The exec was decidedly not amused.
"All right, Murphy. Straight answers now. Are you all lunatics or failed experiments or just what the fucking hell are they doing in there?"
Murphy had been given a full bath, shave, and clean generic clothing and looked just as much an unmade bed as he had before in spite of that. Still, he'd been sound asleep in his "quarters" when he'd suddenly been rudely awakened by two big, burly marines and almost hauled up seventeen levels to the command and control deck.
Now he wiped sleep blearily from his eyes, and, partly resting on the side of a desk, he strained to focus on the viewing screen in front of them. It was the girls, all right, but he didn't remember there being nine of 'em. . . .
Now the figures began to come together as his eyes more or less focused, and he gaped at what the duty personnel had been watching for who knew how long.
The three Tara Hibernus girls were sitting on the deck in the middle of one of the two cabins assigned to them, stark naked except for the necklaces each of them wore around their necks, designs stained onto their bodies. They were holding hands and chanting, eyes shut, faces partially raised up as if in some kind of trance. Around them they'd drawn a design using chalk or something which they'd completed after sitting in the middle so that the drawing extended all around them.
"Kinda gettin' more'n your money's worth of what normal wimminfolks look like, ain't you?" he commented dryly.
Commander Sittithong was not amused. "If there is one single thing about those three that can be defined as 'normal' by anyone, on any world, anywhere, I have never heard of it," she responded. "Just what in heaven's name are they doing?"
Murphy shrugged. "Chanting, seems like," he responded.
The exec reached out and forcefully pulled the old captain around. "I've about had it with you, Captain Murphy! And you can stow that old folksy ethnic act, too. That may get you a few more drinks in spaceport dives, but it means nothing here! Now, just what is this all about?"
Murphy squinted at the screen. "Be damned," he muttered, more to himself than to the naval officer. "First time I ever seen 'em painted up like that. They all got hold of them damned necklaces, though. First time I seen 'em clear. Emerald, ruby, and turquoise. Strange lookin' things. I don't like this. Can you turn up the volume a bit and isolate the chant? What're they sayin'?"
The exec turned and gave a nod to one of the technicians, who pressed a few controls. The chanting grew much clearer, if no more explicable.
"Power of the universe, come to us!
Father of darkness, heed our prayers.
Send your messengers to heed the call of your brides!
"Gather, darkness! Come from where nothing escapes,
Hear our prayers and extend to us your power!
"Give power from the darkness where no light springs!"
It went on like that, some of it in some sort of tongue-twisting language that was unfamiliar to any of them but which fit the chanting, mostly the same words clearly said over and over again, with occasional added lines of supplication to bizarre names or creatures.
"Come send the goat that eats its young.
"Come from the power where no light springs. . . ."
"Those are prayers, Commander," Murphy said at last, indicating with a gesture that he didn't have to hear more. "I'm not really well schooled on it, but apparently they're praying to their lord and master and his minions to spring from the black holes of the universe and give them the ultimate power. To do what, I don't even want to think, but I kind of hope that it won't get beyond that silliness."
"Prayers! To what deity? Nothing of the faiths of ancient Earth nor the cults that sprang from the colonies, surely."
"Oh, yes. Old as any of 'em. Maybe older than all but one. That design's a kind of protection, since their deities can't even be trusted to not kill their own followers—that stuff about the goat eating her young. Some ancient symbol, and more on their bodies. But it was known on Old Earth, for sure. It's devil worship, Commander! They're summoning demons."
The exec stared at him. "You can't be serious!"
"Oh, but I am. More importantly, they're serious. They're witches, Commander. That's why they was bein' burned back on Tara Hibernus. Don't look so shocked. It's not that odd. The damned society there is so strict, so fundamentalist if you please, that if you don't blindly accept it, you're corrupted. It's the ultimate rebellion for the young in such a place. They only had three alternatives, you see. Blindly follow the incredibly strict and boring theocracy there or be the opposition, as it were. Mostly it does little harm and lets 'em blow off steam, since the third way is to kill yourself, which many do I'm told. I'd sure do it if I was stuck there, I'll tell you. I'm from the same ancestral stock and traditions as them people, but they're way beyond what my folks lived. Sooner or later, of course, most of the young ones pair off and wind up bein' reabsorbed into that society and that's the end of that. But these girls, their group or coven or whatever, went a bit far in the pleasures of the dark side and they got knocked up on a world where the powers that be think it's damned near impossible, almost unthinkable. Musta been a hell of an orgy, huh?"
