“What’s this disminding business?”

“Keeps things from getting to you. Anything. Sort of stasis. It’s not so good though. Your mind’s way off somewhere and can’t get back. You have to be helped out. And that’s not easy!”

Her small face was very serious.

“Hot witch in a fast ship!” the captain reflected aloud. “And he runs into something in space that scares him so badly he disminds to get away from it! Doesn’t sound good, does it? Could he have homed the ship in on Uldune on purpose, first?”

Goth shrugged. “Might have. I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s look around the ship a bit before we get at that object. Must be some reason the Daal didn’t feel like talking about it…”

They saw it in its wrappings as soon as they stepped into the tiny control cabin. The large, lumpy item, which could have been a four hundred pound boulder concealed under twisted, thick, opaque space plastic, stood next to the console. They let it stand there. The captain switched on the little ship’s viewscreens, found them set for normal space conditions, turned them down until various angles of the windy Uldune plain appeared in sharp focus. The small patch of gray haze which masked the Daal’s aircar showed on their port side.

They went through the little speedster’s other sections. All they learned for their trouble was that Olimy had kept a very neat ship.

“Might as well look at the thing now,” said the captain. “You figure, it’s something pretty important to Karres, don’t you?”

“Got to be,” Goth told him. “They don’t put Olimy on little jobs!”

“I see.” Privately, the captain admitted to considerable reluctance as he poked gingerly around at the plastic. Whatever was inside seemed as hard and solid as the bulky rock he’d envisioned when he first saw the bundle. Taking hold of one strip of the space plastic at last, he pulled it back slowly. A patch of the surface of the item came to view. It looked, he thought, like dirty ice-pitted old glacier ice. He touched it with a finger. Slick and rather warm. Some kind of crystal?

He glanced at Goth. She lifted her shoulders. “Doesn’t look like much of anything!” he remarked. He peeled the plastic back farther until some two feet of the thing were exposed. It could be a mass of worn crystal, lumpish and shapeless as it had appeared under its wrapping.

Shapeless?

Studying it, the captain began to wonder. There were a multitude of tiny ridged whorls and knobby protrusions on its surface, and the longer he gazed at them the more he felt they weren’t there by chance, but for a purpose, had been formed deliberately… that this was, in fact, some very curious sculptured pattern -

Within the cloudy gray of the crystal was a momentary flickering light, a shivering thread of fire, which seemed somehow immensely far away. He caught it again, again had a sense of enormous distances. And now came a feeling that the surface of the crystal was changing, flowing, expanding — that he was about to drop through, to be lost forever in the dim, fire-laced hugeness that was its other side. Terror surged up; for an instant he was paralyzed. Then he felt himself moving, pulling the plastic wrappings frantically back across its surface, Goth’s hands helping him. He twisted the ends together, tightly, as they had been before.

Terror lost its edge in the same moment. It was as if something which had attacked them from without were now simply fading away. But he still felt uncomfortable enough.

He looked at Goth, drew in a long breath.

“Whew!” he said, shaken. “Was that klatha stuff?”

“Not klatha!” said Goth, face pale, eyes sharp and alert. “Don’t know what it was! Never felt anything like it.”

She broke off.

Inside the captain’s head there was a tiny, purposeful click. Not quite audible. As if something had locked shut.

“Worm Worlders!” hissed Goth. They turned to the viewscreens together.

A pale-yellow stain moved in the eastern sky above the wintry plain outside, spread as it drifted swiftly up overhead, then faded in a sudden rush to the west.

“If we hadn’t put it back when we did—” the captain said.

Some minutes had passed. Worm Weather hadn’t reappeared above the plain, and now Goth reported that the klatha locks which had blocked the Nuri probes from their minds were relaxing. The yellow glow was a long distance away from them again.

“They’d have come here, all right!” Goth had her color back. He wasn’t sure he had yet. That was a very special plastic Olimy had enclosed the lumpish crystal in! A wrapping which deflected the Worm World’s sensor devices from what it covered -

But Manaret wanted the crystal. And Karres apparently wanted it as badly. Olimy had been carrying it in his ship, and for all his witch’s tricks, he’d been harried by the Nuris into disminding himself to escape them. Since then Worm Weather had hung about Uldune, turning up here and there, searching… suspecting the crystal had reached the planet, but unable to locate it… He said, “You’d think Sedmon would blow up half the countryside around here to get rid of that thing! It’s what keeps the Nuris near Uldune.”

Goth shook her head. “They’d come back sometime. Sedmon knows a lot! He doesn’t have that cap of his just because of witches. He’s scared of the Worm World. So he wants Karres to get that crystal thing.”

“Should help against Manaret, eh?”

“Looks like Manaret thinks so!” Goth pointed out reasonably.

“Yes, it does…” As important as that, then! The misty screen concealing the Daal’s aircar on the plain was still there. The men inside it had seen the Worm Weather, too, had known better than to try to take off. The car would be buttoned tight now, armor plates snapped shut over the windows, doors locked, as it crouched like a frightened bird on the empty slope. But in spite of his fears, Sedmon had come here with them today because he wanted Karres to get the crystal…

The captain said, “If we can take it as far as Emris—”

Goth nodded. “Always somebody on Emris.”

“They’d do the rest, eh?” He paused. “Well, no reason we can’t. If we just take care it stays wrapped up in that stuff.”

“Maybe we can,” Goth said slowly. She didn’t sound too sure of it.

“The Daal thinks we can make it,” the captain told her, “or he wouldn’t have showed it to us. And, as you say, he’s a pretty knowing old bird!”

A grin flickered on her mouth. “Well, that’s something else, Captain!”

“What is?”

“You look a lot like Threbus.”

“I do?”

“Only younger,” Goth said. “And I look a lot like Toll, only younger. Sedmon knows Threbus and Toll — and we got him thinking that’s who we are. He figures we’ve done an age-shift.”

“Age-shift?”

“Get younger, get older,” explained Goth. “Either way. Some witches can. Threbus and Toll could, I guess.”

“I see. Uh, well, still—”

“And Threbus and Toll,” Goth concluded in a rather small voice, “are an almighty good pair of witches!”

For an instant, the barest instant then, and for the first time since he’d known her, Goth seemed a tiny, uncertain figure standing alone in a great and terrible universe.

Well, not exactly alone, the captain thought.

“Well,” he said heartily, “I guess that means we’re going to have to be an almighty good pair of witches now, too!”

She smiled up at him. “Guess we’d maybe better be, Captain!”