"Breeding vats?" interjected the captain.

The Nuris, pliable and expendable slaves of whoever or whatever was in a position to command them, were bred at long intervals in the quantities required by their masters. Such a period had begun, and it was evident that Moander planned now to multiply the Nuri hordes at his disposal a hundredfold.

"In themselves the Worm People are nothing," said Cheel's thought. "But they are Moander's instruments. As the swarms grow, so grows the enemy's power. If Moander is not defeated before the worms have bred, our defenses will be overwhelmed...and your worlds, too, will die in a great Nuri plague to come.

"Restore the synergizer to its place in the central instrument room, or break Moander's stronghold and Moander, those are the only solutions now. And we cannot tell you how to do either -- "

The thought-flow was cut off as Cheel and the great chamber suddenly blurred and vanished. The captain's wraith-shape drifted again in featureless grayness.

He relled vatch, faintly at first, then definitely.

I HEARD ALL; the vatch voice came roaring about him out of the grayness. A MOST BEAUTIFUL PROBLEM!...WAIT HERE A LITTLE NOW, GREAT PLAYER OF GREAT GAMES!.

Its presence faded. At least there was nothing to rell any more. The captain drifted, or the grayness drifted.

A beautiful problem! Something new to entertain the vatch, from the vatch's point of view...But a very terrible and urgent problem for everyone else concerned, if the Cheel creature had told the truth.

What could he do about it? Nothing, of course, until the vatch returned to get him out of this whatever-it-was, and back into his body and the rest of it.

And there probably would be very little he actually could do then, the captain thought. Because whatever he tried, the vatch would be looking over his shoulder, and the vatch definitely would want the game played its way. Which might happen to be a very bad way again for everyone else involved. There was no counting on the vatch.

How could you act independently of an entity which not only was able to turn you inside out when it felt like it but was also continuously reading your mind? He thought of the Nuri lock Goth had taught him to construct...

If there were something like a vatch lock now -- The thought checked. In the grayness before him there'd appeared a spark of bright fire. It stayed still for an instant, then quiveringly began to move, horizontally from left to right. It left a trail behind it; a twisted, flickering line of fire as bright as itself. It was -- Awful fright shot through him. Stop that! he thought.

The spark stopped. The line of fire remained where it was, quivering and brilliant. It looked very much like one of the linear sections of the patterns that had turned into the Nuri lock.

But this was a far heavier line, not a line at all really but a bar of living fire!

Klatha fire, he thought...It had stopped where it was only because he'd checked it.

He hesitated then. If this, too, was part of a potential lock pattern, then that lock must be an enormously more powerful klatha device than the one which had shut the Nuris out of his mind!

Well -- "Are you certain," something inside him seemed to ask very earnestly, "that you want to try it?"

He was, he decided. It seemed necessary.

He did something he couldn't have described even to himself. It released the klatha spark. The line of fire marched on. From above, a second line came trickling down on it, a third zigzagged up from below.

It was awesomely hot stuff! There was a moment when the universe seemed to stretch very tight. But the fire lines crossed, meshed, froze; there was a flash of silent light, and that was it. The pattern had completed itself and instantly disappeared. The ominous tightness went with it.

It was not, the captain decided, the kind of pattern that needed to be practiced. It had to be done right once, or it would not be done at all. And it had been done right.

He waited. After a while he relled vatch. That strengthened presently, grew fainter again, almost faded away. Then suddenly it became very strong. Old Windy was with him, close by.

And silent for the moment! Possibly puzzled, the captain thought.

Then the wind voice spoke. But not in its usual tumultuous fashion and not addressing him. The vatch seemed to be muttering to itself. He made out some of it.

Hmmm?...BUT WHAT IS THIS?...MOST UNUSUAL...IT APPEARS UNDAMAGED, BUT --.

SMALL PERSON, the familiar bellowing came suddenly then, CAN YOU HEAR ME?.

"Yes!" the captain thought at it.

Hmmm?...COMPLETE BLOCK?...BUT NO MATTER, the vatch decided. A MINOR HANDICAP! LET THE GAME GO ON --.

A momentary sense of tumbling through icy blackness, of vast distances collapsing to nothing ahead of him. Then the captain found himself lying face down on something cool, hard, and prickly. He opened his eyes, lifted his head.