The exec looked over at the chief tech, who was ahead of her. "Orgy, Commander. A frequent rite of ancient cults going back to the early civilizations of Old Earth involving frenzied singing, dancing, drink and drugs, and wanton and uninhibited sexual activity."
"I always wanted to attend somebody's orgy but I never could find one," Murphy sighed.
"I do not understand all that, but I do understand that it is a demonstration of disobedience and rebellion," Sittithong commented.
"Of course y'don't, you manufactured martinet! They engineered the sex right out of your society. Probably the drinking, drugs, and all the rest that make life fun now and then, too."
"We have songs," the commander responded, almost defensively. "But, never mind. So they truly were under a death sentence? And you rescued them?"
"Only in a manner of speakin'," Murphy replied. "You're dismissin' what they're doin' as just some kid's act, like throwin' a tantrum or holding their breath until they get their way. It's not like that. That's how it starts, but they're already well along. There's always somethin' to them things, I found in me long life. Maybe not what you expect, or even what they think is right, but usually there's reasons why things keep goin', and wherever there's a belief in somethin' supernatural, there's always the two sides. The yin and the yang. God and the devil. Angels and demons. Somehow those little darlin's sprung themselves from what must have been pretty good security. And, in that condition, they somehow made their way over forty kilometers on a world with no paved roads or mechanized vehicles to the one point of outside contact, the tiny spaceport and freight center. Security's even better there. Really good. They hire some real experts to make sure of that, since they don't want nobody on their little world to get the idea you can just pick up and leave and all. Folks like me don't even have a point of contact with the common folk there. Just a few officials, priests mostly, who do the intermediary work. Yet they got in there, easy as you please, and it was just my bad fortune to be the one in port at the time. They only can handle one ship at a time, y'see."
"But given that, tugs are generally automated or have at best one pilot. There wouldn't even be room for them, and they'd be detected by machines or pilots. How did they get aboard your ship?"
"They just—did, that's all. I delivered some pure breeding stock, mostly cows. I figure they used the pressurized and insulated containers to get up. But how they got in, how they kept from triggerin' all the alarms or bein' seen on the monitors, and how for that matter they got through a coded double airlock into the ship itself is beyond me. You see what I mean?"
"You asked them, I assume?"
"Oh, yes, I asked 'em. Never got an answer, though. Fact is, once they was in there, it never once entered my head to report 'em, throw 'em off, or whatever. It was like they was payin' passengers and was expected. I can't explain it, but it's kinda spooky. On the one hand, I knew somethin' was real wrong, but on the other, I just went along like all was normal."
The commander stared at the chanting women and considered the new information. "So these three are not the ignorant little things they like us to believe?"
"That's just the point! I think they are pretty much what you see. They're sure enough illiterate; they think the law of gravity is somethin' passed by the government, they was absolutely shocked when they discovered that their home world wasn't flat, and they didn't have the slightest idea how to turn the lights on and off in the cabin, let alone figure out how to boil water for tea. No, they think it's all bein' done by invisible demons from the depths of Hell or somethin'. But they got power that's scary as all hell. That's what I meant by you bein' sorry you ever picked us up. Looks to me like they're gettin' ready to use that power, and with all that and not a brain in their cute little heads, they're about as dangerous as a nuclear reaction."
"Why didn't you tell us this at the start?"
The old captain shrugged. "What? That them girls is three witches with supernatural powers who can do all sorts of mysterious stuff? You don't even believe my story now, Commander. But looks like you will soon. When they start them chants and trance stuff, they're up to somethin'. Just what I can't say, but you're gonna have a hard time figurin' it out or dealin' with it. Then you'll see."
