The Other Side of Nowhere

Chapter 5

At the bottom of the corridor, Braden saw the streak of intolerable brightness that was a blaster bolt. It slanted across the corridor and hit the steel wall. There it disappeared, scorching the paint where its charge heated the metal. A man howled. Running figures appeared and vanished, and additional intolerably bright flashes followed them. A woman screamed and screamed and screamed.

Braden raced down the curving corridor, his mind a blank except for rage that anybody had dared think of harming Diane. But the crewmen - or at least four of them - were in flight at the moment. They'd been pursued by lightning flashes which regrettably, it seemed, were fireworks instead of deadly blaster bolts.

Panting, he came to the passengers' quarters. The crewmen were out of sight now. Fortescue stood in the doorway with a blast-rifle in his hand. Since Braden had supplied only pistols, Fortescue's rifle would be a stage weapon, of moral value only until what it was became known. Then it would have no value at all.

Fortescue jerked up the rifle, then lowered it as he recognized Braden. He was deathly white, but he tried to grin.

"Get inside!" snapped Braden. "Only peek out! And not at head-height, either!"

He went through the door to where a woman still screamed.

It was Derr Carmody in hysterics, with Duckworth and Hardy trying to quiet her; Diane watched with composure. There is hysteria and hysteria. Sometimes it is the honest crack-up of a personality under intolerable stress. Sometimes it is the result of habitual tantrums staged to achieve one's desires. In this case it is an automatic reaction which puts on others the responsibility for any situation unpleasant to the supposedly delicate nature of the person affected. It is "temperament." This woman's hysteria was something in between. There was real terror involved, as there'd been real danger.

"What's happened?" Braden snapped. "Anybody hurt?"

Diane told him, her voice unsteady. They hadn't dared tell her rejuvenated mother during the past week that mutiny by the whole ship's crew was expected. Nor even now had they dared tell her that the coffee on the table had been doctored to make them unconscious while the ship was being taken over. Since other parts of their meal might possibly be fatal to any idea of defense against the mutineers, Diane had seemingly carelessly knocked over the coffeepot. She'd spilled not only the coffee but ruined the entire meal.

Her mother denounced her in a fine, incoherent temper tantrum which was a combination of great-actress temperament and maternal scolding. No one dared protest and - in view of the microphones - no one dared explain. As a climax, Derr Carmody stalked off to her cabin in a towering rage. There was silence. None of the rest had anything to say. Time passed. Somewhere, someone listened in on the passengers' quarters. There was silence. The crewmen eagerly started to move toward the supposedly helpless people. On the way down the corridor they talked freely. It could not matter. They believed that everyone not a member of their group was completely insensible. They babbled, and were heard. When they reached the door of the passengers' quarters, they crowded in, grinning.

Hardy, the cameraman, sent a stage blast-bolt between the heads of two of them before the door was wide open. On the instant Fortescue fired; his shot hit the ceiling. Diane fired.

A man bellowed, and Derr Carmody appeared in the doorway of her cabin. She saw crewmen in the doorway and blasters in action. She saw Diane fire again as a crewman incredulously held up a forearm whose sleeve was burning luridly. He cursed. Derr Carmody screamed.

Diane fired again. So did the others. The crewmen fell over each other getting out of the doorway. Derr Carmody continued to scream. Fortescue plunged to the doorway and sent unfortunately harmless stage blaster bolts after the fleeing mutineers. He was doing it with a splendid air. It made a fine scene.

Then Braden appeared.

Duckworth and Hardy took Derr Carmody to her cabin. The door closed. Her screams were muffled. In a little while, her audience lessened, they diminished.

"So far," said Braden harshly, "so good. But not so good, at that. If this works in with the skipper's intentions, it's very good indeed. But I don't know how he's made out. He was warned, though."

He wiped cold sweat from his forehead. He began to shake because Diane had been in danger and he wasn't there to fight for her.