He had eyes to open and a head to lift again! He had everything back! He rolled over on rocky ground, sat up in a patch of withered brown grass, looked around in bright sunlight. A general awareness of windy autumn scenery, timbered hills about and snow-capped mountain ranges beyond them, came with the much more important discovery of the Venture standing some four hundred feet away, bow slanted towards him, forward lock open and ramp out. He scrambled to his feet, started towards it.

"Captain!"

He swung about, saw Goth running down the slope of the shallow depression in which he and the ship stood, shouted something and ran to meet her, relief so huge he seemed to be soaring over dips in the ground. Goth took off in a jump from eight feet away and landed on his chest, growling. The captain hugged her, kissed her, rumpled her hair, set her on her feet and gave her a happy swat.

"Patham!" gasped Goth. "Am I glad to see you! Where you been?"

"Worm World," said the captain, grinning fatuously down at her.

"Worm-HUH?"

"That's right. Say, that crystal thing of Olimy's, it's still on the ship, isn't it?"

"How'd I know?" Goth said. "Worm World!" She looked stunned. She shook her head, added, "Ship came just now, with you."

"Just now?"

"Minute ago. I was headed back to camp -- "

"Camp? Well, skip that. Hulik and Vezzarn are with you?"

"Both. Not Olimy. I relled a vatch. Giant vatch, you don't do things small, Captain! I turned around, and there the Venture was. Then you stood up -- "

"Come along," he said. "We've got to make sure it's on board! I know what it is now. Ever hear of a synergizer in connection with Manaret?"

" Syner...no," said Goth, trotting beside him. "Important, huh?"

"The most!" the captain assured her. "The most! Tell you later."

They scrambled up the ramp and through the lock. The control section lighting was on, the heating system going full blast. The bulkheads felt icy to the touch. They took a moment to check the control desk, found everything but the general emergency switch and the automatic systems in off position, left things as they were and headed for the back of the ship. They paused briefly again at the first emergency wall. The Sheem Spider hadn't exactly burned out a hole in it; it had cut out a section big enough to let it through endwise along with its master and knocked the loose chunk of battle-steel into the next compartment, shattering fifteen feet of deck.

"One tough robot!" remarked Goth, impressed. "Kind of sorry I slept through all that!"

"So were we, child," the captain told her. "Come on..."

The lost synergizer of Manaret was in the strongbox in the vault, in its wrappings. They picked their way back out of the shattered vault, opened Olimy's locked stateroom next and saw him imprisoned but safe in his eternal disminded moment there, locked up the room and left the ship by the ramp.

"Let's sit," said Goth. She settled down crosslegged in the grass. "The others are all right. What happened to you? How'd you get to the Worm World?

What's that synergizer thing?"

She listened without interrupting, face intent, as he related his experience up to the point where he'd decided to take a fling at constructing a vatch lock. For various reasons it didn't seem advisable to mention that at the moment. "The vatch seemed to say something about going on with the game," he concluded.

"Next thing I knew I was here."

Goth sighed. "That vatch!" she muttered. She rubbed her nose tip. "Looks sort of bad, doesn't it?"

"Not too good at present," the captain admitted. "But we have the synergizer safe here. That's something...We don't know what the vatch intends to do next, of course."

"No."

"But if it leaves us alone for a while...any idea of where we are here?"

"Know exactly where we are," Goth told him. "Can't see that'll help much, though!" She patted the ground beside her. "This is Karres...

"What!" He came to his feet. "But then -- "

"No," Goth said. "It's not that simple. This isn't Karres-now. It's Karres- then."

"Huh?"

She indicated the big yellow sun disk above the mountains. "Double star,"

she said. "Squint your eyes, you can see just a little bit of white sticking out behind it on the left. That's its twin. This is the Talsoe System where Karres was when witches found it, its own system. There's nobody here yet but us."

"How do you...You think that vatch sent us back in time?"

"Long way back in time!" Goth nodded.

"How can you be sure? Now you've mentioned it, this could be Karres by its looks! But a lot of worlds -- "

"Uh-uh!" Her forefinger pointed at a shining white mountain peak beyond the rise. "I ought to know that mountain, Captain! That's where I was born...or where I'm going to be born, thirty miles from here. Town's going to be in the valley north of it." Goth's hand swept about. "I know all this country, it's Karres!"