Commander Sittithong sighed. "I sincerely doubt this, Captain. You might be so suggestible or gullible, but this is a star cruiser capable of eliminating whole planets if such a drastic action were ever needed. There's more military might, and military safeguards, on this vessel than in any of past history's entire navies, all under the ultimate command and control of cybernetic minds who themselves share power and must agree on an action. No, Captain, they're just going to sit there and chant themselves all the way home."
Murphy's head shot up, suddenly wide awake. "Home? You're takin' 'em home?"
"There is no other legal, moral, or ethical choice," the exec told him. "It has been approved all the way to the Admiralty. We'll be within their home sector in just a few weeks, and then we'll shuttle them back in. You, too, unless we find somewhere before that you can be put off at. Then none of you are our problem any longer."
"You're takin' 'em home?" Murphy repeated, barely hearing the rest. "My God, Commander! And you told them this?"
"We had to. Regulations require—"
"Damn your regulations! Any way I can be moved off to one of your destroyers? Or at least close to a disaster escape pod?"
"You're being overly dramatic, aren't you?"
"Just you wait," Murphy responded, wagging a finger at the officer. "Just you wait and see. At least you oughta break that up. Break all three up and put 'em in different areas of the ship so far apart they can't even find each other. I think they need to be together to exercise this power."
"I've indulged you this far, Murphy, but no farther. There is no reason to split them up. The very thought that such as they could be any danger to this ship or anyone on it is ludicrous! Now, go back to your quarters and pray to your primitive god if that makes you feel any better, but let's have no more of this nonsense!"
"You wouldn't happen to have some whiskey on this tub, would you?" Murphy asked him.
"Of course not!"
"Well, could you send one of them big marines in to my old ship and have him fetch a bottle from me secret compartment in the galley? Surely you can't deny an old man that."
"We found that stash of cleaning fluid you call whiskey earlier today," the exec told him. "It is marked for disposal, but I don't see why, if you want to kill yourself slowly, you shouldn't have at least one bottle of it if it keeps you calm."
"Oh, I don't want it to keep me calm," the old captain replied. "I want it to keep me nicely blotto for a while. . . ."
Lieutenant Commander Mohr, the head of ship security, was an even meaner and bigger figure of a man than most of the marines on board, yet right now he looked like a small child caught with his hand in the candy jar.
"What do you mean, 'They're missing'?" Commander Sittithong thundered. "How in hell could anyone be missing on this ship?"
Behind them on the viewing screen was a full view of the "guest" cabin where the young women or whatever they were had been sitting and chanting for hours. Now it still showed the strange pentagram in which they'd been sitting, but there was no sign of them or of any life whatsoever in the place.
"I—I have no explanation, Commander. None. One moment they were there, the next they weren't. You can play back the recording yourself. The alarm went off as soon as the subjects vanished from the surveillance. We immediately did a visual of the entire cabin area and found no signs of life, and the guards were still in place outside the door. We immediately ordered the lead guard in with the other blocking the door with weapon drawn. The marine went through every centimeter of the cabin. They aren't there. We immediately initiated a shipwide comparator search. No unknowns or unauthorized persons came back. None of the three showed up in a general search, either. It's as if they vanished into some other dimension or something."
"Bullshit! Those girls couldn't spell 'dimension,' let alone find a new one. Has the captain been notified?"
"Not yet. We were waiting for you."
The exec nodded. "Yes, well, I'll notify him in a bit. He's sleeping at the moment and it won't do any good to wake him until we have something to tell him beyond the fact that these girls pulled a magic trick on the most secure location in what's left of the known galaxy. What about Murphy?"
"Murphy, sir?" Because the sexes were so irrelevant to this crew, all officers were "sir."
"The old freighter captain."
"Oh, him. He's still in his cabin, sleeping off the effects of whatever that horrible crap he swallowed so eagerly was."
"Hmmm . . . We may have underestimated his story, or at least his fears. What about the freighter? We don't have sensors everywhere on it."
"We thought of that, sir, but we do have visuals on every pressurized area on it as well as constantly monitored seals on the entrance. All show no activity."