Diane, still very pale, regarded him matter-of-factly.

"What do we do now?" she asked.

"I don't know.... Look!" said Braden desperately. "I'm afraid to try to take you to the control- room. We could be butchered! The skipper and I... we'll hunt them down. If they come here again we'll hear the shooting and we'll come. Barricade yourselves. They can't get in before we can get here. And they'll have to tackle us first, anyhow. They thought they wouldn't have to fight anybody!"

The outcries from Derr Carmody's cabin had by now diminished to what sounded like yelps in between frenzied sobs.

"I'll do that at once," Braden said, again desperately. "I don't like it, but... they won't try too hard at first. Just... don't let them surprise you! I'll be back...."

He turned and ran toward the bow and the control-room. It was not what his instincts ordered. They demanded that he hunt down the mutineers, regardless of danger, and kill them one by one for having dared think of harming Diane. He despised himself for acting like a thinking human being when he wanted to wreak infinite violence upon his enemies. He despised himself again for thinking of a space-boat and getting Diane away from the Rim Star where she would be safe. Safe against everything but the fact that it was unlikely he could ever get a space-boat to a habitable planet in this part of space.

He came to steps and went up them three at a time. He remembered bitterly that he hadn't showed them how to hold a mirror out of the doorway to see the corridor, with no danger greater than a smashed mirror. He recalled that he hadn't put the passengers' quarters on emergency lights. The mutineers might cut off the lights and close in on them in the dark. He'd showed Diane how to find the switch, but she might not remember.

He raced along a sloping curved ramp. He was risking the corridors, but he could take the chance. A running man is a bad target. Also, there was still confusion among the crewmen. The steward might still be out cold. Those who went to the stern had been defeated. What the skipper had done was uncertain, but he must have done something....

Braden panted and ran, ran and panted. Around him the giant ship was completely silent. Nothing to be heard or seen showed that anything out of the ordinary had taken place. The ship herself was an impersonal steel hull more than a quarter of a mile in length and as thick as a twenty-story building is tall. She contained exactly thirteen people, some of whom now must murder the others or be executed for having tried and failed to capture the ship.

He found himself becoming panicky because he was going away from where he felt that he was needed. He abruptly lost confidence in the skipper's undisclosed plan for handling the mutiny he'd invited by having the steward bring those particular crewmen on board the ship. A space officer should not have done that. Things could go wrong. They almost had! If Braden or the skipper had drunk that coffee, everything would be lost.

He was about to pass the galley. He raised a blaster to readiness, but the galley was empty. He ran on, panting, and saw the door of his own cabin. The steward... The door was open and his cabin was empty. The steward had recovered and had left the cabin.

Braden swore - he should have killed the steward. Here were the skipper's quarters; he went past them. There was the control-room door, and it was open. "It's Braden!" he panted, and fairly dived inside the room. If there were an ambush, calling out his name would seem to be a warning to the skipper, and they'd expect Braden to stop for an answer. But if the skipper were inside, the fact that he'd come in at a headlong run would be assurance that it wasn't a mutinous member of the crew. He burst into the control-room, blasters ready to kill as many men as possible if he'd been ambushed.

It was empty of all life.

But there was a dead man on the floor.

It was the crewman with the sharp eyes, the first man Braden had had empty his ship-bag in the forecastle. He lay on the floor, his head at a completely impossible angle to his body. His neck was broken.

Silence. Stillness. Braden listened with impassioned intensity. If the skipper was dead, he had to get the passengers to a lifeboat and take to space regardless. The skipper'd said the ship would not outlive him by more than twenty-four hours. If he was alive, the two of them must hunt down the mutineers ruthlessly, killing them any way they could. So he listened for a sound that might be the skipper.

