Goth nodded. “Picked him out last year. Nice boy from the town. They get married as soon as she’s marriageable. She just told you to come back because she was upset about you. Maleen had a premonition you were headed for awful trouble!”

“She was quite right, little chum,” the captain said nastily.

“What were you thinking about?” Goth inquired.

“I was thinking,” said the captain, “that as soon as we’re sure you’re going to be all right, I’m taking you straight back to Karres.”

“I’ll be all right now,” Goth said. “Except, likely, for a stomach-ache. But you can’t take me back to Karres.”

“Who will stop me, may I ask?” the captain asked.

“Karres is gone,” Goth said.

“Gone?” the captain repeated blankly, with a sensation of not quite definable horror bubbling up in him.

“Not blown up or anything,” Goth reassured him. “They just moved it. The Imperials got their hair up about us again. This time they were sending a fleet with the big bombs and stuff, so everybody was called home. And right after you’d left… we’d left, I mean… they moved it.”

“Where?”

“Great Patham!” Goth shrugged. “How’d I know? There’s lots of places!”

There probably were, the captain agreed silently. A scene came suddenly before his eyes — that lime-white, arenalike bowl in the valley, with the steep tiers of seats around it, just before they’d reached the town of Karres. The “Theater where—”

But now there was unnatural night-darkness all over and about that world; and the eight-thousand-some witches of Karres sat in circles around the Theater, their heads turned towards one point in the center where orange fire washed hugely about the peak of a cone of curiously twisted girders.

And a world went racing off at the speeds of the Sheewash Drive! There’d be lots of places, all right. What peculiar people!

“Aren’t they going to be worried about you?” he asked.

“Not very much. We don’t get hurt often.”

Once could be too often. But anyway, she was here for now… The captain stretched his legs out under the table, inquired, “Was it the Sheewash Drive they used to move Karres with?”

Goth wrinkled her nose doubtfully. “Sort of like it.” She added, “I can’t tell you much about those things till you’ve started to be one yourself.”

“Started to be what myself?” he asked.

“A witch like us. We got our rules. And that likely won’t be for a while. Couple of years maybe, Karres time.”

“Couple of years, eh?” the captain repeated thoughtfully. “You were planning on staying around that long?”

Goth frowned at the jar of Wintenberry jelly, pulled it towards her and inspected it carefully. “Longer, really,” she acknowledged. “Be a bit before I’m marriageable age!”

The captain blinked at her. “Well, yes, it would be…”

“So I got it all fixed,” Goth told the jelly, “as soon as they started saying they ought to pick out a wife for you on Karres. I said it was me, right away; and everyone else said finally that was all right then — even Maleen, because she had this boy friend.”

“You mean,” said the captain, startled, “your parents knew you were stowing away on the Venture?”

“Uh-huh.” Goth pushed the jelly back where it had been standing and glanced up at him again. “It was my father who told us you’d be breaking up with the people on Nikkeldepain pretty soon. He said it was in the blood.”

“What was in the blood?” the captain asked patiently.

“That you’d break up with them… That’s Threbus, my father. You met him a couple of times in the town. Big man with a blond beard. Maleen and the Leewit take after him. He looks a lot like you.”

“You wouldn’t mean my great-uncle Threbus?” the captain inquired. He was in a state of strange calm by now.

“That’s right,” said Goth.

“It’s a small galaxy,” the captain said philosophically. “So that’s where Threbus wound up! I’d like to meet him again some day.”

“You’re going to,” said Goth. “But probably not very soon.” She hesitated, added, “Guess there’s something big going on. That’s why they moved Karres. So we likely won’t run into any of them again till it’s over.”

“Something big in what way?” asked the captain.

Goth shrugged. “Politics. Secret stuff… I was going along with you, so they didn’t tell me.”

“Can’t spill what you don’t know, eh?”

“Uh-huh.”

Interstellar politics involving Karres and the Empire? He pondered it a few seconds, then gave up. He couldn’t imagine what it might be and there was no sense worrying about it.

“Well,” he sighed, “seeing we’ve turned out to be distant relatives, I suppose it is all right if I adopt you meanwhile.”

“Sure,” said Goth. She studied his face. “You still want to pay the money you owe back to those people?”

He nodded. “A debt’s a debt.”

“Well,” Goth informed him, “I’ve got some ideas.”

“None of those witch tricks now!” the captain said warningly. “We’ll earn our money the fair way.”

Goth blinked not-so-innocent brown eyes at him. “This’ll be fair! But we’ll get rich.” She shook her head, yawned slowly. “Tired,” she announced, standing up.

“Better hit the bunk a while now.”

“Good idea,” the captain agreed. “We can talk again later.”

At the passage door Goth paused, looking back at him.

“About all I could tell you about us right now,” she said, “you can read in those Regulations, like the one man said. The one you kicked off the ship. There’s a lot about Karres in there. Lots of lies, too, though!”

“And when did you find out about the intercom between here and the captain’s cabin?” the captain inquired.

Goth grinned. “A while back. The others never noticed.”

“All right,” the captain said. “Good night, witch — if you get a stomach-ache, yell and I’ll bring the medicine.”

“Good night,” Goth yawned. “I might, I think.”

“And wash behind your ears!” the captain added, trying to remember the bedtime instructions he’d overheard Maleen giving the junior witches.

“All right,” said Goth sleepily. The passage door closed behind her — but half a minute later it was briskly opened again. The captain looked up startled from the voluminous stack of General Instructions and Space Regulations of the Republic of Nikkeldepain he’d just discovered in the back of one of the drawers of the control desk. Goth stood in the doorway, scowling and wide-awake.

“And you wash behind yours!” she said.

“Huh?” said the captain. He reflected a moment. “All right,” he said. “We both will, then.”

“Right,” said Goth, satisfied.

The door closed once more.

The captain began to run his finger down the lengthy index of K’s — could it be under W?

The key word was PROHIBITED…

Under that heading the Space Regulations had in fact devoted a full page of rather fine print to the Prohibited Planet of Karres. Most of it, however, was conjecture. Nikkeldepain seemed unable to make up its mind whether the witches had developed an alarmingly high level of secret technology or whether there was something downright supernatural about them. But it made it very clear it did not want ordinary citizens to have anything to do with Karres. There was grave danger of spiritual contamination. Hence such contacts could not be regarded as being in the best interests of the Republic and were strictly forbidden.

Various authorities in the Empire held similar opinions. The Regulations included a number of quotes from such sources:

“…their women gifted with an evil allure… Hiding under the cloak of the so-called klatha magic—”

Klatha? The word seemed familiar. Frowning, the captain dug up a number of memory scraps. Klatha was a metaphysical concept — a cosmic energy, something not quite of this universe. Some people supposedly could tune in on it, use it for various purposes.