The exec thought frantically for a minute. Finally, she asked, "Who is your best security analyst aboard? Someone who can figure these kinds of problems out if need be?"
"I'm not sure anyone has ever had any experience with this sort of thing, but Sergeant Maslovic has been excellent at solving the most subtle security breaches. He's the one who found the missing neutronium, or at least accounted for it."
"An enlisted man? And a marine at that? Very well, I'll go along with you on this, but he better be good. Get him up here now, with every bit of data and clearances he requires to start on this right away. And bring Captain Murphy up here as well. Sober him up as best you can—check with Medical, they should have something. On the double!"
Both Captain Murphy and Sergeant Maslovic had at least one thing in common. Neither of them wanted to be there and stuck with this knotty problem, and neither of them had the slightest idea where to start. Still, Murphy, who was the most sour not only from the news that his "witches" had flown the coop, as he called it, but also that he was suddenly as sober as he'd ever felt in his adult life, was probably in the worse frame of mind.
Still, he had that deep-down sense of "told you so" satisfaction that he was more than willing to shove up these robotic martinets' noses. He looked at Maslovic with a familiar nod, recognizing him from the squadron that boarded the freighter. Clearly the man was more than just a mere guard if he was here.
"So the little girls took a powder and now the whole navy's in a panic," he said with a wry smile. "And old Murphy's been called up to help pull you out of the mess you made when you didn't listen to him in the first place!"
"And you did so much better with them, by your own account," Sittithong shot back.
"Well, you got a point there," the old man admitted. "But if it wasn't for you buttin' in like you did, they'd be where they wanted to be and I'd be rid of them by now. Even I had no idea that they could do this!"
Maslovic was less inclined to trust the old captain. "This is quite a level of sophistication for three airheaded young things who can hardly walk, isn't it?"
" 'Sophistication' he says! 'Tis the black arts, m'boy! Nobody can teleport themselves off a ship by chantin' usin' some kind of gizmo!"
Maslovic nodded. "And there I agree with you. Not in the black magic, but in the fact that nobody can will themselves elsewhere. If these girls really could do that, why did they need you?"
"Invisible, then! Maybe they made themselves invisible!"
"Not likely. We don't just track by vision. Every living thing aboard gives off heat and makes noise and has all sorts of nonvisual emanations that we can use for detection. They show up on none of them, even though small pests in the deepest holds do. No, they didn't teleport anyplace and they didn't become invisible or any such thing. There's only one explanation that makes any sense here, and it's highly sophisticated. Let me see the replay again, if you please, Commander."
All eyes went to the screen, which blacked out for just a moment and then came back up with a recording of the trio sitting there inside the pentagram chanting.
"If that's not an act, then those faces show a near trancelike state," Maslovic pointed out. "But they're doing something, and more and more they're doing it in perfect synch. Look at the slight twitching in the feet, the little muscular movements in the mouths, and you'll see they get to where the slightest little thing, even breathing and heart rates, are absolutely identical, like they're one organism. It's the closest to telepathy I've ever seen. The chanting helps them in some way, combines them in some kind of shared consciousness. It's a discipline, but it's clearly deliberate."
"So they merge," Sittithong commented. "That would give them a combined IQ of our dumbest sailor."
Maslovic kept staring at the three. "No, sir. It's not intellect at work here. It's feelings, emotions, I can't tell what else." He looked at the small timer clicking off the hundredths of seconds in the lower left hand corner. "Now, finally, they've got to where they wanted to be. How they learned this I have no idea, but it will be essential that we find out. Imagine what would happen if these girls fell into the hands of someone who could direct them for the wrong ends, or if they could teach more capable people to do this. Nothing would be safe. On the other hand, if we can learn how it's done, nothing would be closed to us."
Even Murphy was getting interested. "What are you talkin' about, man?"
"Watch. There!"
One moment the trio is still sitting there, chanting, and the next moment they simply are not there. There was no transition, no fading out, nothing. They were there, and then they weren't, just like that.
"What do you see, Sergeant?" the exec prompted. "What do you see that we can't?"