Something whirred, and he whirled to face it. But this was one of the times when all the readings of the ship's innumerable instruments were recorded on the log. The log-tape whirred between its guides. There was a tiny humming sound. It stopped. The state of the ship was on tape, so far as the ship alone was concerned. But it was somehow shocking that the ship, the Rim Star - the enortnous thing which had been created by men and was tended by men and which men almost thought of as animate - it was somehow shocking that the ship was oblivious to men. A dead man on the control-room floor called for no record on the narrow strip of tape which was the great ship's memory. The dead man did not matter. Nor did Braden, nor the skipper, nor Derr Carmody nor even - incredibly - Diane.

Braden shook his head to clear his mind of such irrelevancies. Then he heard a tiny squeaking noise.

The door of a locker opened. The skipper was wedged in it. He squirmed out. His expression was blank. He seemed filled with a bitter astonishment. But he made a gesture that commanded silence and pointed urgently at the door. Braden went to it and looked out, down the corridor.

The skipper went down on his hands and knees close by the control-board. A huge fat man, he looked grotesque in such a position. He crawled under the knee-space, breathing heavily. He scraped at something and backed out, with a miniature microphone and hair-thin wires in his hand. He jerked the wires, and they broke. He threw the tiny object on the floor.

"A damned bad business!" he said querulously. "But no more eavesdropping, anyhow! I'm... frightened, Braden! This man came in here. No knock. No word. He just came in. Thinking me unconscious, he had some cord in his hands to truss me up so I'd be helpless. He was composed and businesslike. I lolled in my chair, pretending to be sleeping. He came over to me and felt in my pocket. He took my blaster and put it in his own pocket. Then he began, very professionally, to wrap cord about my feet. I took him by the throat, Braden. Gently! I didn't want to kill him. Not as easily as that! I took him by the throat, and he jerked my blaster out of his pocket. So I snapped his neck."

The skipper wiped sweat from his face with his hands.

"But he'd pulled the trigger, Braden! He'd pulled the trigger, and my blaster didn't fire! It didn't go off! I've looked it over and... and somehow, some time, the steward got at it and it's all smashed inside! It's useless! I... I was never without my blaster, Braden! I can't imagine when he got it! I've been disarmed without knowing it, Braden!"

Braden said urgently:

"The passengers have four pocket blasters and some things that look like blasters and sound like them. We'd better join forces with them and start fighting."

"No!" protested the skipper. "I... I hid, to think. You saw it. There's something more important than that! Much more important! Don't you see? If the steward got at my blaster, what else has he got at? Has he guessed all my plans? Has he known all along what I was doing? It would be like him, Braden! I'm... I'm frightened!

Sweat beaded his face again.

"I've... got to find out!" he panted, almost whimpering. "It couldn't be! But that man over there - he didn't come in here to cut my throat, he came to bind me so I'd wake up helpless... Maybe because they knew I'd planned to trap them, that I got the steward to bring them aboard as a crew. Maybe they wanted to laugh at me as they laughed at..."

Then the skipper's throat clicked shut.

"I'll find out!" he said hoarsely. "I'll come back!"

As if blindly, he went out of the control-room, his hands clenching and unclenching. He turned into his own quarters. Braden was unbearably tense for several seconds. There were now four crewmen instead of five; they and the steward had to kill everybody else on the ship or be destroyed. Even though they could not be everywhere in so gigantic a vessel, the skipper should not go about unarmed. Braden thought of Diane, and a vast, impatient urgency filled him. In a situation like this, initiative is everything. When trouble comes, the advantage is always with those who start it. The crew had tried to take the ship without using arms. They'd failed. Now if two raging men began to hunt them they'd be rocked back on their heels. The skipper and Braden should take ruthless and violent action. They should put the fear of hell into the crewmen; keep them confused; wipe them out as they were found. It was their duty as merchant-space officers, and they should do their duty now, while the choice of action lay with them. But the moment for action was passing quickly!