"All right. But they could have moved it to the Talsoe System the last time, couldn't they? Let's get in the ship and..."

Goth shook her head. "Not a bit of klatha around except ours and the vatch. There's no witches here yet, believe me! And won't be for another three hundred thousand years anyway -- "

"Three hundred thou...!" the captain half shouted. He checked himself.

"How do you know that?"

"Got a little moon here. You'll see it tonight. Karres had one early, but then it smacked down around the north pole and messed things up pretty bad for a while. They figured that must have been a bit more than three hundred thousand years back...so we're back before that! Besides, there's the animals. A lot of them aren't so much different from what they're going to be. But they're different. You see?"

"Yeah, I guess I do!" the captain admitted. He cleared his throat. "It startled me for a moment."

"Pretty odd, isn't it?" Goth agreed. "No Empire at all yet, no Uldune!

Patham, no starships even! Everybody that's there is still back on old Yarthe!"

Her head tilted up quickly. "Umm!" she murmured, eyes narrowing a little.

The captain had caught it, too. Vatch sign! Old Windy was somewhere around. Not too close, but definitely present...They remained quiet for a minute or two. The impression seemed to grow no stronger in that time. Suddenly it was gone again.

"Giant-vatch, all right!" Goth remarked a few seconds later. "Brother! You picked yourself a big one, Captain!"

"They're not all the same then, eh?"

"Come in all sizes. Bigger they are, the more they can do. That's mostly make trouble, of course! This one's a whale of a vatch!" She frowned. "I don't know..."

"They can read our minds, human minds, can't they?" asked the captain.

"Lot of them can."

"Can they do it from farther away than we can rell them?"

"Not supposed to be able to do it," said Goth. "But I don't know."

"Hmm...is there such a thing as a klatha lock that will keep vatches from poking around in your thoughts?"

"Uh-huh. Takes awfully heavy stuff, though! I don't know how to do that one. There's only three, four people I know that use a vatch lock."

"Oh?" said the captain, somewhat startled. Goth looked up at him questioningly, then with sudden speculation "Ummm," she said slowly. She considered a moment again, remarked; "Now there's something I do that works about as good as a lock against vatches. Can't tell you how to do that either, though."

"Why not?" he asked.

Goth shrugged. "Don't know how I do it. Born with it, I guess. Takes just a little low-intensity klatha. Dab of it on anything particular I don't want anybody to know I'm thinking about, and that's it! Somebody sneaks a look into my mind then, he just can't see it."

"You sure?" the captain asked thoughtfully.

"Ought to be! Some real high-powered mindreaders tried it. Wanted to study out how it was done so others could use it. They never did figure that out but it works just fine! They couldn't even tell there'd been anything blurred."

"That will be a help now," the captain said.

"Uh-huh! Vatch isn't going to find out anything from me he shouldn't know about." She cocked her head, looking up at him. "Did you make yourself a vatch lock, Captain?"

"I think so." He gave her a general description of the process. Goth listened; eyes first round with apprehension, then shining. "Even when I thought directly at it," he concluded, "it didn't seem able to read me."

"That is a vatch lock then...A vatch lock!" Goth repeated softly. "You're going to be a hot witch, Captain, you wait!"

"Think so?" He felt pleased but there was too much to worry about at present for the feeling to linger. "Well, let's assume that when we can't rell the vatch, we can talk freely," he said. "And that when we do rell it, we'd better keep shut up about anything important but needn't worry about what we're thinking...But now, what can we do? We've got the Venture but there's no sense in flying around space three hundred thousand years from our time. There's nowhere to go. Is there any possible klatha way you know of we might use to get back?"

Goth shook her head. Some witches had done some experimentation with moving back in time, but she hadn't heard of anyone going back farther than their own life span. The vatch must have used klatha in bringing them here; but then it was a giant vatch, with immense powers...

It looked as if they'd have to depend on the vatch to get them back, too. It was not a reassuring conclusion. The klatha entity was playing a game and regarded them at present as being among its pieces. It had heard that there seemed to be no way to overcome Moander in his stronghold on Manaret and was out to prove it could be done. At best it would consider them expendable pieces.

It might also simply decide it had no further use for them and leave them where they were. But as long as the synergizer remained in their custody, they could assume, they were still included in the vatch's plans.

It wasn't a good situation. But at the moment there seemed to be nothing they could do to change it.