"Well, sir, for one thing I can see that we need a faster clock. Still, if you go back to the precise instant that they 'vanish,' you may be able to see it. At the moment they vanish, freeze it. I mean truly at that moment, at the precise frame number."
It was done, but they could still see nothing. The girls sat, frozen, in that eerie unison that the sergeant had noticed. "Now advance one frame at a time."
Each frame was a hundredth of a second, so it was going to take a while to go through the next few moments, but there they vanished, and nothing was clearly different.
"Right there, the first very few frames, perhaps five one hundredths of a second in all. Can't you see it?"
Both Murphy and Sittithong started as the same frames went by slowly again and again, but it wasn't clear.
Finally, Maslovic said, "Don't pay any attention to the girls vanishing. Look at the background, and in particular that crude design drawn around them. If we had thousandths of a second frames I think it would be obvious, but this isn't much. Just look at the design behind where the women were sitting from the point of view of the camera."
"I believe I see it. A slight distortion, a sort of blurring," the exec commented. "Is that what you mean?"
Maslovic nodded. "The information had to be interpolated for that very short period. After that, the full information could be compiled from earlier storage. You see, we don't keep every frame of every surveillance video we have. On a ship of this size the storage alone would be enormous. They'd been chanting for several hours, so the view of that part of the design was no longer in the security computer's memory. It had to interpolate. As soon as it got the full view, it back-filled the design, redrew it digitally, but for those brief first few fractions of a second it had to hold the design while reprocessing the rest of the image. Because of that, we get that distortion. It's so minor you'd only see it if you expected to see it, and then only in this frame-by-frame analysis."
Both Murphy and the exec turned and stared at the marine. "And, Sergeant, how in hell did you know to expect to see it?"
"It had to be there. And because the alarms triggered at five one hundredths of a second, it was the one small section that could not be digitally redrawn before a secure offline copy was made. The two computers are substantially the same speed, but the general security and surveillance computer had a lot to do. It still almost managed."
"And all this nonsense means what?" Murphy asked, genuinely confused.
"It means that your girls didn't disappear anywhere. After they did what they needed to do, they simply stopped, got up, and walked out the door."
"Impossible!" Lieutenant Commander Mohr asserted. "They'd be all over our sensors!"
"Not, sir, if the surveillance computer was told to remove them from any and all monitoring."
"What?"
"They are here, somewhere. They are simply being completely ignored, both by the monitoring computers and any crewmembers they might come into contact with. The background for every single security point on the ship is in memory, so only the parts that move or change need to be dealt with. Wherever they are, the computer is simply not showing or reporting them, but painting each frame and adjusting all records using prior data to have them not show up. As I say, I don't know how they do it, but the computers are self-aware and in many ways would be recognized as just other life-forms, so whatever they're doing to make them not noticed by our people is the same thing they did with the computer. I don't think they know how they do it. In fact, I'd rather doubt it. But they're here, as you saw them, most likely walking around the ship, and absolutely no person or computer is taking any notice of them. Is, in fact, blotting out their very existence. That's why I mentioned telepathy, although I don't think they read minds, I just do not have another term for this. They could be right here, right now, and neither we nor our highly sophisticated surveillance equipment would show it. Our brains would simply paint them out, just like the computers are doing. Since they don't seem very bright, sir, I think we're in very big trouble if they stop sightseeing and begin pushing buttons and interfering with other processes. This ship's run by computers that are of the same relative design as the one they've compromised."
The chief of security and the executive officer were appalled. Murphy, a queer half-lunatic look in his eyes, stroked his chin and muttered to himself, "What an idiot I've been! And me with the three most perfect burglars in the universe!"
Sittithong, however, was not convinced. "This is all well and good, Maslovic, but it's a fantasy. Never once have we ever observed such powers. We've had people working on such things for decades, probably much longer, but even if there is some sort of psychic power in some people, it's very minor and very limited and not subject to control. I'll need more than a few fuzzy frames of video to believe any of what you say."
"The Holmes Conundrum," Maslovic sighed.
"Eh? What's that, Sergeant?"
