The Witches of Karres by James Schmitz

Author:James Schmitz [Schmitz, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-13T08:48:45.509834+00:00

Chapter Eight

For a while, the passengers and the one-man crew seemed to be on their best behavior. The Chaladoor, however, was not. There were several abrupt alerts, and one hard run from something which blurred the detectors and appeared in the viewscreens' visual magnification as a cloud of brown dust. It displayed extraordinary mobility for a dust cloud. An electric-blue charge crackled and snapped about the Venture's hull for minutes as they raced ahead of it; then, gradually, they'd pulled away. Another encounter—when a great pale sphere of a ship came edging in swiftly on their course—was averted by warning snarls from the nova guns. The sphere remained parallel for a time, well beyond range, then swung off and departed.

And finally there was Worm Weather in the viewscreens again . . .

It was nothing like the previous occasion. One had to be alertly observant to catch them; and hours might pass without any sign at all. Then a tiny hazy glow would be there for a minute or two, moving distantly among the stars, and disappearing in the unexplained fashion of the Nuri globes. The lounge screens remained off—the captain had let it be known that the temporary malfunction was now permanent—so neither Vezzarn nor the passengers became aware of that particular phenomenon. But for the two responsible for the Venture's safety, and for matters which might be unthinkably more important, it was a nerve-stretching thing. Sleep periods were cut short again.

The captain, therefore, wasn't too surprised when he discovered himself waking up in the control chair during a watch period once more. Nor—at the moment—was he too concerned. He'd rigged up a private alarm device guaranteed to jar him out of deepest slumber, which he left standing on the desk throughout his watches. It had to be reset manually every three minutes to keep it silent, and, even in the Chaladoor, there were few stretches where anything very serious was likely to develop without previous warning in three minutes. At the first suggestion of drowsiness he turned it on.

But then came a disturbing recollection. This time he had not turned it on. He remembered a wave of heavy sleepiness, which had seemed to roll down on him suddenly, and must have literally blanked him out in an instant. It had been preceded by a momentary sense of something changing, something subtly wrong on the ship. He hadn't had time to analyze that . . . .

For an instant, his thoughts stopped in shock. Automatically, as he grew aware there'd been a lapse in wakefulness, he'd glanced over the detector system, found it inert, shifted attention to the ship's screens.

There was something very wrong there!

The appearance of the route pattern ahead of the Venture had changed completely. Off to the left by a few degrees, hung a blue-white sundisk the size of his thumb nail, a patch of furious incandescence which certainly hadn't been in view before! How long had he—

Three hours plus, the console chronometer told him silently. A

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