear poured out from it like an almost tangible force; and only by the impact of that fear was the captain able to tell that this thing of sternly blazing glory was the lumpy crystalloid mass of the Manaret synergizer, returned to its own place and transformed in it. An instant later a great viewscreen flashed into sight halfway down the hall, showing the hugely enlarged purple scaled head of a Lyrd-Hyrier. The golden-green eyes stared at the synergizer, shifted quickly to the three human figures near it. The captain was certain it was Cheel even before the familiar thought-flow came.
“Do not move, witch friends!” Cheel’s thought told them. “This is for your protection-“
Something settled sluggishly about them, like a heavy thickening of the air, Motion seemed impossible at once. And layer on layer of heaviness still was coming down, though the air remained transparently clear. At the edge of the captain’s vision was a momentary bright flashing as the synergizer rose towards the arched ceiling of the hall. He couldn’t see where it went nor what it did, but a pale glow spread through the upper sections of the hall and the chattering din of instruments gone insane changed in seconds to a pulsing deep hum of controlled power.
Now the vatch shifted closer, turned into a looming mountainous blackness in which dark energies poured and coiled, superimposed on the hall, not blotting it out but visible in its own way along with the hall and extending up beyond it into the body of the ship-planet.
And the vatch was shaking with giant merriment…
TWELVE
“WITCH FRIEND,” Cheel’s thought told the captain, “you and your associates have served your purpose … and now you will never leave in life the medium which has enclosed you. The synergizer is restored to its place, and its controls reach wherever Moander’s did. Our Nuris are again ours, and Manaret is again a ship; a ship of conquest. It has weapons such as your universe has never seen. Their existence was concealed from Moander, and it could not have used them if it had known of them. But the synergizer can use them, and shall!
“Witch friend, we are not allowing Manaret to be restored to our native dimensional pattern. We are the Great People. Conquest is our destiny and we have adopted Moander’s basic plan of conquest against your kind. At the moment our Nuris are hard pressed by your world of Karres and have been forced back among the cold suns. But Manaret is moving out to gather the globes about it again and destroy Karres. Then-“
It wasn’t so much a thought as the briefest impulse. A lock took shape and closed in the same beat of time, and the connection to Cheel’s mind was abruptly sliced off. What Cheel still had to say could be of no importance. What he already had said was abominable, but no great surprise. There’d simply been no way to determine in advance how trustworthy the Lyrd-Hyrier would be after they were relieved of their mutinous robot director. Since that must have been considered on Karres, too, it might be that Cheel would not find Karres as easy to destroy now as he believed…
But one couldn’t count on that. And in any case, something would have to be done quickly. That there was death of some kind in this paralyzing heaviness which had closed down on him and his witches, the captain didn’t doubt. He didn’t know what it would be, but he could sense it being prepared.
And that made it a very bad moment. Because he was not at all sure that what could be done on a small scale, and experimentally, might also be done on an enormously larger scale under the pressures of emergency. Or that he was the one to do it. But there wasn’t much choice…
I KNEW IT! I FORESAW IT! the vatch-voice was bellowing delightedly. OH, WHAT A JEWEL-LIKE MIND HAS THIS PRINCE OF THE GREAT PEOPLE! WHAT A DEVASTATING MOVE HE HAS MADE! … WHAT NOW, SMALL PERSON, WHAT NOW?
Carefully, the captain shaped a mind-image of the grid of a starmap. And perhaps it was a klatha sort of starmap, and that tiny dot on it was then not simply a dot but in real truth the living world of Emris, north of the Chaladoor, goal of the Venture’s voyage. Now another dot on it which should be in empty space some two hours’ flight from Emris… Yes, there!
Then a mental view, a memory composite, of the Venture herself, combined with one of the Venture’s control cabin. That part was easy.
And a third view of Goth and the Leewit, as they stood beside him unmoving in the death-loaded, transparent heaviness still settling silently on them all from above… Easier still.
He couldn’t move his head now; but physical motion wasn’t needed to look up at the shifting, unstable mountain of vatch-blackness only he saw here, the monstrous torrents of black energy rushing, turning and coiling in endlessly changing patterns. Slitted green vatch-eyes stared at him from the blackness; vatch-laughter thundering:
YOU DID WELL, SMALL PERSON! VERY WELL! YOU’VE PLAYED YOUR PART IN THE GAME, BUT NO PLAYER LASTS FOREVER. NOW YOU’VE BEEN BEAUTIFULLY TRICKED; AND WE SHALL SEE THE END!
What manner of klatha hooks, the captain thought carefully, were needed to nail down a giant vatch? Flash of heat like the lick of a sun … The vatch voice howled in shock. The blackness churned in tornado convulsions…
Not one hook, or three or four, the captain thought. Something like fifty! Great rigid lines of force, clamped on every section of the blackness, tight and unyielding! Big Windy, for all the stupendous racket he was producing, had been nailed down.
The captain glanced at his three prepared mind pictures, looked into the seething vatch-blackness.
As much as we need for this! Put them together!
YAAAAH! MONSTER! MONSTER!
A swirling thundercloud of black energy shot from the vatch’s mass, hung spinning beside it an instant, was gone. Gone, too, in that instant were the two small witch-figures who’d stood at the captain’s right.
And now Manaret, the great evil ship-
We don’t want it here….
Black thunderbolts pouring from the vatch-mass, crashing throughout Manaret. Horrified shrieks from the vatch. The ship-planet shuddered and shook. Then it seemed to go spinning and blurring away from the captain, sliding gradually off into something for which he would never find a suitable description; except that the brief, partial glimpse he got of it was hideously confusing. But he remembered the impression he’d received from Cheel of the whirling chaos which raged between the dimension patterns, and knew the synergizer was taking the only course left open to save Manaret from being pounded apart internally by the detached sections of vatch energy released in it. And in another instant the Worm World had plunged back into the chaos out of which it had emerged centuries before and was gone.
As for the captain, he found himself floating again in the formless grayness which presumably was a special vatch medium, and which by now was beginning to seem almost a natural place for him to be from time to time. The vatch was there, not because it wanted to be there, but because he was still firmly tacked to it by the klatha hooks. It was a much reduced vatch. Over half its substance was gone; most of it dispersed in the process of demolishing Manaret, with which it had disappeared. The captain became aware of slitted green eyes peering at him fearfully from the diminished mass.