"The Holmes Conundrum, sir," Mohr jumped in. "If you eliminate all the other explanations, then what is left, no matter how unbelievable, must be the truth. And we've had more of these kinds of powers in our histories than you suspect. It's mostly suppressed, since the results were much less than threatening to security. Still, within decades of us establishing colonies and going through wormholes, we have been getting mutations. Most are minor, of no consequence, or they simply can not be handled. Telepaths either grow up as idiots or they go rather messily insane. There's no control. Contrary to their being in our minds, everyone and everything around them, from the start, is in their heads. We simply aren't designed to cope with that. Until the Great Silence, there were squads of experts whose job it was to track down anyone with even mild paranormal talents and either recruit them into studies of our own or simply erase them if we could not. Now there are no secret laboratories and no central authority to do that. Sooner or later this sort of thing was bound to come up. It is possible that we have such a case here."
"I wonder if it's not more than possible, sir," Mohr responded. "Take Tara Hibernus. Isolated, out of the way, totally controlled by its governing councils. Who's to say someone there isn't trying to develop these sorts of people? And if any are discovered, well, then, there's this witchcraft thing. The planet's normal but ignorant population acts as their guardians and security force without even knowing it. Surely not all of those scientific groups and psych squads were on the other side of the Silence. . . ."
The exec was growing whiter with every sentence. Finally she asked, "Why have I never heard of these people and this operation? Why don't even our databases on a ship like this contain anything?"
Mohr looked slightly uncomfortable. "Yours don't. Ours do. You see, Commander, until now, you didn't really have a need to know."
Sittithong started to say something, but the words wouldn't come. Finally she asked, "Does the Captain know?"
"Um, probably not."
"The Admiralty?"
"Um, unknown, sir. It depends on whether or not they've needed the information."
"And who decides who needs this information?"
Mohr was now more than uncomfortable, he had the look of a man with a noose around his neck. "Well, the Security Directorate, sir."
"Listen, Mohr . . . This is a small but compact independent task force. We no longer have a civil authority to answer to. You know that."
"Yes, sir?"
"And you're telling me that those who command this task force, those who make the life or death decisions on it, are having information withheld from them by junior officers and even"—she looked over at Maslovic—"enlisted personnel?"
"It is all available to them if they require it."
"I see. And you, and your comrades, you alone decide if they require it?"
"Not exactly, but in a practical sense, yes. It has to be that way, Commander. It is a part of our job, our oaths. The information we have is far more secure than anything else on this ship. If the sergeant's right, and I believe he may be, then your entire computer system, command and control and all support and subsystems, have already been compromised. Ours isn't because they don't know it isn't. Now they can't learn of it and compromise it because it remains in the Directorate and in this room."
"And if they're already here? Assuming I buy this nonsense?"
"We've taken some precautions, sir, in this area. But, they could still be here. We do not believe it would mean anything to them if they were, though. These aren't highly intelligent secret agents. They are three units of someone's breeding stock who think they are getting their powers from demons inside black holes."
"They'da been bored to death by this point if they was here," Murphy commented dryly.
"And what about him?" Sittithong asked, gesturing towards Murphy. "He certainly knows now."
Maslovic went over to the old captain. "What about you, Murphy? Is this really a surprise or were you delivering these girls to somebody before their babies were born?"
"Eh? I don't know what yer talkin' about, sonny boy."
"You're not the science type, but you're not dumb, either. Sure, I believe these girls could make you take them along after they came aboard without you ever noticing. But if we're right, and Tara Hibernus is more than a primitive backwater, then they'd need somebody to get subjects in and out without attracting any undue attention. You and your scow are just about ideal for that, Captain Murphy, and while you might have been under their spell, I don't think they could have gotten into that small but extremely tightly guarded spaceport on their own, particularly in their condition. Don't play the fool any more, Murphy. Who was paying you to pick up ones like these girls now and then and where were they to be taken? Might as well tell us. You should know more than anybody that, in the hands of people like us, there's nobody who can't be broken."
