“Uh-huh!” Goth’s teeth briefly indented her lower lip. Her eyes remained reflectively on his face.

“But I don’t have any explanation for the dream,” the captain said. “Unless it was the kind of thing Vezzarn was talking about.”

“Wasn’t exactly a dream, captain. Nuris have a sort of klatha. You were seeing them that way. Likely, they knew it.”

“What makes you think that?” he asked, startled.

“Nuris hunt witches,” Goth explained.

“Hunt them? Why?”

She shrugged. “They’ve figured out too much about the Manaret business on Karres… Other reasons, too!”

Now he became alarmed. “But then you’re in danger while we’re on Uldune!”

“I’m not,” Goth said. “You were in danger. You’d be again if we got Worm Weather anywhere near Zergandol.”

“But…”

“You got klatha. Nuris’d figure you for a witch. We’ll fix that now!”

She moved out before him, facing him, lifted a finger, held it up in front of his eyes, a few feet away. Her face grew dead serious, intent. “Watch the way it moves!”

He followed the fingertip as it drew a fleeting, wavy line through the air. Goth’s hand stopped, closed quickly to a fist as if cutting off the line behind it. “You do it now,” she said. “In your head.”

“Draw the same kind of line, you mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

She waited while the captain went through some difficult mental maneuverings.

“Got it!” he announced at last, with satisfaction.

Goth’s finger came up again. “Now this one…”

Three further linear patterns were traced in the air for him, each quite different from the others. Practicing them mentally, the captain felt himself grow warm, perspiry, vaguely wondered why. When he was able to say he’d mastered the fourth one, Goth nodded.

“Now you do them together, Captain… one after the other, the way I showed you quick as you can!”

“Together, eh?” He loosened his collar. He wasn’t just perspiring now; he was dripping wet. A distinct feeling of internal heat building up… some witch trick she was showing him. He might have felt more skeptical about it if it weren’t for the heat. “This helps against Nuris?”

“Uh-huh. A lock.” Goth didn’t smile; she was disregarding his appearance, and her small brown face was still very intent. “Hurry up! You mustn’t forget any of it.”

He grunted, closed his eyes, concentrated.

Pattern One — easy! Pattern Two… Pattern Three -

His mind wavered an instant, groping. Internal heat suddenly surged up. Startled, he remembered:

Four!

A blurred pinwheel of blue brilliance appeared, spun momentarily inside his skull, collapsed to a diamond-bright point, was gone. As it went, there was a snapping sensation, also inside his skull — an almost audible snap. Then everything was relaxing, went quiet. The heat magically ebbed away while he drew a breath. He opened his eyes, somewhat shaken.

Goth was grinning. “Knew you could do it, Captain!”

“What did I do?” he asked.

“Built a good lock! You’ll have to practice a little still. That’ll be easy. The Nuris come around then, you switch the lock on. They won’t know you’re there!”

“Well, that’s fine!” said the captain weakly. He looked about for a cloth, mopped at his face. He’d have to change his clothes, he decided. “Where’d that heat come from?”

“Klatha heat. It’s a hot pattern, all right — that’s why it’s so good… Don’t show those moves to somebody who can’t do them right. Not unless you don’t mind about them.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because they’ll burn right up — flames and smoke — if they try to do them and don’t stop fast enough,” Goth said. “Never seen someone do it, but it’s happened.”

She might have thought he was nervous if he hadn’t repeated the experiment right away to get in the practice she felt he needed. So he did. It was surprisingly easy then. On the first run through, the line patterns seemed to flicker into existence almost as his thoughts turned to one after another of them. On the second, he could barely keep up with the overall pattern as it took shape and was blanked out again by the spinning blue blur. On the third, there was only an instant flash of brilliance and that odd semiaudible snap near the top of his skull. At that point he realized there had been no recurrence of the uncomfortable heat sensations.

“You got it now!” his mentor decided when he reported. “Won’t matter if you’re asleep either. The locks know their business.”

“Incidentally, how did you know I could do it?” the captain inquired.

“You picked up the Nuris,” Goth said. “That’s good, so early…” Over dinner she filled out his picture of the Worm World and its unpleasant inhabitants. Manaret and the witches had been at odds for a considerable time — around a hundred and fifty years, Karres time, Goth said; though she wasn’t sure of the exact period. The baleful effect of the Worm World on human civilizations was more widespread and more subtle than anyone like Vezzarn could guess, and not limited to the Nuri raids. There were powerful and malignant minds there which could act across vast reaches of space and created much mischief in human affairs.

Telepathic adepts among the people of Karres set out to trace these troubles to their source and presently discovered facts about Manaret no one had suspected. It was not a world at all, they found, but a ship of unheard-of size that had come out of an alien universe which had no normal connections to the universe known to humanity. Several centuries ago, some vast cataclysm had temporarily disabled the titanic ship and hurled it and its crew into this galaxy; and the disaster was followed by a mutiny led by Moander, the entity who “spoke in a thousand voices.” Moander, the witches learned, was a monstrous robot-brain which had taken almost complete control of the great ship, forcing the race which had built Manaret and been its masters to retreat to a heavily defended interior section where Moander’s adherents could not reach them.

Karres telepaths contacted these people, who called themselves the Lyrd-Hyrier, gaining information from them but no promise of help against Moander. Moander was holding the ship in this universe with the apparent purpose of gaining control of human civilizations here and establishing itself as ultimate ruler. The Nuris, whose disagreeable physical appearance gained Manaret the name of Worm World, were a servant race which in the mutiny had switched allegiance from the Lyrd-Hyrier to Moander.

“So then,” Goth said, “Moander found out Karres was spying on him. That’s when the Nuris started hunting witches…”

The discovery also slowed down Moander’s plans of conquest. Karres, the megalomaniac monster evidently decided, must be found and destroyed before it could act freely. The witches at that time had no real defense against the Nuris’ methods of attack and, some eighty years ago, had been obliged to shift their world beyond the western side of the Empire to avoid them. The Nuris were not only a mental menace. They had physical weapons of alien type at their disposal which could annihilate the life of a planet in very short order. There had been a great deal to learn and work out before the witches could consider confronting them openly.

“They’ve been coming along with that pretty well, I think,” Goth said. “But it’s about time, too. Manaret’s been making a lot of trouble and it’s getting worse.”

“In what way?” The captain found himself much intrigued by all this.

The Worm World more recently had developed the tactics of turning selected individual human beings into its brain-washed tools. It was suspected the current Emperor and other persons high in his council were under the immediate influence of Moander’s telepathic minions. “One of the reasons we don’t get along very well with the Imperials,” Goth explained, “is the Emperor’s got orders out to find a way to knock out Karres for good. They haven’t found one yet, though.”