The passengers were barricaded in their quarters, and the two ship's officers were doing nothing either to increase their safety or to prevent the mutineers from recovering from the setbacks they'd suffered, which must give rise to simple desperation. Now there could be nothing but absolute victory for the crewmen or absolute defeat. And victory for them would mean much more than defeat for their antagonists. Braden was bitterly aware that piracy is not undertaken solely for profit. There are men to whom criminality is satisfying in itself, men who experience a kind of ecstasy in acting against all honor and decency and mercy. Braden had met them. They find joy in hatred, and bliss in malevolence, and pleasure in causing disaster to others. The power to injure gives them satisfaction. They are subject to a strange, inverted ambition. So the seizure of the Rim Star would be only partly for the treasure aboard. The act would mean indulgence in enormity... in atrocity.

Braden hated men who could act on such motives. He raged, pacing helplessly in the control-room while time passed. Time in which the crewmen could recover from their first failure and realize the stark necessity of success - for them. He heard a sound behind him and whirled. It was an emergency intercom buzz from one of the boxes on the wall of a passageway. He threw the switch and the steward's voice came on. "Calling control-room. Captain, sir?" The voice was smooth and suave and obsequious. The steward didn't know where Braden was. He didn't know whether the skipper knew about the shooting in the passengers' quarters. He didn't know what had happened to the man with the sharp eyes who lay in a shapeless heap on the control-room floor. But he could ask. He hadn't definitely intended to murder Braden. He hadn't done anything that proved he had that intention in mind. He could insist that the suspicions of the crewmen he'd expressed were justified, that he'd been completely loyal; and he could claim total ignorance that any of the food he'd served had been doctored. "Captain, sir?" His voice was openly uneasy. It was good acting. "What the hell do you want?" demanded Braden.

"Oh! Mr. Braden!" The voice expressed infinite relief. "I'm so glad you answered! There's the devil to pay, Mr. Braden! I'm afraid you believe I was mixed up in it. Terrible things have happened, sir!"

"So I've noticed," said Braden.

"The crew has mutinied, sir! They've armed themselves somehow, and... I don't know what their plan is, sir, but it's terrible!"

A pause.

"I'm afraid they're searching for me, sir! To kill me! I'm hiding at the moment, but I don't know what to do! May I speak to the captain, sir?"

Braden waited an instant. Then he said:

"He's not available."

It could mean that the skipper was not in the control-room. It could also mean that he was dead. Braden would have answered just that way, with just such a pause, in either event, or if he'd gone to the control-room and found it empty. The answer was designed to give no information whatever - not even that one of the steward's men lay dead at Braden's feet with his head at an impossible angle.

The steward's voice acquired just the right touch of the frantic.

"But what shall I do, sir? I need someone to tell me what to do!"

"I can't give you any orders," said Braden curtly.

He flipped the switch to end the talk. Seconds later the intercom buzzed again. He did not answer. The steward wanted information and he hadn't gotten it. He should be greatly disturbed. He had no working hidden microphone in the control-room now. The skipper had tom it out. Its absence must appall him.

Braden made a gesture of pure rage. The control-room was important. From it all manner of dials and indicators reported innumerable facts about the ship's condition, and switches and levers directed innumerable operations. Fires could be fought from it. The air-supply to any compartment could be adjusted or shut off. The temperature, the gravity, the corridor lights, the holds - even compartment doors could be closed simultaneously all over the giant ship. But he could use none of these in the absence of the skipper and in ignorance of the skipper's plans.

There was no word or sign from him. Braden became half-mad with impatience. There should be action, now!

Then there was a sound in the corridor and he plunged to the door, his blaster ready. It was the skipper.

He came out of the door to his quarters and stumbled into the control-room. His face was gray. He seemed to have shrunk. In a bare ghost of his former rumbling voice he said dully:

"Dog the door shut, Mr. Braden. I must have some time. That devil... that devil knew! Ah- h-h! He knew! He's been laughing in his sleeve all the time I've been pampering him - toadying to him - in the hope of having him get his fellow pirates aboard and in my trap! Shut the door!"