Murphy's grizzled features broke into a slight smile, and there was still something of a twinkle in his eyes. "You're a smart laddie, aren't you? 'Course, I'm no genius meself. I had no idea what them girls was capable of and that's the Lord's truth. I mostly never know, and that suits me fine. I have—had—a regular route. The extra couple of folks now and then they put on at Tara Hibernus was always young, usually young girls in a family way, you might say. The pay was good, and instead of deadheading out of that hole I made a handsome profit, all below the table, as it were. I never asked no questions. That woulda been bad fer business, y'see. There was always somebody at the other end worried about gettin' 'em through the port, usually without the port knowin', if you know what I mean. And me account in the Trade Bank of Marchellus would get fatter. Hell, I never even knew if I had a pickup 'til I got 'em. Sometimes yes, but only maybe a third of the time if that. I can say that most of them what came aboard was out and out devil worshippers or somethin' of the sort, though. Just like them. All sorts of secret stuff and signs and blasphemous shit."
"Did they all seem to believe that stuff, like these girls seem to?" Maslovic asked him.
"Some did. Some didn't. You could kinda tell. But the ones that didn't seem to be into it was often the scariest of the bunch."
"In what way?"
"I can't explain it to you. Not really. But you could feel it, deep inside. But if any of that sort had been aboard this time, we wouldn't be standin' here now talkin' about it, 'cause they'd be runnin' this whole damned tin soldier factory. This lot, they're probably gettin' their jollies playin' Peepin' Tom and explorin' the place. They ain't actin', Sarge. They're really that dumb. Like little kids. I got to tell you, if I knew about what these girls could do, I'da been makin' plans to divert maybe to some worlds that got things worth stealin' before I dropped 'em off."
"And where were you to drop them off, Captain?" Mohr asked him, thinking.
"Same place as always. Didn't make sense to keep 'em around any longer than we had to, so it was my next stop. Queer little place called simply Barnum's World. You know it?"
Sittithong went over to the main console and ran a check. "Yes, here it is. Not much of a place. Apparently an old service world that bred and supplied plants and animals to newly terraformed colonies. They maintain themselves with some major grants and by replacing flora and fauna that needs it on worlds that have had problems keeping up their ecosystems. You're right, Captain. Odd place. Everything from dogs to elephants to a number of things found in exploration without Old Earth origins, as well as purebred strains of grains, grasses, trees from high altitude evergreens to jungle vines. They always pay us our fees, so I don't believe we've had cause to send anyone there in, well, at least as long as I can remember. Not much of a shore leave area. . . . Huh. Says here it's maintained by a Catholic monastic order, and its population is recruited from various colonies and isn't native."
"That's the place," Murphy agreed. "Run by an offshoot of the original Jesuits, they are. Smart lads. Zoologists, agronomists . . ."
"Geneticists?" Maslovic asked.
Murphy looked genuinely surprised as he caught the train of thought. "Be damned! Never would have thought of that. But these are real Holy Joes. Even as a blind they'd never go for Satanism. These are more like the ones who'd still burn witches at the stake."
"Well, it would be a logical cover. And wasn't that what you said these girls faced back home? No, I'm beginning to see a very disturbing pattern here," Mohr commented. "I think maybe we've put off visiting this Barnum a bit too long. Don't you agree, Commander?"
"I believe we should notify the captain of this before going any further," Sittithong replied. "This is suddenly turning very, very dark."
Mohr nodded. "I agree. And we've got something of a cover here with Murphy and his ship. We can simply explain our visit as taking our people where they were heading in the first place."
They all seemed to like the idea—all, that is, except Murphy. "Uh, pardon me, folks, but ain't you forgettin' somethin' here?"
"Yes?"
"I wasn't kiddin' about them girls bein' scared out of their wits at the idea of goin' back to their home world. They was all told that they would burn if they ever tried a comeback. And that's where they think we're takin' 'em now. That's why they did what they did."
"Yes, but we're not going to do that now. They're going where they want to go," Sittithong pointed out.
"Uh, yeah, well and good if you can get the word to 'em. But might I remind all of you that we ain't got 'em? And we got no idea where they are around here or how the hell to find 'em?"