The first voice said distinctly, “Shall we just leave it on?”
A second voice, considerably more muffled, replied, “Yes, let’s! You never know when you need it—”
The third voice, tucked somewhere in between them, said simply, “Whew!”
Peering about in bewilderment, the captain realized suddenly that the voices had come from the speaker of the ship’s intercom connecting the control room with what had once been the Venture’s captain’s cabin.
He listened; but only a dim murmuring was audible now, and then nothing at all. He started towards the passage, returned and softly switched off the intercom. He went quietly down the passage until he came to the captain’s cabin. Its door was closed.
He listened a moment, and opened it suddenly.
There was a trio of squeals:
“Oh, don’t! You spoiled it!”
The captain stood motionless. Just one glimpse had been given him of what seemed to be a bundle of twisted black wires arranged loosely like the frame of a truncated cone on — or was it just above? — a table in the center of the cabin. Above the wires, where the tip of the cone should have been, burned a round, swirling orange fire. About it, their faces reflecting its glow, stood the three witches.
Then the fire vanished; the wires collapsed. There was only ordinary light in the room. They were looking up at him variously — Maleen with smiling regret, the Leewit in frank annoyance, Goth with no expression at all.
“What out of Great Patham’s Seventh Hell was that?” inquired the captain, his hair bristling slowly.
The Leewit looked at Goth; Goth looked at Maleen. Maleen said doubtfully, “We can just tell you its name…”
“That was the Sheewash Drive,” said Goth.
“The what drive?” asked the captain.
“Sheewash,” repeated Maleen.
“The one you have to do it with yourself,” the Leewit added helpfully.
“Shut up,” said Maleen.
There was a long pause. The captain looked down at the handful of thin, black, twelve-inch wires scattered about the table top. He touched one of them. It was dead cold.
“I see,” he said. “I guess we’re all going to have a long talk.” Another pause. “Where are we now?”
“About two light-weeks down the way you were going,” said Goth. “We only worked it thirty seconds.”
“Twenty-eight,” corrected Maleen, with the authority of her years. “The Leewit was getting tired.”
“I see,” said Captain Pausert carefully. “Well, let’s go have some breakfast.”
They ate with a silent voraciousness, dainty Maleen, the exquisite Leewit, supple Goth, all alike. The captain, long finished, watched them with amazement and — now at last — with something like awe.
“It’s the Sheewash Drive,” explained Maleen finally, catching his expression.
“Takes it out of you!” said Goth.
The Leewit grunted affirmatively and stuffed on.
“Can’t do too much of it,” said Maleen. “Or too often. It kills you sure!”
“What,” said the captain, “is the Sheewash Drive?”
They became reticent. Karres people did it, said Maleen, when they had to go somewhere fast. Everybody knew how there. “But of course,” she added, “we’re pretty young to do it right.”
“We did it pretty clumping good!” the Leewit contradicted positively. She seemed to be finished at last.
“But how?” said the captain.
Reticence thickened almost visibly. If you couldn’t do it, said Maleen, you couldn’t understand it either.
He gave it up, for the time being.
“We’ll have to figure out how to take you home next,” he said; and they agreed.
* * *
Karres, it developed, was in the Iverdahl System. He couldn’t find any planet of that designation listed in his maps of the area, but that meant nothing. The maps weren’t always accurate, and local names changed a lot.