Braden said urgently:

"I can see down the corridor, sir, when it's open. We'll have warning if they intend to try anything against us."

"No.... They've heavy-duty rifles now! Dog the door shut! I'd a hinged plate in my cabin, Mr. Braden. There's a way - between the ship's inner and outer skins - to where I had the... bomb that was to make it certain they couldn't win. I thought only I knew it. But that devil found it! And I had... weapons there too. It was in my mind... Close and dog the door, Mr. Braden!" Then, ahnost hysterically, "Make sure the door hasn't been tampered with! Make sure it can be locked!"

Braden made certain that the door would stay fastened against any attempt to open it. The skipper was working frantically to loosen the lever that would release emergency air into the ship in case of an air leak. It could be worked by hand because in such a case only hand- operated controls would work. He got the lever clear. It was immediately evident that it was not only a control lever but could serve as a wrench. He fitted it to the end of a bolt in the wall under the CO2 repeaters. He heaved on it, panting.

"I had a bomb there, Mr. Braden! So they couldn't win! So they couldn't win! So the ship would be blown to atoms if I didn't press a certain button within twenty-four hours of the last signal. And that devil found it! He cut the detonator to little bits! Now nothing will set it off!"

The bolt squeaked and yielded a quarter of a turn.

"I'd thought of everything!" panted the skipper, still heaving on the wrench. "It was... it was perfect! I... even had weapons there in case I had to hunt down any of them who wriggled out of my main trap! Heavy-duty rifles, Mr. Braden! I didn't want to use them. Quick death... ah, they deserve so much more than that! But I was ready even to kill them quickly if I had to! I'd save the ship if I could..." he heaved again... "even if I had to kill them quickly...."

The bolt moved again. Braden, close by the door, said harshly:

"I hear movement in the corridor."

"No matter. It will take time for them to break in."

Something crashed against the door. There was no summons to surrender - mockery as such a summons would be. The crash came again and the door shook. The skipper heaved on the long-handled wrench once more. The bolt turned.

"In here," panted the skipper, "... place to carry money... jewelry... such stuff." He heaved again. "I always hoped... to find the Melpomene's crew. So I... put things here. After... I found the steward I... prepared - I thought - more adequately.... Damn him! But this was... from before his time."

He turned and grimaced at Braden. Bending down, he began to loosen the bolt with his fingers.

"Sporting rifles in here," he wheezed. "Ultra-high voltage. Special license. Shipped for a hunter who was killed by some beast before they arrived. They'll stop any beast! It's a pity... it's a great pity to kill these devils so quickly!"

He stood up. He pulled and a plate swung out, the CO2 repeaters swinging with it. There was a space behind it. It was a perfect hiding place for treasure or weapons which someone might be tempted to steal if they were put in any of the ship's holds.

Then the skipper gave an inarticulate cry. There were grease marks on the floor of the closet. There had been weapons there. The partial outline of a blaster was marked in grease on the floor-plate. The skipper cried out in horror and grief and rage.

The cabinet, the closet, the place for storing treasure or weapons, was empty.

There was a harsh rasp beyond the door. Then the smell of burned paint and hot metal. A point on the metal door of the control-room turned dull-red, then glowed cherry-red. The former crew of the Melpomene had abandoned trickery as a means of destroying the skipper and everyone else in authority, for they'd run into trouble when they tried it. So now they had resorted to undiluted, ravening, arbitrary force.

With heavy-duty weapons they could melt down the door if they chose. They did choose. And four men who could play the enormous energies of heavy weapons before them could not be faced, not even for the half-second needed to fire a blaster at them.

An incandescent spot appeared on the steel door and melted through. There was a shower of coruscating sparks. The hole widened... extended. Two blast-rifles were working on it. Two more spots glowed red.

This was a strictly workmanlike preliminary to the destruction of Braden and the skipper.

Another hole melted through.